Sad Penguin

As mentioned in my main blog, the strapline for this blog is now out of date in that I've recently bought a new PC - an entry-level Dell desktop. It's a huge improvement on the old one - which with a bit of effort and expenditure could have been upgraded to "obsolete" status - though in some respects it hasn't exactly "run out of the box".

Having basically wiped the hard drive (including the "hidden" recovery partitions that Dell put in to save on the cost of supplying a couple of CD Roms, at the expense of 10% of your hard drive) to have a Windows/Linux dual boot, I then spent the last weekend in an eventually successful attempt to get the graphics working on Linux (was only getting 16-bit colour - mind you, Windoze was doing even worse, being unable even to recognise the monitor and the integrated graphics chipset, and couldn't manage more than a 640x480 default resolution).

(For those who might want to get an Intel Extreme Graphics chipset (82865G) working on a Dell Dimension 3000 desktop, the answer is you increase the Video RAM buffer setting in the BIOS to 8 MB rather than 1 MB. That should be enough to get the graphics working for non-demanding uses. Then set the Video RAM in XF86Config-4 to something like 32 MB - or using XAdminmenu, if you have the good taste to be a Libranet user - if you want to use it for games. OK, so this is a pretty dull paragraph for 99% of you to read, but if it saves just one person 12 hours+ of unnecessarily driver downloads, kernel recompilations and hairstyle reconfigurations - a.k.a. tearing your hair out - then it'll all be worthwhile).

Windows and Dell haven't exactly covered themselves with glory. I had been planning to install Linux only once I'd made sure everything was working, but ended up bringing it forwards because of problems like XP repeatedly losing my external modem. Then it turns out that Dell don't supply copies of any drivers for the monitor, graphics or audio - the only options if you need to reinstall these are (i) download new versions from Dell's website - just what you want when you only have a dial-up connection - or (ii) wipe the entire hard drive and restore the PC to its "out of the box" state using PC Restore. So I now have a computer that dual boots into an utterly useless - i.e. even more than usual - XP set-up. Ho hum.

Anyway, back to Linux where, while I still have no sound, the graphics are now working fine. So I spent a happy hour last night playing Tuxracer and Head Over Heels - an old ZX Spectrum game which has now been remade by Retrospec.

But I think this means that the Sad Penguin is now a Happily Racing Tux, and accordingly this blog is now officially closed.

In the (continuing, infuriating) absence of a working internet connection, I've turned my attention back to getting Emacs installed. The lack of an internet connection is not helping. As the Jedi Master is not a member of the Debian Order, I've put a query on the debianHELP site. Let's see what that throws up.

In the meantime, though, I've downloaded the PDF version of IBM's tutorial on Living in Emacs... so you can see which side of the religious divide I'm thinking of coming down on at the moment...

Here's my latest theory about why I'm having difficulty getting my modem to work (after spending hours poring over the modem HOWTO, checking setserial, adjusting my BIOS plug-and-play settings, etc). It's a little bit crazy, a little bit left-field, a little bit off-the-wall, but here goes: the modem's knackered.

Now, I know what you're thinking, but hear me out, hear me out. I've just tried it on my wife's parents' PC, and whaddyaknow, Windows can't see the modem either. Looks like the IT department at work - who provided the modem in return for a tenner into their beer fund - may (inadvertently, I stress) have sold me a lemon.

Still, it's good to have identified the problem, and hopefully I can now source another modem: either see if our IT boys have another spare kicking around in their store cupboard, or even - gasp! - buy a new one. And yes, I will make sure it's a proper modem, not one of these "Winmodem" abominations...

Oops. (See comments).

It looks like setting up my modem is going to be fun!!! Ho hum.

Here's a tutorial from Linux Questions. My favourite bit is about halfway down, when it says, "Now comes the complicated bit". Er, right.

The first obstacle is getting hold of the driver. Here's the address on the US Robotics website:

ftp.usr.com/usr/dl15/LNUX_3ComMdm-1.0-1.i386.rpm

Alas, this link just times-out. I've found another site which alleges hosts a copy of the LNUX_3ComMdm-1.0-1.i386.rpm file, here:

ftp.yars.free.net/pub/software/unix/platforms/linux/kernel/drivers

This is on the website for the Yaroslavl State University. Wherever that might be. Though I notice their site is hosted on a free website service apparently based in Russia.

Call me a suspicious Aloysius, as Ned Flanders might say, but I'm a little reluctant to just stick a disk in my PC from a source like that, while logged on as root, and simply let it do its stuff.

I may see if the US Robotics site's working tomorrow. Or - since I have a rescue CD to hand - should I just take a chance, on the basis that if it does anything malicious then I can just wipe the hard-drive and start again? (I'm a little reluctant to go down that route, given my experience to date!).

Some links to useful information about bash, as the Jedi Master attempts to keep his young charge from the lure of the Dark Side of excessive GUI usage ("Once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny. Consume you it will!"):

• The Bash Reference Manual, in HTML and PDF versions.
  


• A bash introductory tutorial
  


• I'm already finding this book to be a useful reference for the various commands and their options.

Hooray! Libranet installed, and pretty much everything is working except for the modem. If anyone knows off the top of their head where to find a Linux driver for a US Robotics 56K Faxmodem (no other model number anywhere on the unit) then please let me know in the comments; otherwise I'll just do a bit of googling, or post a query on Linux Questions.

But otherwise everything is working - I got a fun login screen complete with a much happier penguin (the jolly fellow pictured in this post) than the one featured on my title bar, and the IceWM windows manager is more than adequate.

However, I'm glad to have had the (enforced) opportunity over the past few days to use the command-line interface and generally dig around in the innards a bit. I never did get to grips with DOS, but I can now see something of the benefits of using the shell rather than dragging and dropping everything all over the place. Indeed, I felt almost disappointed to go back to windows, menus, icons and all the rest of it - like Ray Liotta at the end of Goodfellas, grumbling that "There's no action ... I'm an average nobody. I get to live the rest of my life like a schnook."

So I will try to continue using bash where possible/necessary. Whether these "good habits" will survive remains to be seen, though having to contend with a slightly clunky GUI like IceWM will certainly help :-)

Thanks once again for all the help and advice people have given on this site. It has all been much appreciated.

Bear one another's burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ. (Galatians 6:2)

OK, looks like I'm going to try Libranet 2.7 Classic now. System requirements look manageable, I've found an installation guide on the web, this review was positive, and I can get it from Linux Emporium for £3 plus P&P, and most important of all, it got the Jedi Master's thumbs-up.

Third time lucky...?

Schlimmbesserung (German): the act of fouling things up in the process of trying to make them better.

Thanks to those of you who have left comments on my previous posts, below. Your suggestions are much appreciated, and leave me feeling slightly guilty that I've now managed to make them a bit moot... but hopefully most of the tips will port across to whatever I end up doing next. I'm not quite at the stage of taking Thomas' advice and taking a hammer to the blasted thing! :-)

But that still leaves the current... problem.

Having done some digging around on Linux Format's website, it became apparent that there's a tendency for the Mandrake cover-disc only to part-install on machines with low RAM. This is clearly what had happened to me, so rather than continuing to bash my head against a wall I decided to try to start from scratch and re-install.

In the course of this, the Mandrake installation program (text-only mode, which worked OK last time) started to format my hard drive - and then promptly fell over.

I tried again - got the opening splash menu screen - chose text install - but as the kernel started up, but before the installation program started, I got a message something along the lines of:

Kernel panic: Unable to mount fs on unknown block (1,3)

(That might have "been Kernel panic: VFS:" etc - I was too knackered to pay much attention by that stage. I'd experienced a similar message when I tried to install SuSE 9.1 last week (but that's another story), but I'm pretty sure that both times it was due to lack of memory.

When I rebooted again, without the CD, it took me through to GRUB.

It goes without saying, I'm afraid, that I haven't done anything sensible like prepare boot floppies or a bootable floppy version of fdisk. If you thought I might have done that, you'd be mistaking me for someone who had a clue. :-)

Having given this more thought since my slightly panic-stricken email to my Jedi Master, and also read the comments people have made to my previous posts, I'm already minded to try a distro that is more suitable for a low-spec machine. Daniel suggested Slackware, someone else has mentioned Debian. Any comments on these?

And is it likely that either of these distros will be able to circumvent the Misery and Ruination which I have brought to the previous peaceable kingdom of my hard drive?

This is probably the most irritating problem at the moment.

When I shut down, I get the "Power down" at the end of the logout script, but then the computer neither shuts itself down automatically nor responds when I press the power button to shut it off manually. To turn it off, I'm having to hit the "reset" button then hit the power button immediately afterwards. Not particularly satisfactory!

dmesg tells me that my BIOS is too old for ACPI to work, and suggests using "acpi=force". However, having tried this it still doesn't work, and when Linux boots up again the original setting as set out in dmesg remains.

Getting online is a major priority, if only because there are probably things I'll need to download onto this machine to get some of the other problems sorted out.

First question: can I run Mozilla without KDE or Gnome? If not, what should I use instead? (It would be quite handy just to get Lynx working, so that I could at least make some contact with the outside world!).

Attempts to install Mozilla using RPM have resulted in long lists of dependencies, some of which I've found on my disks, some of which I haven't. This may be related to the first question, I suppose.

There's no internal modem on the PC, so I've connected a US Robotics 56K Faxmodem to the serial port. Followed the instructions in a couple of weighty Linux guides I got from the library and set up a /dev/modem link which points to /dev/cua0, the serial port in question. Again, as suggestion, I tried using $ echo "ATDTnnnnnn" >/dev/modem" to test the connection, and got no response - and no change in the lights displayed on the modem. So it appears that the OS is not communicating with the modem at the moment.

Again, following instructions on setting up a PPP link, found that it doesn't appear to have the necessary wherewithal installed (sorry to be a bit vague here - am working from memory!). The book suggested checking through dmesg to see if it refers to having TCP/IP set up, and then if it didn't I think you were supposed to use pppd to do this. But pppd isn't installed and I can't find it on the disks.

Update: Will try reading through these HOWTOs:
* PPP-HOWTO
* ISP Connectivity mini-HOWTO

I'd been advised not to install OOo on my machine given that it has no real chance of running on a 32 MB machine. However, it got installed by Mandrake during the installation process and, sure enough, it doesn't work - running it from X, got a pretty splash-screen that made my machine actually look like a modern PC (rather than a 1982 green-screen terminal) for a few minutes. Yes, that's right, minutes. It stayed up there with a loading bar crawling across the bottom, and after 10-15 minutes or so I decided to put it out of its misery.

Apparently AbiWord may be a better option - I haven't yet had the chance to find out if this is on my disks, though. May also install Gnumeric for the rare occasions I use spreadsheets.

The other issue is how to set about uninstalling OOo. Update: this site suggests using ./setup and choosing the remove option.

While working through suggested exercises in various books (eg Linux Pocket Guide from O'Reillys, Teach Yourself Linux) I've found a number of suggested commands that don't appear to be present. One or two of these I've managed to install (eg emacs) but items still missing include:

• info


• setserial


• lsof


• xinit

Emacs wasn't installed as part of the Mandrake installation, but have subsequently installed this using RPM and have been browsing through the manual.

However, the Emacs Tutorial doesn't appear to have been installed: when I type ^h-t, I get a message saying that the TUTORIAL file can't be found. Can anyone suggest how I should go about installing this?

Have acquired an old Dell PC from my church. PII 233 MHz processor, 3 GB hard drive, 32 MB RAM, and have proceeded to install Mandrake 10.1 as the sole OS. This is the "community edition" version which came as this month's cover-CD on Linux Format magazine.

Went for a minimal install - no KDE or Gnome - though appear to have inadvertently installed OpenOffice.org. Have installed X.org but currently have no desktop installed.

The main purposes for which I'm hoping to use this PC are (i) web access; (ii) developing a fairly basic website for my church, to replace the current horror-story which, to protect the innocent, I'm not even going to link; and (iii) editing Word docs so I can work from home occasionally.

So I need to get online, get a browser sorted out and get some kind of WP (AbiWord?) that will read/edit/create MS Word files.

However, I'm likely to be able to upgrade my PC in a couple of months for something a little more suitable - still not what you'd call up-to-date, but more like 128 MB than 32 MB for starters. So upgrading the RAM on this machine isn't worth doing.

This blog is a place for me to record, for my own benefit, current problems and steps taken (and sources of advice found) to resolve them. However, I also have comments enabled and will welcome any suggestions to any of the issues covered.

Not much to see here yet - this is intended as a log where I can record problems with my Linux installation project, and also invite comments from people with suggestions or advice.

I'm trying to get Linux working on a 32MB PII PC, without upgrading the RAM. (I've installed it without KDE or Gnome, but with X.org). More details to follow.

In the meantime, please visit my main blog, Confessing Evangelical.