Notes from the Mousepad

I volunteered at Free Geek Chicago again on Sunday, and spent much of my day trying to get Xubuntu Feisty Fawn to install on some rather unique hardware. It didn’t go so well.

The machine in question was a PII with 256mb of RAM, and two SCSI hard drives – one 8gb and one 4gb in size. I tried to set up an LVM installation, but the installer hung after it had completed 85% of the software installation. So I also tried manual partitioning, setting up the root partition on the 4gb drive, and boot, home, and swap partitions on the 8gb drive. It hung at 85%, too. Even trying to do a command-line installation hung at 85%.

With frustration mounting, we just switched over to a new computer. I knew there had to be a way to view what was causing the install to hang, so I asked the folks in #ubuntu-iso what I could do to see these error messages. I talked the issue over with Stephane Graber, and he suggested that I check out some of the install messages in /var/log by pressing ctrl-alt-f2 and getting to run level 2 once the installation had hung.

I’m going to do that the next time I’m at Free Geek Chicago. If anything, I’d like to at least get a good bug report out of this. I haven’t done too much testing of SCSI drives, and also haven’t done to much LVM testing, so I think I might try and add that to my testing repertoire on this release cycle. I’m even going to trade in my standard PII testing box (which runs just fine, thank you) for this SCSI beast (assuming it has no hardware issues).

In regards to Dell’s explorations/websites/surveys regarding Linux on the desktop… I think it’s good they’re asking, but I don’t expect something soon. And if it happens, I don’t think that we’ll see any discount on computers because of them having Linux on the desktop. And I don’t expect any support from Dell (or anyone else) if they (or another major PC builder) puts Linux on the desktop.

For me, the cost item isn’t a big issue because you can already get a computer for $500-$600 that is plenty powerful to do anything you need (except for maybe gaming). And the lack of Dell (or whatever company) support isn’t a big deal to me because we all know how to get on IRC or go to a forum for our support. That’s where the best support comes from, anyway.

To me, the issues are hardware compatibility, having a free-as-in-freedom OS, and getting another option other than Microsoft, and I would actually be willing to pay a bit more for those things. Maybe $50 more for a $600 computer. After all, if I spend two hours trying to set up a wifi connection because the wifi hardware isn’t totally compatible, isn’t that worth at least $20? If I have to do some tricky work to get suspend / resume working, isn’t that worth another $20-$25? And being able to completely wipe my drive and take off Novell’s Suse Linux because I want to put on Xubuntu, but still have everything work . . . Isn’t that worth a few more bucks?

If it takes a few more dollars to make Linux on the desktop financially viable for the hardware vendors, then I’d be willing to pay it.

After Herd 5′s release, I’ve been playing catch up with other parts of my life. One bit of good news is that my new HP AMD64 computer arrived, and so I’ve been de-commissioning my old computer, and preparing the new machine. Part of getting rid of the old computer has also involved attempts to prepare a Samba file and print server, so it’s a big mess of computer parts around my place right now.

My file server is going to be an old Compaq desktop, which I’m outfitting with the 80gb drive that was the master drive in my prior primary desktop computer. Prior to making the swap, I made a couple of changes:

• I backed up my data,
• Modified the grub and fstab entries,
• Removed the 80gb drive, and set the jumpers on the 40gb drive so that it would be the new master drive,
• Modified the BIOS to indicate that there’s only one hard drive now
• Hoped for the best

It all worked. I know that an 80gb drive might not seem like a lot for a file server in this day and age, but it’s plenty good enough for my needs at this time. Right now, my backup data fills up less than 25gb.

I’ve got to make some quick modifications to the Xubuntu testing pages, so I better get on that. It’s nice to know that I’m making good progress on my machines, though.