The Linux Questions Thread: a bunch of pitfalls, but technically it's possible

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > The Linux Questions Thread: a bunch of pitfalls, but technically it's possible

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spiritual bypass: Feb 19, 2008; Grimey Drawer

Linux doesn't have an equivalent to C:\

/ is the beginning of all of your files. It is all-encompassing and any file on your computer exists somewhere under /

/swap is your swap file, which is used for paging data in and out of RAM.

/home is your home directory, which is where all of your personal files reside. Unlike "C:\Documents and Settings\Users" on Windows, you will actually use /home and the layout makes sense.
Having these 4 partitions on your disk will not have any adverse effect on your computer. Modern Linux distributions can read and write NTFS with no trouble straight out of the box. Windows, on the other hand, would need special drivers to read non-Microsoft filesystems.

# ? May 26, 2009 19:25

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# ? May 16, 2024 21:48

taqueso: Mar 8, 2004

sicarius posted:

What are /home, /, and /swap? I'm assuming the / is basically what I consider C:/ (the root directory) but what are /home and /swap used for?

As someone who's never really dealt with partitions are there any real negative implications of using so many and is Ubuntu going to be able to deal with NTFS formatted drives?

Linux uses the concept of a virtual file system. You can mount more than one filesystem to appear as part of the VFS. Using a 2nd filesystem for various parts of the VFS allows you to easily back up those sections, if one is filled or damaged it does not affect the others, you can change the disk that part of the filesystem is stored on, etc. For a hobby system, they are very much optional. I like to keep /boot separate at a minimum, and on a server I would have more separate filesystems: at least /usr, /home, /tmp, and /var/tmp. In that case I would also be using LVM so I can create/resize new volumes easily.

For a first install, I would just not worry about it at all. Make a swap partition and a root partition only.

As a sidenote, there is no /swap in the filesystem like the others, the swap partition(s) are listed in /etc/fstab (config file with list of filesystems to mount) but do not appear in the filesystem.

e: info on different toplevel areas in the FS: http://www.freeos.com/articles/3102/
maybe this will help: http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/tutorials/3174/1/

taqueso fucked around with this message at 19:44 on May 26, 2009

# ? May 26, 2009 19:35

sicarius: Dec 12, 2002; In brightest day,
In blackest night,
My smugface makes,
women wet....

That's how it goes, right?

Awesome, thanks a ton guys. Helpful info and an overall helpful thread. I can see now why so many people are die-hard Linux users and, honestly, if it weren't for my terrible loving gaming habit I would have probably migrated over years ago.

EDIT - Does anyone here know of a bootable cd/dvd I can use to get to some form of command prompt to run fdisk? I started the Win7 installation and it doesn't seem to want to let me partition the drives before it actually begins the installs. I have the option to format, but don't see one to partition.

sicarius fucked around with this message at 20:35 on May 26, 2009

# ? May 26, 2009 19:46

Keito: Jul 21, 2005; WHAT DO I CHOOSE ?

sicarius posted:

EDIT - Does anyone here know of a bootable cd/dvd I can use to get to some form of command prompt to run fdisk? I started the Win7 installation and it doesn't seem to want to let me partition the drives before it actually begins the installs. I have the option to format, but don't see one to partition.

Get the GParted LiveCD, or just boot up an Ubuntu disc if that's what you're intending to install, and partition your drive graphically and easy.

# ? May 26, 2009 21:27

sicarius: Dec 12, 2002; In brightest day,
In blackest night,
My smugface makes,
women wet....

That's how it goes, right?

Keito posted:

Get the GParted LiveCD, or just boot up an Ubuntu disc if that's what you're intending to install, and partition your drive graphically and easy.

Yeah, I did the latter, but I am slightly confused.

Just installed Win7 onto a 500GB drive and want to trim down the partition it is on to about 100GB and use it for nothing but Windows, necessary programs (antivirus) and things like Codecs. I want to create about a 50GB partition for Ubuntu on the same drive, and use the remainder for say - Games and other various poo poo.

However, when I go to Resize the Win7 partition I'm slightly confused by the options - under "Use as" the default is "do not use partition" - is that what I want or should I set it as NTFS? Under Mount As should I mount it as /windows or just not bother mounting it at all?

sicarius fucked around with this message at 21:53 on May 26, 2009

# ? May 26, 2009 21:40

spiritual bypass: Feb 19, 2008; Grimey Drawer

Don't worry about mounting the partition during installation; you can automount it from the "Places" menu once you're up and running.

# ? May 26, 2009 22:03

sicarius: Dec 12, 2002; In brightest day,
In blackest night,
My smugface makes,
women wet....

That's how it goes, right?

Welp, guys, thanks to you, I am now posting from Ubuntu 9.04 Desktop edition's included Firefox browser. Hooray.

Anything I should immediately do? Any settings I need to get a hold of? Also, any suggestions on both a video player and an audio player? I'm getting no sound from the included Rhythmbox Media Player.

sicarius fucked around with this message at 22:15 on May 26, 2009

# ? May 26, 2009 22:09

dont skimp on the shrimp: Apr 23, 2008

E: Hoh crap, missed a whole page.

sicarius posted:

What are /home, /, and /swap? I'm assuming the / is basically what I consider C:/ (the root directory) but what are /home and /swap used for?

As someone who's never really dealt with partitions are there any real negative implications of using so many and is Ubuntu going to be able to deal with NTFS formatted drives?

/ is, as you said, the root directory. That's where the main system will go. About 10-15GB should be enough.

/home is where you stash your junk. Should the system ever implode or you want to reinstall, you'll still have everything on /home.

"swap" is a partition for swapspace, in case you run out of RAM. It's recommended, but I wouldn't really bother with it on a system with over 1.5GB of RAM. If you still want it, put it somewhere between 512-1024MB

/boot isn't really needed on a separate partition as far as I'm concerned, unless you run any funky filesystems that GRUB can't handle (GRUB works with ext4 in Arch so it's probably safe to assume you won't).

Ubuntu will deal with NTFS. I'm completely certain it can read from the drives, but really depends if it can write or not. I think it can from the go, but I'm not certain.

-------

For video-players I recommend either SMplayer, regular Mplayer or VLC. Music would be exaile or amarok. No idea about the sound issue, could be pulseaudio loving around.

# ? May 26, 2009 23:28

waffle iron: Jan 16, 2004

In modern versions of Linux you can have a swap file that has almost no performance hit versus a swap partition.

http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/linux/RHL-8.0-Manual/custom-guide/s1-swap-adding.html

# ? May 27, 2009 00:45

Keito: Jul 21, 2005; WHAT DO I CHOOSE ?

waffle iron posted:

In modern versions of Linux you can have a swap file that has almost no performance hit versus a swap partition.

http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/linux/RHL-8.0-Manual/custom-guide/s1-swap-adding.html

That's really smart and easy, thanks for the tip. Maybe I'll get working suspend now.

# ? May 27, 2009 14:07

deedee megadoodoo: Sep 28, 2000; Two roads diverged in a wood, and I, I took the one to Flavortown, and that has made all the difference.

I'm running three xen virtuals off of a single lvm volume group using 20GB snapshots of a "pristine" master partition. Is there any way to recover a snapshot volume once it fills up? I extended the volume to no avail. It's giving me a bad superblock error and I can't seem to figure out how to fix it. I know, stupid me, considering the documentation basically says "if the snapshot fills up you are hosed."

# ? May 27, 2009 14:14

trilljester: Dec 7, 2004; The People's Tight End.

Is there a good way to share an address book between 3 computers in my house using Linux? I keep seeing articles on setting up an LDAP server, but it appears Outlook can't update LDAP-based address books. Any suggestions?

# ? May 27, 2009 16:25

taqueso: Mar 8, 2004

HatfulOfHollow posted:

"if the snapshot fills up you are hosed."

I think this is true, but I don't have direct experience.

# ? May 27, 2009 16:50

waffle iron: Jan 16, 2004

Keito posted:

That's really smart and easy, thanks for the tip. Maybe I'll get working suspend now.

If you need swap for suspend to disk, I would favor a partition because the large sequential reads and writes will be faster. As opposed to swapping a single program or mapped memory.

# ? May 28, 2009 00:16

Ensign Expendable: Nov 11, 2008; Lager beer is proof that god loves us; Pillbug

Is there a browser that can work from command line without X (stage 4, I think it was called)?

# ? May 28, 2009 01:17

waffle iron: Jan 16, 2004

Ensign Expendable posted:

Is there a browser that can work from command line without X (stage 4, I think it was called)?

lynx
links
elinks

The most recent version of links can even do a graphical mode on a framebuffer.

http://links.twibright.com/

# ? May 28, 2009 01:25

taqueso: Mar 8, 2004

waffle iron posted:

lynx
links
elinks

The most recent version of links can even do a graphical mode on a framebuffer.

http://links.twibright.com/

also w3m

# ? May 28, 2009 04:35

juggalol: Nov 28, 2004; Rock For Sustainable Capitalism

I'm having some trouble getting a permissions issue sorted out. I have a system running FreeNAS, which is hosting a RAID5 array.

I have another server running VMware ESX, and I'm looking to use part of the RAID server as storage space for the virtual machines.

The RAID server has one large RAID5 array, which is further split up into logical volumes (music, video, etc etc). I've created another volume for virtual machines, and I would like for this volume to be accessible only by the RAID server (so regular users accessing the music or videos can't get copies of the VM files).

I have the permissions set up on the FreeNAS server so that only the owner+group can read/write the volume, and nobody else can read it.

But the confusion comes in when I'm trying to mount this volume from the ESX server. Is it possible to specify a username on the server when mounting NFS? Meaning, from the ESX server, how can I specify the username/password for the FreeNAS server in order to read/write to the volume?

Or maybe there's a better way to this and I'm just silly.

# ? May 28, 2009 19:42

taqueso: Mar 8, 2004

I think the UID and GIDs need to be the same on both systems when using NFS, and access is controlled by the ID numbers and not names.

# ? May 28, 2009 19:48

juggalol: Nov 28, 2004; Rock For Sustainable Capitalism

taqueso posted:

I think the UID and GIDs need to be the same on both systems when using NFS, and access is controlled by the ID numbers and not names.

Ah, this makes much more sense. Thanks. Only took a couple of minutes to get that set up, it was a lot easier than I expected.

# ? May 29, 2009 00:02

30 TO 50 FERAL HOG: Mar 2, 2005

I just tried to reassemble my array.

Thanks MDADM for thinking "HEY HE SPECIFIED 4 DRIVES FROM A 4 DRIVE AWAY, ONE IS OBVIOUSLY A SPARE AND ONE OF THE ORIGINAL FOUR HAS FAILED. NOW I WILL START RECOVERY WITHOUT PROMPTING OR ANYTHING".

Now I get to wait 10 hours for MDADM to "recover" to the spare that was a part of the array in the first place. Awesome.

# ? May 29, 2009 03:29

30 TO 50 FERAL HOG: Mar 2, 2005

Ahahahaha. Reconstruction fails because apparently one of the drives is faulty. This rules so hard. Thanks for sucking poo poo MDADM.

# ? May 29, 2009 03:42

taqueso: Mar 8, 2004

BiohazrD posted:

Ahahahaha. Reconstruction fails because apparently one of the drives is faulty. This rules so hard. Thanks for sucking poo poo MDADM.

Have you tried assembling the array using --force?

As an aside, raid-5 is way too fragile for my tastes. Also, md has never been anything but rock solid for me. Too bad the docs are scattered all over hell.

p.s. you have a backup, right? RAID is not a backup sorry, I reread that and it seems a little harsh - still true though

taqueso fucked around with this message at 05:04 on May 29, 2009

# ? May 29, 2009 04:42

30 TO 50 FERAL HOG: Mar 2, 2005

taqueso posted:

Have you tried assembling the array using --force?

As an aside, raid-5 is way too fragile for my tastes. Also, md has never been anything but rock solid for me. Too bad the docs are scattered all over hell.

p.s. you have a backup, right? RAID is not a backup sorry, I reread that and it seems a little harsh - still true though

The drive isn't actually faulty. The rebuild just keeps failing. I can --assemble --force with the 3 devices that it didn't randomly decide to write poo poo to and mount the array just fine.

I tried to --zero-superblock the "spare" and then add it to the array to see if it would build correctly but the machine segfaulted.

I'm having enough issues as it is (audio over HDMI plus this) and I'm seriously considering getting Windows Server 2k3 through DreamSpark and just using it. Although I can't grow arrays with Server2k3 which is a bit of a pain in the rear end.

# ? May 29, 2009 07:33

taqueso: Mar 8, 2004

BiohazrD posted:

the machine segfaulted.

Maybe there is a hardware issue?

# ? May 29, 2009 15:05

maskenfreiheit: Dec 30, 2004

Edit: doublepost

maskenfreiheit fucked around with this message at 01:37 on Mar 13, 2017

# ? May 29, 2009 18:42

deedee megadoodoo: Sep 28, 2000; Two roads diverged in a wood, and I, I took the one to Flavortown, and that has made all the difference.

GregNorc posted:

I'm trying to get my eee working as a wireless ap. For reasons I won't get into, madwifi isn't an otption.

I found out I needed at least the 2.6.29 kernel to do this (They added support for it in the kernel... you use mac80211 and hostapd)

I installed fedora core 11's preview release since it has that kernel, and have all the other random things I need to install installed, but when I checked lsmod, I noticed it's using the ath5k driver.

How do I install/enable the ath9k driver?

I googled a bit, and the closest I could find was this: http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=69217

However, it's a bit out of date. I tried following along, substituting the 2.29 files I downloaded with the ones it mentions, but it asks me to install to directories that don't exist on my Fedora 11 preview's install.

Thanks for the help!

What directories specifically?

# ? May 29, 2009 19:16

30 TO 50 FERAL HOG: Mar 2, 2005

taqueso posted:

Maybe there is a hardware issue?

Possible. Only thing I can really test for is RAM however.

# ? May 29, 2009 19:19

maskenfreiheit: Dec 30, 2004

Edit: Double Post

maskenfreiheit fucked around with this message at 20:46 on Mar 13, 2017

# ? May 29, 2009 19:42

deedee megadoodoo: Sep 28, 2000; Two roads diverged in a wood, and I, I took the one to Flavortown, and that has made all the difference.

GregNorc posted:

I'm told to cd into /usr/src/redhat/SPECS and run "rpmbuild -ba kernel.spec" and a few other commands. (http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=69217)

The guide claims it's for fedora but that seems odd since the directory it mentions does not exist on my fedora install.

yum install rpm-build

# ? May 29, 2009 21:31

capitalcomma: Sep 9, 2001; A grim bloody fable, with an unhappy bloody end.

-snip-

capitalcomma fucked around with this message at 04:23 on Jun 10, 2014

# ? May 30, 2009 01:36

maskenfreiheit: Dec 30, 2004

Edit: Double Post

maskenfreiheit fucked around with this message at 20:47 on Mar 13, 2017

# ? May 30, 2009 02:27

maskenfreiheit: Dec 30, 2004

Edit: Double Post

maskenfreiheit fucked around with this message at 20:47 on Mar 13, 2017

# ? May 30, 2009 02:57

Polygynous: Dec 13, 2006; welp

Is there a good way to write a UDF filesystem in linux? All I've been able to find is the halfway kludge in mkisofs and udftools which doesn't appear to have been updated in five years. It does have to be UDF since I'm dealing with a file over 4 GB in size.

GregNorc posted:

Numerous other usenet posts quote this code, if anyone knows how to use it I'd appreciate the help:

code:

iff --git a/drivers/net/wireless/ath5k/base.c 
b/drivers/net/wireless/ath5k/base.c
index e09ed2c..69aad6e 100644
--- a/drivers/net/wireless/ath5k/base.c
+++ b/drivers/net/wireless/ath5k/base.c
@@ -488,6 +488,7 @@ ath5k_pci_probe(struct pci_dev *pdev,

        hw->wiphy->interface_modes =
                BIT(NL80211_IFTYPE_STATION) |
+               BIT(NL80211_IFTYPE_AP) |
                BIT(NL80211_IFTYPE_ADHOC) |
                BIT(NL80211_IFTYPE_MESH_POINT);

You should be able to save that to a file and then run 'patch -p1 <file' in the kernel source directory.

# ? May 30, 2009 03:36

Unacknowledged: Jul 20, 2004; Nobody likes me.

I have some trouble with my compiz. I have a hotkey set to "move window to next display" and I accidentally did it on my desktop. Since I have 2 different resolutioned monitors, this happened:

Disabling compiz removes the weird areas at the top of screen, but I would like to fix it instead of just ditching compiz. I tried a restarting and a full compiz purge but both had no effect. Anyone have ideas?

Edit: Ok, I guess the purge worked and I just had to re-import my old profile and restart compiz. Silly me.

Unacknowledged fucked around with this message at 17:51 on May 31, 2009

# ? May 31, 2009 17:46

Grigori Rasputin: Aug 21, 2000; WE DON'T NEED ROME TELLING US WHAT TO DO

How do I burn a cd/image for HFS+/Mac in ubuntu? I've been trying, but every disk is unreadable by Ubuntu and my iBook. I installed hfsplus and nada... the error I get when trying to read it is:

"CD-ROM is NOT in ISO 9660 format"

# ? Jun 1, 2009 23:05

dont skimp on the shrimp: Apr 23, 2008

Grigori Rasputin posted:

How do I burn a cd/image for HFS+/Mac in ubuntu? I've been trying, but every disk is unreadable by Ubuntu and my iBook. I installed hfsplus and nada... the error I get when trying to read it is:

"CD-ROM is NOT in ISO 9660 format"

Do macs really use hfs for the filesystem on CD's?

Try just burning it with ISO9660, that should work I think, especially since that's what the error says.

# ? Jun 2, 2009 08:43

spiritual bypass: Feb 19, 2008; Grimey Drawer

I bet it wrote the disc just fine but you can't mount it because the default filesystem is incorrect.

You need to specify that you're mounting an image that's not a 9660. The mount man page should make sense of it.

I don't know what Apple does nowadays, but back in 1995 they definitely used HFS on their CD's. I know this because I had to mount some old discs to play my SCUMM games.

# ? Jun 2, 2009 15:22

Twlight: Feb 18, 2005; I brag about getting free drinks from my boss to make myself feel superior; Fun Shoe

I have a centos 5 server which needs to be upgraded past the 2.2.3 version of httpd that ships in the centos repos (due to bug fixes that aren't being back ported for what ever reason) I'd like to mirror the configuration flags that centos uses when it installs the httpd package, but I'm having trouble finding them. Is anyone aware of a location where those flags might be saved?

# ? Jun 2, 2009 16:18

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# ? May 16, 2024 21:48

JHVH-1: Jun 28, 2002

Twlight posted:

I have a centos 5 server which needs to be upgraded past the 2.2.3 version of httpd that ships in the centos repos (due to bug fixes that aren't being back ported for what ever reason) I'd like to mirror the configuration flags that centos uses when it installs the httpd package, but I'm having trouble finding them. Is anyone aware of a location where those flags might be saved?

You could probably get the configs by downloading the source rpm of the package you have installed. There is a spec file that it includes so if you install the src RPM it the source and spec file shows up somewhere in /usr/src/redhat/

I think the apache source comes with its own spec file also, if you could get it working with the source you could build your own RPM. One of my co-workers has done this before. I think I might give it a shot one of these days when i have free time.

# ? Jun 2, 2009 16:43

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > The Linux Questions Thread: a bunch of pitfalls, but technically it's possible

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