Ubuntu 6.06 LTS

Sencer · 2006-08-05 14:15:05

net-carver wrote:

XP and Ubuntu dual boot with grub. Is this viable now? Anyone had any trouble with the install and dual booting?

It works. One thing you have to look out for: Do not delete or add partitions “in front of” your windows partition, or else Windows might refuse to boot and complain with nonsense “hal” something errors. However if it does happen, it can be easily fixed by adjusting a line in boot.ini on your windows partition (if you use NTFS as your partition types, then you should have a windows resuce/boot-cd available, because Linux will usually only mount ntfs as read-only).
Given that Ubuntu doesn’t care where it lives, you can safely add all linux partitions on the extended/logical partition.

How easy is it to get a local AMP package installed? I have the impression (maybe wrong) that Apache on a debian base can be a bit tricky to configure – is that really the case?

No, it’s the same as everything on debian-based system, the package manager will take care of just about everything – you simply choose the packages.
Though you probably do want to make sure afterwards that it is configured in a way to your liking (for example, do you want to bind apache+mysql only to localhost, or should they be available from the outside etc.). No difference in that respect to other (operating) systems.

Security I’ve been used to running a personal firewall and virus checker on XP so wondering about recommendations about these products too.

There is firestarter available as a package (easy enough to use), but you do not need it, because on a properly configured system there are no ports open that you do not want to be open. Ubuntu ships with no ports open (i.e. no software listening on any ports). Hence no gain by a firewall.
There is antivir for linux, and there is clamav for mailservers – however both of them are usually used to clean windows-viruses (either when functioning as a mailserver with windows clients, or when mounting windows partitions). Here is an article that talks about it Virus-Scanners & Linux:
Linux Virus Solutions in Search of a Problem

Can’t help you with the editor. The regular Text-editor “gedit” has plenty of features so that for casual to medium editing/programming you won’t miss anything. For people that need more control & features there’s always vim or emacs…

Last edited by Sencer (2006-08-05 14:15:34)

hcgtv · 2006-08-05 14:39:14

net-carver,

Sencer pretty much covered the topics, I’ll just briefly add my thoughts:

1. Grub recognized my Windows XP partition and added it as a menu option, it’s working great.

2. There’s an admin menu option to add packages. I would go with the latest: Apache2, MySQL 5.x and PHP 5 – most Open Source apps are running fine with this config, Textpattern included.

3. Gedit works just fine, it even has syntax highlighting.

4. Linux in general is more secure out of the box than Windows, very tightly wrapped. From a command line run nmap on localhost to see what ports are open, if any.

The Ubuntu forums are a wealth of info, as is their Wiki. I hung out on the forums for a few days before I took the plunge, there’s always gotchas, but in Ubuntu’s case, I didn’t read of any.

net-carver · 2006-08-06 15:24:06

Sencer, Bert

thanks for getting back to me on this one, some useful pointers in there. I’m looking forward to giving it a shot after a full backup.

Robert · 2006-08-06 17:21:57

I tinkered with Breezy Badger, but my sound card (Creative SoundBlaster X-Fi) is not supported under Linux. Creative claims a closed source driver will be available, probably for a fee, early in 2007. Other than that I had no problems. Although it did take me a few minutes to get my modem up and running. Yes, that’s right I still use dial up.

net-carver · 2006-08-08 03:59:41

Bert, Sencer,

I’m now running with Dapper – and very happy with it. I actually think the install is easier than a Win 9x — can’t compare with XP though as that was pre-installed on my hardware. I can even use power management on the laptop now (something that XP failed to do!)

Gradually moving apps/data over now.

Thanks once again!

NyteOwl · 2006-08-08 21:55:03

Hmm I tried the Ubuntu Live CD on my Thinkpad and it totally bombed out. I’ll try a different one but so far nada.

hcgtv · 2006-08-08 22:27:09

NyteOwl,

Maybe the ISO was bad?

Check out this Ubuntu Wiki page for more info. I know many users have Ubuntu running fine on their Thinkpads from what I’ve read on their forums.

net-carver,

Glad to hear things are going good. The install is actually easier and faster than Windows XP, from my past experiences.

Sencer · 2006-08-08 22:34:12

NyteOwl wrote:

Hmm I tried the Ubuntu Live CD on my Thinkpad and it totally bombed out. I’ll try a different one but so far nada.

It’s interesting, I’ve heard plenty of reports from thinkpad users and it seems to be divided evenly between “almost everything works” and “didn’t boot/didn’t run/didn’t work at all”. I guss it must depend on the specific model and hardware. Here is a positive report from a thinkpad user:
http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/007148.html

net-carver · 2006-08-12 17:43:45

A little more feedback on my journey into linux courtesy of Ubuntu…

After suitable backups being taken and a think through how the hard-drive was to be configured, the initial installation itself was a breeze. The ubuntu disk partitioner is very good and grub installation was spot-on, giving me a dual booting Aspire on the first attempt. Hardware worked, even the power management — something that XP failed to do on this machine.

My initial problem came with a twenty second timeout in the DNS lookups. That’s a long time to wait before a web client even starts it’s conversation with the server. Turns out that there is an IPV6 stack installed by default, that’s ok if you have an IPV6 router and service provider but if you haven’t it can cause some serious delays as the DNS queries are resolved on that stack before it tries the older v4 stack, hence the delay in my setup. After some false starts, google finally turned up the solution. Editing /etc/modprobe.d/aliases, I change the line that reads alias net-pf-10 ipv6 to alias net-pf-10 off ipv6 and a quick reboot fixed the problem.

There were some other hurdles to get over with the differences between rights/permissions between XP and linux but that hasn’t taken long.

Package management is very good but slow connection speeds to some of the repositories, even on DSL, made for some looooong downloads — on the other hand, some repos seemed to fly.

My biggest hurdles were …

20 second IPV6 stack timeout on every DNS query.
Slow connection speeds to the repositories.
not knowing about the multiverse (and other) repositories!
getting apache running properly with mod_rewrite. Mark Stone covers the needed bits in his posts in this thread but I found the critical one on my setup was having the “AllowOverride All” in the virtual hosts <directory> section, the other commented out lines at the top of the TxP .htaccess were not needed after I fixed that.
finding suitable replacements for some XP apps (editor, svn client, merge tool). Specifically, the install of Sun’s JVM so that I could get JEdit running — argh, it took some time crawling through forum posts suggested by google to find out how to do it.

Most of the problems I have encountered are partly due to my wanting to get a PHP dev environment working for TxP plugin work — otherwise a straight install would have covered almost all of what I wanted.

maniqui · 2006-09-29 18:35:49

Well… here I am, running Ubuntu 6.06!
I used to have 4.9 and 5.10, but never really switched to them.
Now, it’s time to make a step fordward and try to learn many new things.

I want to learn:

how to program in PHP
things about MySQL
install and configure an Apache server
develope and work offline with TxP and then upload what I have done.
learn how to test svn versions of TxP and have it up-to-date
test new scripts offline

My idea is to learn programming in PHP/MySQL by reading a manual and by looking at how Textpattern has been made.
Do you think it’s a good way to learn that language?

I’m very anxious to start learning this things and many others too.
I would appreciate your advices.

hcgtv · 2006-09-29 20:54:03

maniqui, you’re going about it in a good way, this will give you more of an under-the-hood feel than what you may experience on a Windows box.

First begin by getting your environment in order, Apache, MySQL and PHP.
When you feel good, install Textpattern on the local server and start playing around.
Then try out the different text editors, gedit is nice and does syntax highlighting but it’s just one of many.

As a first tip, give your machine a static ip and a hostname. This way from your internal network, you can test your sites from other machines by adding the ip and hostname to their hosts file.

Use an ip out of the DHCP range, so if your router uses DHCP addresses of 192.168.1.100, use something like 192.168.1.20 for your machine.
Pick a domain name you like and name each machine in your network, like ubuntu.maniqui.com. Don’t worry if it’s not a valid domain name, or if it’s already being used, it’s your own network. You should see the fun you can have by playing with someone’s hosts file and putting up a fake CNN page on your server :)

And remember, Google is your friend ;)

maniqui · 2006-10-05 19:45:45

hi hcgtv. I know you were going to answer me! thanks, man!

thanks for your tips. I haven’t done anything productive (like installing Apache, MySQL and PHP) yet! :D

I just have reinstalled Ubuntu (I’m a bit obsesive with tuning and tweaking the system and that’s a big distraction that keep me away from starting to learn the things I should start to learn… grrrrr… it’s hard to fight against myself).

I didn’t get the tip of using an ip out of the range…
My wi-fi network is actually configured this way:

Router IP: 10.0.0.1
Subnet mask: 255.255.255.0
My machine IP: 10.0.0.133

But well… I will leave that for future, because I’m still in “tuning system mode”…

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#25 2006-08-05 14:15:05

Re: Ubuntu 6.06 LTS

#26 2006-08-05 14:39:14

Re: Ubuntu 6.06 LTS

#27 2006-08-06 15:24:06

Re: Ubuntu 6.06 LTS

#28 2006-08-06 17:21:57

Re: Ubuntu 6.06 LTS

#29 2006-08-08 03:59:41

Re: Ubuntu 6.06 LTS

#30 2006-08-08 21:55:03

Re: Ubuntu 6.06 LTS

#31 2006-08-08 22:27:09

Re: Ubuntu 6.06 LTS

#32 2006-08-08 22:34:12

Re: Ubuntu 6.06 LTS

#33 2006-08-12 17:43:45

Re: Ubuntu 6.06 LTS

#34 2006-09-29 18:35:49

Re: Ubuntu 6.06 LTS

#35 2006-09-29 20:54:03

Re: Ubuntu 6.06 LTS

#36 2006-10-05 19:45:45

Re: Ubuntu 6.06 LTS

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