DIY Street Linux Thread.

[Guest Blooz1]

I'm ready to get into the whole Linux thing also.

 

Although I never took any courses in programming, I did spend many hours at the command line back in the pre-windows days. I expended a lot of energy swearing at my monitor while trying to to free up enough memory to play games like the original "Wing Commander" in DOS!

 

I've actually got a couple of spare rigs, and all the time in the world for tinkering. so some sort of guide on "Linux For Morons" would be very, very helpful.

[Guest culinist]

Just take the plunge!!!!

 

My advice is to test all the major distros and pick one that you feel most comfortable with. You'll know it when you find it. It may take a while so be patient. But it'll happen. Linux is all about choice and being able to load it up in anyway you want. So someone elses idea of a perfect distro may or may not be yours.

 

I mean hell. Distrowatch has a top 100. And that's just the tip of the penguin covered iceberg.

 

http://distrowatch.com/

[Angry_Games]

I started waaaaay back when Red Hat was...3? 2? Heck, can't remember. I then gave it up as too impossible to use. Then I think Mandrake...7? It stunk too haha. Mandrake 9 I remember as it gave me hope, but in the end, I punched 1,354,882 holes in my monitor in a 6 day span, and uninstalled it.

 

I tried Ubuntu at Culinist's suggestion back in Ubuntu 6 days and it was pretty cool, but not even him remoting into the machine could get ATI or Nvidia 3d acceleration, and that was the killing point. Uninstall and swore it off for another year or three.

 

Since I can't do dual-boot with XP on a 2x80 softraid with Ubuntu without taking 9,432 steps and 13,322 command line entries, I'm going to have to find something else. I got an Archlinux iso burned to dvd (I'm out of cd-r's) and maybe I'll google before I even try.

[Guest Blooz1]

culinist, thank you very much!

 

Distrowatch is exactly the kind of thing I was hoping would be available - a place where you'd be able to get info about all the various distro's and such. I'm going to be spending some time there in the next few days!

[Guest culinist]

No sweat Blooz , good luck to ya!!!!

 

AG if your gonna try Arch do some homework first and get ready for some command line work.

 

Damn I'm tired.

[suedenim]

Anyone tried running Linux as a virtual and if so have any advice. I've been recommended virtualbox as fast, slim host. I'm not going to abandon XP just yet but having it in a virtual will cetainly ease the borked installation problems that A_G has been ranting about all over the place (thanks for the heads up on the pain - much appreciated).

 

Also how do these virtualisers handle your hardware? I dabbled with VirtualPC and that had pre-determined emulated hardware.

[KimTjik]

Linux generally works alright as a guest in a virtualization environment. You have to accept a performance penalty though. VMware or VirtualBox, choose what you like the most. Some view VirtualBox as the easier one, but with Windows as the host VMware is probably more frequently used. VirtualBox is partly based on Qemu, which also is available, but I suppose it's not as a good choice in Windows (in Linux you might run it in kernel mode by using the KQemu module - that's what I do the most; overall virtualization is easier in Linux, at least in my view).

 

If you install VMware player (free) take a look at this post I made a long time ago (no one ever commented it; it must have been a worthless post by me ): http://www.diy-street.com/forum/showthread.php?t=60243

 

VMware and VirtualBox both basically simulates hardware, which allow the guest OS to run isolated. It's not uncommon that Linux developers make sure their distribution will run in for example VMware and VirtualBox, so usually it works. The headache some find is when you need to configure for example VMware to connect Internet through the host OS, or transfer files between the host and guest.

[ReelFiles]

I am having problems getting 1024x768 on PClinuxOS. The monitor is a Hansol 701a (17" CRT). I set HorizSync to 30-85 and VertRefresh to 47-160, but the max I can get out of it is 832x624. The GPU is a S3 Virge DX (PCI), this has been driving me nuts, any ideas?

[faheyd]

I am having problems getting 1024x768 on PClinuxOS. The monitor is a Hansol 701a (17" CRT). I set HorizSync to 30-85 and VertRefresh to 47-160, but the max I can get out of it is 832x624. The GPU is a S3 Virge DX (PCI), this has been driving me nuts, any ideas?

 

It's probably not detecting that S3 Virge correctly. It's easy to screw up the X windows totally when playing around with it. Search the web for the real instructions, but in general, you boot into single user mode, run 'xfconfig' from the command line and work from there.

Then, boot into multi-user mode or run startx from the command line to start X again. Plenty of documentation on the web to get you there.

[ReelFiles]

It's detecting he card correctly; it shows up in the hardware manager. I had no problem with my old graphics card, so you're probably right, in the aspect that it's related to the card. I am a little surprised since it is really old an was quite popular in it's day. I've used this monitor with Linux before and it was real hard to find the settings for it online, but I did have it running ok at one point. I have a few other PCI cards I can try if I can't get this one to work right. Thanks.

[e_lion_1]

I am having problems getting 1024x768 on PClinuxOS. The monitor is a Hansol 701a (17" CRT). I set HorizSync to 30-85 and VertRefresh to 47-160, but the max I can get out of it is 832x624. The GPU is a S3 Virge DX (PCI), this has been driving me nuts, any ideas?

 

That feels like a driver limitation to me. It might be that the depth is too much (32).

 

In the Xorg.conf find the line

 

Section "Screen"

and see if there is this line:

 

DefaultDepth 32

If so, change the number 24 or 16. A depth of 16 still looks pretty good and does go faster, especially

on older hardware! If the line does not exist, you can safely add it in the Screen section.

 

Here's what my config file looks like:

...

Section "Screen"

...

Identifier "Screen0"

Device "Card0"

Monitor "Monitor0"

DefaultDepth 24

SubSection "Display"

Viewport 0 0

Depth 1

EndSubSection

SubSection "Display"

Viewport 0 0

Depth 4

EndSubSection

SubSection "Display"

Viewport 0 0

Depth 8

EndSubSection

SubSection "Display"

Viewport 0 0

Depth 15

EndSubSection

SubSection "Display"

Viewport 0 0

Depth 16

EndSubSection

SubSection "Display"

Viewport 0 0

Modes "1280x1024"

Depth 24

EndSubSection

EndSection

 

Good luck!

[dr_bowtie]

http://mirror.anl.gov/pub/ubuntu-iso/DVDs/...u/7.10/release/

 

I am thinking really hard on trying this.....

 

Any comments on it....

 

 

the reason why you ask...?

 

saw a really great, detailed guide on building a Linux server with a total walk-thru for even a dummy like me...

 

it's not the XGL thing that had me drooling but know nothing about....CLI what?

 

I need freaking easy point and click stuff....