Featured Comments: Week of 2012 June 3

There was no "Featured Comments" post last week because there were no comments on the posts from the previous week. This past week, one post got a handful of comments, so I'll repost a few of those.

PCLinuxOS (Kinda) Saved My Laptop

Reader shem suggested, "PXE at bootup is usually for booting via network, so yeah, something happened to your ethernet. Could try go into BIOS, check all settings and save changes, even if none made. If that doesn't help, power off for 20 seconds, go into BIOS again, load default settings or optimized defaults (if available) and save changes, again even if none made. No guarantees that it will work, but definately won't harm to try..."
An anonymous commenter said, "Try the ethernet in Win7. If id doesn't work there then you know that the hardware is the issue."
Reader Mechatotoro had this bit of support: "Congratulations on the recovery of your cherished Mint. PCLinuxOS has also saved me a couple times already and one can't get enough of a good thing. It is now the main system on my laptop. I believe all of us become clumsy when stressed out, so no problem there. Thanks for sharing your story!"
Commenter cirrusuk added this: "pclinuxos will always have a special place in my cyberheart , good stuff on getting everything back on track."

Thanks to all those who commented on this past week's posts. I'm back at MIT now and ready to start my UROP; this also means that I will have time (and USB flash drives) to do normal reviews again, so watch out for those soon. In the meantime, if you like what I write, please continue subscribing and commenting!

PCLinuxOS (Kinda) Saved My Laptop

Yesterday, I was surfing the web in my room as usual, when some exterminators came to my house and advised that I leave the room while the pesticides were applied. I unplugged my laptop from the wall outlet, forgetting that I had also removed the battery. Whoops.

Today, I was alarmed to see that I could not boot into my Linux Mint system; the OS would give a "no init found" error after the boot splash. First, I had to boot into Microsoft Windows 7; thankfully, that worked as Linux Mint was the OS I was [of course] using when I accidentally unplugged my computer. I looked up the error, and it turns out it's a common one that can be solved by a file system check ("fsck") from a live CD. All the guides I saw recommended using a live CD of the same OS whose hard drive partition is affected, but I had left my live CDs and USB sticks in my dormitory room. Whoops again. What I figured would just be a minor inconvenience turned into a semi-major problem.

First I tried making a Linux Mint live CD from within Microsoft Windows 7. The first attempt failed because I didn't use the right tool to burn the ISO file to the CD. The second attempt failed too, but that is because the live CD would hang during the [very long] boot process after the boot splash screen was done.

After that, I figured it may just be an issue with Linux Mint, so I rummaged through some CDs and found an old Fedora 11 "Leonidas" GNOME live CD. That would also hang right after the boot splash, so at that point I became quite worried that my computer may never be able to work with Linux ever again.

Finally, I found an old PCLinuxOS 2009.2 KDE live CD, and I gave that a shot. To my relief, it worked, although it would not connect to the Internet. I entered "su" into the terminal followed by "fsck -y /dev/sda5" (because my Linux Mint partition is "sda5"), and that seemed to work OK. Rebooting into my installed Linux Mint system worked! I was incredibly happy to see my main OS back in working order and to see that I would not have to resign myself to using Microsoft Windows 7. There are only two lingering issues, and both of them are quite minor. The first is that some odd error message involving "PXE" and "PCI" is displayed for a few seconds just before the GRUB boot menu is displayed, but that goes away on its own anyway. The second, which may be related to the first, is that Linux Mint is apparently no longer able to recognize my laptop's ethernet card, so I must now depend on wireless connections to access the Internet, and I will have to train myself to overcome my aversion to wireless connections stemming from numerous failed attempts by my family to send wireless Internet signals to the very room where I am typing this. Anyway, regardless of the fact that I don't particularly care for the newer versions of PCLinuxOS, I salute [the older version of] PCLinuxOS for doing its job when I needed it most!

(UPDATE: I was a little concerned that this accident may have fried my laptop's ethernet card, so as per some advice posted somewhere online, I unplugged my laptop from everything (power, ethernet, even the USB mouse), and didn't touch it again for the next 16 hours (i.e. from yesterday afternoon until now). For one, that weird error message has disappeared. For another, the ethernet card is now recognized in the "System Profiler and Benchmark" program as well as in the output of the terminal command "lshw -C network", although my laptop refuses to connect to the ethernet. Hooray!)

Featured Comments: Week of 2011 July 17

There were two posts that got quite a few comments this past week, so I'll try to repost a few of those from each.

Review: Scientific Linux 6.0

An anonymous reader had this bit of support: "good review. Thanks!"
Another anonymous commenter was generally enthusiastic: "Scientific Linux is great !!! Thanks"

Review: PCLinuxOS 2011.6 KDE

Many of these comments surprised me in the way that they attacked me and the review without properly reading the review and seeing where I actually did praise PCLinuxOS; instead, they focused on the issues that I did have (and the issues that I didn't have or that I had but made clear that those were not to be blamed on PCLinuxOS) and magnified them to the level of a capital offense. Frankly, I was disappointed by the lack of understanding and comprehension among the readers, and it along with similarly savage comments on other reviews of PCLinuxOS that were not 100% positive is unfortunately enough to steer me away from reviewing PCLinuxOS in the future. Anyway, let's get on with the comments.
An anonymous reader said (later following this up with a little conversation with me in the comments), "Please correct me if I am wrong. You tested an operating system through a live environment, and then tested an install through a virtualbox session within the live environment. Is this a fair review? I wonder if you would have needed to tinker if you did a full and proper install. I do agree with you regarding the partition manager at install...it could be better. Emil" Of the rather bluntly critical comments I saw (many of which at best shared these concerns, at worst just engaged in ad hominem attacks), I felt this was the most fair, informed, and courteous of them all, and I'd like to thank this commenter for maintaining civility where other commenters had lost all such semblance.
Another anonymous commenter tried to fight back against that tide: "I use PCLINUXOS, and i am shame of this commentaries from the users. This is the kind of comments that give bad name to the community and the distro itself. Some PCLinuxOS users are know for no respect for the reviewers, this is not the first time and will not be the last! In the future do not complainin when people say that PCLinuxOS users are arrogant! Respect and be respected!"
Yet another anonymous reader had this related suggestion: "Has anyone tried iGolaware or Mageia? Both seem quite good, former is based on Ubuntu and latter fork of Mandriva, now independent. Not a troll :),just thought of asking if anyone had any experience with either."

Still another anonymous commenter said, "I've been using PClinuxOS for nearly 4 months and have found it a very good distro - my hardware is approx 2 years old - and it all works very well. The community very friendly. I think a few - and I would say it is just a few - do get defensive, but sometimes the reviews are so inaccurate I can sort of (partly) understand it. But if I can defend them for a moment, I "rarely" see them being personal in their responses, and secondly, the forum is the best by far of any of the ones I use. You only have to go the Welcome Centre to see how friendly, and helpful, they are. Thanks for reading."

 

Thanks to all those (yes, even the one who called me a "[living] Murphy's law", for your comment was a prime example of said ad hominem attacks) who commented on this past week's posts. This coming week, I plan to have at least three posts, two of which will be reviews again; no, I can't guarantee that either will be 100% positive, though I hope they will turn out that way. In any case, if you like what I write, please continue subscribing and commenting!

Review: PCLinuxOS 2011.6 KDE

Main Screen

The last time I tried out PCLinuxOS was at version 2010.07, and I tried the KDE version then too. I didn't particularly it then because I felt it dropped a lot of useful applications from the 2009.2 release (which I tried out before I started this blog), and because it was pretty slow on my computer. Then again, my perspectives and desires have changed a little bit since then, so don't read too much into that. Anyway, version 2011.6 has been released, and I'm reviewing it.

So what is PCLinuxOS? A long time ago in a galaxy that we are all in, PCLinuxOS was a Mandriva derivative with a custom theme, some changed default applications, and a few customization scripts. Since then, it has grown and diverged into basically its own distribution; really, the only thing it has in common with Mandriva is its package file type, and that is a particular form of RPM used in Mandriva. Other than that, it's basically entirely different, so there's no point in continuing to mention Mandriva after this. Anyway, it primarily uses KDE, though there are GNOME, Xfce, LXDE, and Enlightenment editions available as well. Its selling points include ease of use even for total newbies to Linux, stability, and a rolling-release model. Through it all, it has essentially remained a one-man project, and that man is Bill Reynolds, also known as "Texstar". How can stability be reconciled with a rolling-release model? Well, although packages are sent to the repositories when ready, "when ready" is only after a lot of time and testing. PCLinuxOS is known for its rather conservative stance on upgrading to newer pieces of software; for example, KDE 4 wasn't available for users at large until last year with the release of the PCLinuxOS 2010 series. This is a similar tack Debian-based Linux Mint will be taking by thoroughly testing all incoming Debian Testing packages and only releasing them when ready in monthly packages.

I tested the live session on a live USB made with MultiSystem. I tested the installation in VirtualBox within that live USB session with 1024 MB of RAM allocated to the guest OS. Follow the jump to see what it's like.

Featured Comments: Week of 2010 September 26

There were a few posts that garnered quite a few comments, so I'll try to include a few comments from each post.

Review: aptosid 2010-02 "Keres" KDE

I complained about the lack of Synaptic Package Manager in aptosid. Reader T Beermonster had an excellent explanation of this: "Because aptosid is based on debian unstable packages move fast (when debian isn't in a pre-release freeze anyway) upgrading (which should always be a dist-upgrade not an upgrade) or installing anything that touches X should not be done from a running X session because breakages can and will occur."
Commenter HPB had this to say about the distribution and the community: "I think aptosid is one of the best debian/sid based distro's. It's very fast, up-to-date and it has a very friendly community. As it is apparently not for newbies, it certainly is the distro of choice for newcomers to learn what GNU/linux is all about."

The Ideal Linux Distribution, As I See It

I complained that PCLinuxOS 2010 does not include OpenOffice.org out-of-the-box, thus justifying my choice of Linux Mint "Debian" over it. As an anonymous commenter reminded me, "Pclinuxos does have OpenOffice, but not on the live/install CD. You can download it using the Get Open Office script that will get all the right parts and localization, even KDE or Gnome integration."
Another anonymous commenter, in response to another anonymous reader's question about it, responded, "just try htop - the memory footprint is practically as low as a pure debian install's. And that's the smallest you can get with a pure gnome install."
Reader qa1433 remarks, "I have been using Mint Debian since it came out. On my old clunker box it works faster then other Ubuntu based OS. However, all OS's with KDE 4.5 seem to run very slow except Chakra which is Arch based."
Finally, commenter Matias had this to say about newbie-friendly distributions: "So my favs to newbies - Mint and Mandriva. Personally i'm mostly using Fedora. My family prefer Linux Mint."

Review: wattOS R2

I complained about the removal of the power management utilities that gave wattOS its name. Reader iggy_koopa explains that "I wrote the power management gui originally for wattos, but haven't really had time to work on it in the last year or so. It needs to be updated to support ext4 and I need to rework it so it can be packaged as a deb. I'm assuming that's why biff left it out of this release. Hopefully I'll have time soon to get it back up to date."

Well, that's all for last week's comments. Stay tuned for the posts coming up this week!

Review: Mandriva 2010.1 Spring

Main Screen

Before I do anything else, I want to apologize to readers of this blog (and of Linux Today) as well as to the Mandriva community for giving Mandriva such short shrift in my comparison of KDE distributions for newbies. As I did this test separately (full disclosure: I also wanted to try desktop effects, so Mandriva gets 1 GB of RAM and 128 MB of video memory, while all of the distributions tested on my old computer got 448 MB of RAM and 12 MB of video memory), comparing Mandriva's performance against the others' isn't quite fair, so I won't compare them. My reasoning in the article for not testing Mandriva was that PCLinuxOS uses some Mandriva repositories and tools and seems to support more hardware than Mandriva, so it would be a better contender in the comparison. (It's like why I would choose Linux Mint over Ubuntu in a comparison of GNOME distributions.) Furthermore, Mandriva has been going through a roller-coaster ride of a financial situation of late, so I'm not entirely sure how much longer it will be around in its current incarnation. While the second point still stands, I stand corrected with regard to the first point. Please follow the jump to see why I am so sorry that I chose not to include Mandriva in the last comparison.

Comparison Test: Newbie-Friendly KDE Distributions

In anticipation of my new laptop, I decided to test 5 major KDE distributions to see which one could work best on my laptop. As it happens, I ended up testing all of these on my old Sony VAIO desktop and installed Linux Mint 9 GNOME on my laptop. Go figure.
Each of these distributions aims to provide a hospitable and workable environment for the new user/Windows migrant. As such, there are a few features I expect to see included out-of-the-box. One of these is Firefox. A lot of implementations of KDE provide Konqueror instead of Firefox; while Konqueror may be faster and doubles as an excellent file manager, in terms of extensibility, ability to handle pretty much any webpage, and name recognition, Konqueror doesn't come close to Firefox. Along with this, I expect to see proprietary codecs included out-of-the-box. The story is similar for KOffice versus OpenOffice.org, so I also expect to see OpenOffice.org present and integrated nicely with KDE. I also want to see good hardware support (as tested by checking for support of my Logitech Quickcam Communicate STX USB webcam) out-of-the-box. The distribution shouldn't be too sluggish in live mode (but before that, it should have a live mode so that the user can try the distribution out first before taking the shot in the dark that is the installation process). In essence, the distribution should have Firefox (well-integrated), OpenOffice.org (well-integrated), hardware support (as per my webcam), and a reasonably fast live mode.
Although the newest version of KDE is 4.5, all of these distributions come with 4.4, which isn't a whole lot worse as far as I know. The distributions are openSUSE 11.3 (live CD), PCLinuxOS 2010.07, Sabayon 5.3, Pardus 2009.2, and PC-BSD 8.1 (live CD) along with a mystery contender that shall be revealed at the end of this post. Many of these distributions implement KDE specifically to better serve the new user, as many of these distributions are based on other distributions that are notoriously hard to work with.
As I was running low on blank CDs and DVDs at this time, I decided to try to put each of these distributions on my USB stick as a live USB. Only Sabayon and PCLinuxOS cooperated, so I decided then to test all of these distributions in VirtualBox. All of the impressions I have written are from these tests in VirtualBox; Sabayon and PCLinuxOS's performances as live USBs have not crept into this post (I hope).
With these things in mind, follow the jump to see how each contender fared. (NOTE: There are a lot of pictures after the jump, so your browser will probably slow down a bit. Please continue reading, but keep this in mind.)

Review: SimplyMEPIS 8.5

In my quest to find new distributions to add to my multiboot live USB, I came across SimplyMEPIS, part of the MEPIS family (which also includes the lightweight Enlightenment [window manager]-based AntiX). MEPIS is based off of Debian, which is also the source of Ubuntu (and its derivatives). However, while Ubuntu uses the Debian unstable "sid" packages (though that has changed with 10.04 to the testing packages), MEPIS has usually used either the stable or relatively stable testing packages. While both MEPIS and Ubuntu aim to make Linux computing easy for those unfamiliar with Linux, Ubuntu goes for the cutting-edge, while MEPIS goes for rock-solid stability. Follow the jump to see the rest of this review.

FOLLOW-UP: How-To: Make a Multiboot Live USB Stick

In the post "How-To: Make a Multiboot Live USB Stick", there are major enough errors to fix and changes to be made that I have made this a separate follow-up post.
The hardware is the same. However, the OSs in question have changed.
The smaller change is the removal of PartedMagic from the multiboot combination. I did not want to have to deal with extended partitions, and I figure that on-the-fly creations of live CDs for people in need (to keep) would be more effective anyway.
The larger change is the removal of PCLinuxOS 2009.2. As it seems, PCLinuxOS (as well as its parent distribution, Mandriva) refuses to work on a multiboot live USB (though it will work fine as the sole live OS on a USB stick). After installing more OSs, PCLinuxOS will give an error message that looks like, "This is not a bootable floppy. [emphasis is mine] Please try again."
Basically, your USB stick is apparently now a floppy disk according to PCLinuxOS. I knew then that sticking to that OS would not work.
I searched long and hard for a good KDE-based distribution that would turn on new users and work very well, and I came upon Sabayon Linux.

The following will be a sort of mini-review of Sabayon 5 KDE, the version I installed live to the USB stick.
Sabayon is based on Gentoo Linux, which requires users to compile the source packages frequently (at least once per use). This is not for the faint of heart, but many people enjoy it for the same reason that many car enthusiasts like manual transmissions (which are slowly fading away). This used to be a defining feature in many Linux distributions but has since been basically done away with, so Gentoo has kept it to please the users and to retain the super-bleeding-edge status of the OS.
Sabayon does not require this; it is thus more like a conventional Linux distribution, but it still retains the bleeding-edge codebase of Gentoo. This means that there are a lot of new cool and heavily tested features, making for a great OS experience.
Sabayon 5 KDE comes with a plethora of amazing applications. First, unlike many KDE distributions, Sabayon comes with Firefox and OpenOffice.Org (instead of Konqueror and KOffice) by default and integrates both applications very nicely. Second, it offers a great selection of games, and it even has real game demos like those for World of Goo, and it supports games like America's Army and Wolfenstein. Finally, it is built for media centers. It has a lot of powerful applications like XBMC to manage even the most complex media centers. The final statement (about media centers) is from my reading, not from my experience (as I don't operate a PC media center).
In addition to this, Sabayon 5 KDE implements KDE 4.3 in the best way that I've seen yet. It actually comes with the Desktop folder applet out of the box so as not to confuse new users. The Plasma panel actually works stably without crashing, as do the Plasma widgets too. Finally, the other KDE applications seem to work as intended without a hitch. The whole desktop experience really looks polished and stable, something that I can't say about other implementations of KDE 4.3.
The biggest downside to Sabayon 5 KDE is the relatively demanding set of system requirements. Even the newest (non-purposefully tiny, as in TinyCore or DSLinux) Linux distributions can support computers over 8 years old without sacrificing performance or the features that make them ahead of the (non-Linux) pack. Sabayon 5 KDE doesn't have as much of an advantage, as it requires at least 512 MB of RAM and 10 GB of hard drive space (along with a decent graphics card) to be installed and run well. Furthermore, the boot time is rather long even after installation.

This resumes the talk about the multiboot live USB. Again, this must be done in a Linux system. The partitioning scheme should be two 1 GB and one 2.6 GB ext3 partitions (for the OSs) and one 3.3 GB FAT32 partition (for storage). One can do this in GParted as described in the original post.
Successively install (and test, as described in the original post) Linux Mint 7 "Gloria" Xfce and Sabayon 5 KDE into, respectively, the 1.0 GB partition and the 2.6 GB partition through UNetBootin as described in the previous post.
After these have been tested and are determined to work, download to the desktop the Fedora 11 "Leonidas" GNOME ISO image. Burn the image to a CD but do not do anything to the original image (on the desktop) otherwise. That step is crucial!
Boot into the Fedora 11 live CD, and after logging in, go to "Add/Remove Programs" and search for, check, and apply "livecd-tools" or something like that. After that is all done, open a terminal window and navigate (through commands like "cd" and "ls -l") to the folder (on the original Linux desktop) where the ISO image is.
After this navigation, type into the (still-open) terminal the command

su -c "livecd-iso-to-disk /dev/live /dev/USBDEVICENAME"

where "USBDEVICENAME" is the name of the device and partition (e.g. "sdf2"). To confirm the partition number, type into the terminal (before typing the previous command)

su -c "fdisk -l"

.
Congratulations, you have successfully made a tri-boot live USB drive with room to spare for storage!

How-To: Make a Multiboot Live USB Stick

This is something that I wanted to do for a while to show those interested what Linux is like on the fly. However, I only finished this yesterday.
The USB stick in question is an 8 GB Sandisk Cruzer Micro.
The distributions used are PCLinuxOS 2009.2 (KDE), Fedora 11 (GNOME), Linux Mint 7 (Xfce), and the latest version of PartedMagic. These are the only distributions I've successfully put on a multiboot live USB stick, so I'll only talk about how to create this step.
In terms of setup before the actual live USB creation process, a few steps must be taken. As far as I know, due to Windows only recognizing FAT and NTFS partitions, the steps I used will only work on Linux. My preferred partition editor is GParted. Also, if you don't have UNetBootin, get it beforehand. Finally, make sure that your computer has a CD-RW drive and that you have spare empty CD-R/CD-RWs.
The first distribution to add is PCLinuxOS.
If there are any existing partitions, remove and replace them with a single FAT32 primary partition covering the entire disk.
Next, download the PCLinuxOS 2009.2 KDE ISO image from the Internet and burn the image to (not on) the CD-R/CD-RW. (If, after this step, the disk is ejected, reinsert it but close any autorun dialogs.)
Next restart the computer and (if necessary, reconfigure the BIOS to) boot from the live CD (that is, the CD with the PCLinuxOS image on it).
After that is all done, go to the PCLinuxOS main menu and click on "Make Live USB". Please make sure that the correct USB stick is being written to (you can check this as root in Terminal through the command "fdisk -l" and determining which USB stick with its free space correctly corresponds to your stick, if you know what I mean).
Restart the computer and, after modifying the BIOS to boot from the USB stick, make sure that the live USB works properly.
If it does, it is time to move on. (Revert the BIOS to boot from the hard disk drive.) If not, make sure that you followed all of the steps listed here in the given order.
To prepare for the remaining distributions, in GParted, trim the primary FAT32 partition with PCLinuxOS on it until there is about 100-150 MB of free space left on that partition. Fill the remaining unallocated space with an extended partition. Finally, fill this extended partition with 2 logical FAT32 partitions of size 850 MB (each), another logical FAT32 partition of size 400 MB, and a logical FAT32 partition that takes up the remainder of the extended partition.
The second, third, and fourth distributions are Fedora, Linux Mint, and PartedMagic. Download all of these respective ISO images from the Internet, and use UNetBootin and the "Disk Image" feature to write the images to the partitions. The Fedora and Linux Mint images should go separately in each of the 850 MB partitions, while the PartedMagic image should go in the 400 MB partition. UNetBootin recognizes partitions by disk drive name and number rather than by size, so to verify which partition is which, as root in Terminal type in "fdisk -l" to know which partition to write to in UNetBootin. After each write, verify that the live USB image works properly by booting from the USB. Each time a new image is written by UNetBootin to a partition, that partition is automatically flagged as bootable.
These steps will not allow you to select from all of the distributions which one to boot from (i.e. from a giant GRUB menu list upon booting). You much change which distribution to boot from manually in GParted by modifying the "boot" flag.
If you followed all of these steps and it all works, you should be good to go! If not, please leave a comment!