Linux is trying to kill me. Really.

bigseb · 27 Mar 2010

Prisoner said:

For the past half a year, I've been infrequently been trying to install multiple "flavors" of Linux.

First try was on my XP system. Tried installing Ubuntu, had an ISO straight from the site and settings were perfect for my system. Burned it to a CD at optimal settings, slowest speed possible. Booted from the CD, tried it out with the Live CD or whatever it's called, and loved it. I wanted it on my hard drive, right then and there, until I tried some of the included programs and found they were all missing... Got rid of the disc, didn't try again.

Second Try, about a month later, I got Fedora. Burned to disc and used a USB creator (so if the CD was messing it up, I had a USB to try as well). Tried installing, Partition Manager decided to go commando on my XP partition. Wiped the hard drive, put XP back on, then upgraded to 7 shortly after. It took me approx. 5 days to get everything back in working order, and it didn't help that I was missing drivers that I couldn't find online. Had to do a hunt all over the place to get them back. So by this time, my not-so computer inclined self was very tired of Ubuntu.

Third Try, about 5 hours ago, I heard about Wubi. Tried it, seemed awesome. Installed the Ubuntu Netbook Remix. Installed perfectly, no troubles at all. Partition Manager actually worked on this one! Woo! Then it rebooted. For 10 minutes, the boot screen did nothing but show error messages that I could not understand at all. Finally, it pulled up the login screen, I logged in, and started doing the basic setup. Change the clock, set up weather, get my apps running, etc, etc. It told me that my hard drive is failing (odd, as my hard drive was running Ubuntu and is now running 7). I tried getting some help, it told me that the help files are unavailable. It didn't let me do anything else. So I tried rebooting, and it loaded to the boot screen, did the same 10 minute routine, showed the login screen, and then promptly went away before I could do anything, and gave me a recovery console.

Tried installing the Desktop version, same thing.

Linux hates me. At least it didn't delete Windows this time. I know some of this is probably user error, but still. Come on. An automated installer should do the trick.
(is about to try again)

Pity... I have had nothing but joy with Linux.

loaba · 27 Mar 2010

I'm running Ubuntu on an older PATA drive, and with the exception of a nasty GRUB infestation, I'm happy with the current living arraignments. I will be happier still when I can figure out how to gain access to the windows disks from within Ubuntu.

KCINREBAK · 28 Mar 2010

Im currently running Linux ultimate edition 2.04 intsalled over 2 gb of updates after full install dual boot with windows 7 aside. Ive had no problems so far. At school on my project computer I am running fedora 11 and ubuntu 9.10. Basically I have reformatted my drive so many times and installed those flavors that my drive now fails and has bad sectors lol. but yeah i highly recommend Linux Ultimate edition or even linux mint.

CommonTater · 28 Mar 2010

Prisoner said:

For the past half a year, I've been infrequently been trying to install multiple "flavors" of Linux.

I'm in about the same boat. I keep telling myself to get off the bloated commercial distros of Windows and get onto something I can customize to no end. I've probably tried just about every version of Ubuntu, strayed off into Mandrake even BSD for a while... In the end it's always the same problem... If you know linux, linux is easy, if you don't know it you're SOL for getting any good advice or documentation. That's been the problem all along... it might be the best OS on the planet but when it comes to dealing with problems you're left out to dry.

So, everytime, I end up bouncing off Linux and heading back to Windows, more or less with my tail between my legs thanks mostly to the positively lousy documentation.

stevieray · 28 Mar 2010

CommonTater said:

So, everytime, I end up bouncing off Linux and heading back to Windows, more or less with my tail between my legs thanks mostly to the positively lousy documentation.

That matches my (rather limited) experience with Linux. I had what could have been a simple problem with wireless connectivity, but my questions at Fedora forums went mostly unanswered. Its like the Linux community wants two mutually exclusive things -- Linux to become popular, but they want to keep their own hard-won knowledge secret.

I don't get it. At forums like this place people go out of their way to help, and explain the reasons why things work or not.

Kari · 28 Mar 2010

If you are interested in Linux but find it difficult to setup and use, try gOS (Good OS). It is a complete Lixux distro with the easiest possible setup. It is made for users with no Linux experience. Free download and more information: Good OS - gOS and Cloud operating systems.

Improving the Linux user experience...

Since our debut in 2007, gOS has been praised for being the most beautiful and easiest to use Linux operating system on the market. Now with our third and best version of gOS, we have carried on our effort to create a Linux for the rest of us.

Here's mine, running on VirtualBox:

Linux is trying to kill me. Really.-gos_1.png

Kari

Prisoner · 28 Mar 2010

Thanks Kari, I'll try that, I think. :)

beauparc · 28 Mar 2010

I just burned a Ubuntu 9.10 disk, stuck it in the drive, rebooted, told it what disk to install on, said "yes" to GRUB (what was Grub?) and twenty minutes later the machine rebooted giving me the option of running Win7, Vista or Ubuntu

I was astonished at how easy it was. Idiots luck I would guess

CommonTater · 28 Mar 2010

stevieray said:

CommonTater said:

So, everytime, I end up bouncing off Linux and heading back to Windows, more or less with my tail between my legs thanks mostly to the positively lousy documentation.

That matches my (rather limited) experience with Linux. I had what could have been a simple problem with wireless connectivity, but my questions at Fedora forums went mostly unanswered. Its like the Linux community wants two mutually exclusive things -- Linux to become popular, but they want to keep their own hard-won knowledge secret.

I don't get it. At forums like this place people go out of their way to help, and explain the reasons why things work or not.

Sometimes I think the Linux crew has gotten lost in the minutia.

My experience on various linux forums is the same as yours StevieRay, it's either "What, You don't even know how to do that?" or "It's too complex to explain here..." and often as not I walk away from it thinking: "Yep, they didn't know the answer either."

One of the biggest problems with "Open Source" is documentation... so many cooks in the soup the recipe is lost. "Gee.. I think I know someone who might know one of the guys who has an answer for that..." isn't good enough if they want Linux to be anything but a geek's playtoy... Manpages don't cut it when you don't know what command to ask about.

Linux desperately needs comprehensive help files... but then again, so does Windows.

zzz2496 · 28 Mar 2010

For me personally, OpenSuSE was the joy of my computing life (either for work purposes nor for home server). I got OpenSuSE running in several IBM servers serving for several divisions in my client's company with uptime that made ANY of my windows box (client nor server) put to shame (the last one was 400++ days, had to shut down to maintain the RAID volume, I might have to consider storage systems). At home, it's a developer rig for my work, running side by side with Windows 7 Ultimate through VirtualBox (I dedicated one 24" monitor for it). After all that, I still have another box of OpenSuSE running as a "File Server", this is a server that works like "Windows Home Server" system and then some... UPnP Media server, SAMBA Server, (s)FTP server, HTTP server, SSH + Webmin for remote management, all that serving 8 TB storage pool (in total, serving several iSCSI volumes, several SMB shares, FTP instances and web dav... had to segment the pool so that windows can "see" the volume on the iSCSI) and growing~~~

At times, I can't really comprehend my Microsoft promotes RDC 9 years ago while almost every aspect of Linux/UNIX can be managed from a console (with blazing speeds too, I guess that's what pushed MS to create PowerShell...). For those who struggles with Linux, I can only suggest that you change your mindset from being a "user" to "hacker" (not cracker, that's the dark side of hacking). Get creative, read the Linux project's history, read GNOME project's history, KDE's history, and many large projects out there. By then you might be able to grasp just a tiny glimpse of that sea of ideas called "GNU Linux".

Many of problems I find in using Linux is because I'm using "Windows" mindset, like "in windows, I need to do this, and that and that", it might work that way in Linux, it might not... By the time you "get it", your horizon of computing will expand greatly (or explode might be the right word for this). It's like when I was learning about IBM PowerVM, it was a whole new world for me (coming from managing/supporting hundreds Windows clients/servers for almost 8 years professionally). Thank god I've got my Linux "point of view" (XEN installations in OpenSuSE and VMware ESX server instances) with me, so the PowerVM technology wasn't too foreign to me.

In Windows, everything is "layered" and "compartmentalized". In Linux/UNIX everything is "linear". Everything is just there, it's up to you to grab and use it. An example, if you want to enable HTTP server, go to your package manager, install "apache", set several system variables so that it will start up upon boot up and you're done (one command in my collection of commands, six letters long). In windows, install the IIS, wait for it to install... wait for it... waiiiiittt for it... then when done, you need to check in services, make sure it's there, and configure appropriately, go to IIS management snap in to configure/add sites/etc, that's opening close to a dozen windows, clicking to many many buttons/checkboxes/etc, waiting for the system to respond to your clicks, etc... that's HARD and not to mention needs a long time. In Linux, type in some commands, edit some files, save the files, restart the daemon (service in windows language), recheck the daemon so that it runs the way you want. If not, edit some more config files, restart the daemon... MUCH EASIER.

Another example, in Windows we have UAC sandbox (weird tech if you ask me, slows things down most of the time, not even close to USER land in Linux). Every user in Windows (depending in your group) might have one or two "roles", if you have two, one is "Administrative role" and one "User role", if you have only one, then most likely it's "User role" only. In Linux your role is defined by your user group, and everyone other than "root" user is a regular user, it's very easy to understand if you used multi-user OS (UNIX/Windows NT Server systems). If you need administrative privilege, escalate your privilege by using "su" in Linux (or it's variants in GUI mode). "su" has more or less the same effect as "run-as" under Windows, but I personally feel that "run-as" is "tacked on" so that Windows can have the same "feel" as a true multi-user operating systems. It's mind boggling complicated and annoying none the less. Another example, in Windows we have "Device manager" (need to go into several layers of menus/UAC prompts/annoyingly weird messages), in Linux/UNIX we have "/dev", that's your device list right there, just type in "cd /dev" as "root", that's your devices right there... in linear fashion. If you need a software for your soundcard for example, in windows you'll be doing a driver and application installs. In Linux, you just look for your soundcard's software package (most of the time in distro repo, the driver is built in the kernel most of the time), check one checkbox, let the package manager resolve the dependencies, then sit and wait. 99.999% by the time the package manager finishes, all you need to do is either restart your computer or the device just works...

As for OP, I truly hope you find your "holy grail" in Linux. Linux is fun, it brought back many of my DOS days memories (playing with IRQ, DMA, many autoexec.bat/config.sys file versions with a custom boot menu to boot up with). Everything in Linux is always within reach (as long as you are "root", which you don't need to use unless you have to change something that's important in the system). For a production system, it's close to unbreakable. For a "hacking" station, it provides almost limitless hacking experience, there's so much to see, so much to understand, so much to try, so much to change (...and break it in the process

). It's a joy...

zzz2496