Linux Q & A

**PatrickStar4491** · 05-29-2006, 03:21 PM

Yea, that's what I did. There's a lot more than what they originally enable.

jbm222 · 05-31-2006, 06:51 PM

Ubuntu Live doesn't work on my laptop.

It does work on my dad's really ancient Win98 machine

.

It gets through almost the entire boot up process, but then when it gets ready to start loading the GUI, displays a bunch of barely readable garbage on the screen. And I have what seems like a shell running, but the text is all over the place and doesn't show up on the screen right. Each line starts further over to the right, doesn't wordwrap at all, and after about 5 to 10 lines, it gets back over to the left side.

I think it something about an X-Server error.

Any ideas how i can fix this?

tht00 · 05-31-2006, 10:04 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by jbm222

Ubuntu Live doesn't work on my laptop.

It does work on my dad's really ancient Win98 machine

.

It gets through almost the entire boot up process, but then when it gets ready to start loading the GUI, displays a bunch of barely readable garbage on the screen. And I have what seems like a shell running, but the text is all over the place and doesn't show up on the screen right. Each line starts further over to the right, doesn't wordwrap at all, and after about 5 to 10 lines, it gets back over to the left side.

I think it something about an X-Server error.

Any ideas how i can fix this?

Yeah, it does sound like a problem with the X-server. The configuration file is located at '/etc/X11/xorg.conf'. Thankfully, I've never had to dig into it much myself.

So, what version of Ubuntu did you download? 5.10 or the 6.06 Beta? (6.06 is supposed to be officially released tomorrow, BTW).

jbm222 · 05-31-2006, 11:59 PM

Sometimes I can't get to the shell either. I found hints on how to reconfigure the video driver, but i haven't managed to get to a shell after this problem since i found that info.

I tried Knoppix and DSL live CDs. Both worked fine. Oddly, Ubuntu seems to have worked best on the old 98 machine.

It's 5.10. Maybe I'll try 6.06 tommorrow. I liked the idea of being able to test out the system from a live CD.

tht00 · 06-01-2006, 09:42 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by jbm222

Sometimes I can't get to the shell either. I found hints on how to reconfigure the video driver, but i haven't managed to get to a shell after this problem since i found that info.

I tried Knoppix and DSL live CDs. Both worked fine. Oddly, Ubuntu seems to have worked best on the old 98 machine.

It's 5.10. Maybe I'll try 6.06 tommorrow. I liked the idea of being able to test out the system from a live CD.

Yeah, try the 6.06 liveCD.

If you still can't get it working, your best bet it to probably head over to UbuntuForums' Laptop support forum.

jbm222 · 06-01-2006, 11:44 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by tht00

Yeah, try the 6.06 liveCD.

If you still can't get it working, your best bet it to probably head over to UbuntuForums' Laptop support forum.

6.06 worked fine on the first attempt. My wireless card doesn't work with it "out of the box", but it has been reported to work with some extra drivers.

Now i just need to figure out how to partition everything. I still need windows. Right now i have a single 56 GB NTFS partition, w/ about 20GB in use. 7GB is music which i would like to have a partition with R/W access under both OS's. So I'm thinking it would be nice to split everything roughly into thirds. NTFS / Shared Data / Ubuntu. I don't have Partition Magic & don't want to buy it. Any suggestions about what approach would be best?

ThousandFootScore · 06-02-2006, 01:06 AM

parted, or one of it's gui front-end tools (prefix it with a g or a q..)

ApparentlyNothing · 06-02-2006, 04:47 AM

I decided to give Ubuntu a second chance, and I think I'm glad I did. I installed 6.06 on my laptop, but ran in to a couple problems. First off, wireless problems again. It took me a while, but I was able to get ndiswrapper working right and loading at startup every time I boot. My second problem was that for some reason, my GRUB menu didn't have Windows on it. So after a bit of searching, I found out how to edit the GRUB boot menu and how to add my Windows partition to it. A few hours later, Ubuntu 6.06 is running perfectly (as far as I know, I still haven't tried suspending). This time, I felt a little bit more confident with Terminal than the first go around. I feel a sense of accomplishment now, whereas last time I just felt frustrated. And Ubuntu seems to be more clean than SuSE 10.1, which I was running before. Now that I got everything working, I may prefer Ubuntu, but we'll see. I haven't gotten to really work with it yet. And it's getting way too late. Time for sleep.

tht00 · 06-02-2006, 10:12 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by jbm222

6.06 worked fine on the first attempt. My wireless card doesn't work with it "out of the box", but it has been reported to work with some extra drivers.

Now i just need to figure out how to partition everything. I still need windows. Right now i have a single 56 GB NTFS partition, w/ about 20GB in use. 7GB is music which i would like to have a partition with R/W access under both OS's. So I'm thinking it would be nice to split everything roughly into thirds. NTFS / Shared Data / Ubuntu. I don't have Partition Magic & don't want to buy it. Any suggestions about what approach would be best?

gparted rocks.

It's pretty much a Partition Magic clone.

tht00 · 06-02-2006, 11:57 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by ApparentlyNothing

I decided to give Ubuntu a second chance, and I think I'm glad I did. I installed 6.06 on my laptop, but ran in to a couple problems. First off, wireless problems again. It took me a while, but I was able to get ndiswrapper working right and loading at startup every time I boot. My second problem was that for some reason, my GRUB menu didn't have Windows on it. So after a bit of searching, I found out how to edit the GRUB boot menu and how to add my Windows partition to it. A few hours later, Ubuntu 6.06 is running perfectly (as far as I know, I still haven't tried suspending). This time, I felt a little bit more confident with Terminal than the first go around. I feel a sense of accomplishment now, whereas last time I just felt frustrated. And Ubuntu seems to be more clean than SuSE 10.1, which I was running before. Now that I got everything working, I may prefer Ubuntu, but we'll see. I haven't gotten to really work with it yet. And it's getting way too late. Time for sleep.

Linux can be frustrating for a newbie, that's for sure. I left Linux behind for a short time before I could pick it back up again. Since then, I've been addicted to it -- and it grows on you. You can get good and proficient at using Linux, learning it inside and out if you like, and customize it beyond recognition. You can't really do that with any other OS.

Some things in Linux still frustrate me... though, not nearly as much as Windows does. I'll take some bumps in the road that Linux gives me over the headaches I get from using Windows.

jbm222 · 06-03-2006, 03:43 PM

gparted wiped out my NTFS partition completely when i attempted to resize it.

I suppose it's possible it could've been fixed, but there was very little import data i lost. A few songs i acquired since the last backup i made of my music, and that's about it.

So i decided to get brave and not try to reinstall Windows at all. I'm only running Ubuntu. I like it except for the fact that the GUI for network setup doesn't support WPA. I had my wireless card working with WPA for about 5 minutes, then forgot how i did it. Wired LAN worked "out of the box" of course, but it's a pain to have my computer near the router until i can get this figured out.

They severly need to develop a GUI that configs for WPA though.

**EDIT**

Good news: My Belkin F5D7010 is up and running FWPA-PSK on bootup. turns out that you setup the connection in /etc/network/interfaces but the key line that is easy to overlook is "auto ra0" which is essential if you want it to work on startup.

tht00 · 06-03-2006, 06:25 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by jbm222

gparted wiped out my NTFS partition completely when i attempted to resize it.

I suppose it's possible it could've been fixed, but there was very little import data i lost. A few songs i acquired since the last backup i made of my music, and that's about it.

So i decided to get brave and not try to reinstall Windows at all. I'm only running Ubuntu. I like it except for the fact that the GUI for network setup doesn't support WPA. I had my wireless card working with WPA for about 5 minutes, then forgot how i did it. Wired LAN worked "out of the box" of course, but it's a pain to have my computer near the router until i can get this figured out.

They severly need to develop a GUI that configs for WPA though.

**EDIT**

Good news: My Belkin F5D7010 is up and running FWPA-PSK on bootup. turns out that you setup the connection in /etc/network/interfaces but the key line that is easy to overlook is "auto ra0" which is essential if you want it to work on startup.

It's a good idea to always backup important data before doing anything with partitions. Sounds like you didn't lose much.

Good GUI interfaces are one of the weaknesses of Linux. Often, it's functionallity first (often by console), interface later.

Glad you got the config file figured out... I haven't had to mess with wireless in Linux yet -- I may get a laptop this fall to take advantage of Purdue's huge wireless network. Hopefully I won't have too much trouble.

**PatrickStar4491** · 06-03-2006, 10:00 PM

How can I make my fonts look more like they do in Windows? I got the Microsoft fonts installed, but they look like I'm using ClearType or something.

tht00 · 06-03-2006, 10:10 PM

Hmm... screenshot?

My fonts don't look quite like Windows (similar though). I've learned to like them as-is.

**PatrickStar4491** · 06-03-2006, 10:14 PM

Nevermind, I changed the rendering mode and it works good.