Running linux

[Dusty Chalk]

Sweet -- I just nonintrusively started linux on my machine (bootable from CD Knoppix 4.0.2). Huzzah.

[devwild]

You may also wish to try the ubuntu/kubuntu live cds, they are pretty nice.

[Dusty Chalk]

I will, thanks for the suggestion.

Downside to booting from CD -- no cookies. I have to remember every password I use.

Also, haven't figured out how to play .wmv files yet. And when I tried it on my work computer, network didn't work.

I believe my next step will be a bootable partition. Home computer: 1.5G CPU, 256M mem, only upgradeable to 512M -- time to upgrade, neh? I was hoping to postpone that for a few months.

[devwild]

Downside to booting from CD -- no cookies. I have to remember every password I use.

I seem to remeber knoppix or some other live CD I used once supporting the use of a floppy or usb flash drive as your homedir so you could save bookmarks, cookies etc. Of course could do that with most any distribution after you boot.

wmv files are always a problem. VLC will play some, but far from all, and most of the players need codecs added, which you can't do off a live cd. It's like trying to play internet videos on a mac, except that quicktime doesn't work either . Thank goodness for sites like google using flash now. (Though again, many live cds don't come with flash because it is closed-source)

I dual boot ubuntu on my dell laptop, and it works nicely. Wireless even works with the ndiswrapper quite well. However, even for every day browsing I end up booting back to Windows because I get tired of things not working. It's great to have around when I need it though.

[grawk]

Now that airport extreme support is apparently working, I need to put together a live cd for my powerbook to use with my shuffle as homedir...

[Dusty Chalk]

I seem to remeber knoppix or some other live CD I used once supporting the use of a floppy or usb flash drive as your homedir so you could save bookmarks, cookies etc. Of course could do that with most any distribution after you boot.

Yeah, there's a way to save/install the disk to the hard drive...if I had the room to make a partition, which I don't -- but I have a couple hard drives, so I'm thinking, screw MS, just go linux -- it's not like I'm using my machine to do anything but:

- email

- forums

- browse -- I need to try and remember if youtube's flash thing works

- watch DVD's

- rip and burn CD's

I was going to use it to do music, but (a) that's temporarily on the backburner (I'll have another computer by the time I get to it); ( I don't expect to need to do anything complex...yet...

[amb]

My Linux server (1.7GHz P4 w/ 1GB ram and lots of SCSI disks, running SuSE Linux) has now been up continuously for over a year (373 days to be exact) and just keeps humming along. It's got UPS battery backup, and the last downtime was because I had to shut it down to install some hardware. This box isn't just idling either... it acts as my firewall, NAT and router, mail server, web server, ftp server, dhcp server, ssh server, DNS server, NIS server, file server (NFS and samba), print server, VNC server, time server, slimdevices squeezebox server, etc...

A separate SuSE Linux machine acts as my desktop. It too just runs and runs.

No blue screen of death here

[devwild]

My Linux server (1.7GHz P4 w/ 1GB ram and lots of SCSI disks, running SuSE Linux) has now been up continuously for over a year (373 days to be exact) and just keeps humming along. It's got UPS battery backup, and the last downtime was because I had to shut it down to install some hardware. This box isn't just idling either... it acts as my firewall, NAT and router, mail server, web server, ftp server, dhcp server, ssh server, DNS server, NIS server, file server (NFS and samba), print server, VNC server, time server, slimdevices squeezebox server, etc...

I'm sure you keep a good eye on things, but I just want to say this as a matter of course... uptime isn't everything. There have been critical kernel vulnerabilities in the past year which should be patched, not to mention ssh, apache, etc (though generally you only need to reboot for kernel patches, or nfs sometimes when it gets finicky). Especially in the case of a box used as a firewall and/or web server, keeping your box secure is of utmost importance, and bragging about uptime is often bragging about a box on the virge of getting hit by script kiddies.

I'm not saying that's the case with you - if you know your weaknesses, watch bugtrac, keep track of your ports... you can last a lot longer without patching. But the uptime bragging rights are a pitfall many new linux administrators fall into and eventually get bitten by.

If you really want uptime try a BSD varient....

BTW, BSODs haven't been much of an issue since Windows 98/ME. 2000 and XP only BSOD due to faulty hardware or poorly written drivers (probably 80%+ of BSODs I've seen in the past 5 years have been from bad RAM, the rest bad video cards or ATI's drivers).... and the same issues cause linux to kernel panic. Windows has it's issues, but before you start on the OS wars it's best to get the facts strait. Most of the frustrations I experience with computers of any variety these days are hardware related... and moreso dealing with the vendors as a result.

[amb]

Hi devwild, point very well taken. I am not a newbie when it comes to Unix or Linux. Worked as a Unix admin when I was in college 20 years ago, developed a lot of software under Unix and Linux, and have been using Linux since its very early days. I was a Unix kernel and internals guy in my past jobs for 15+ years, and literally lived and breathed that stuff...

Anyway, I do regularly update my machines with patches. I am also subscribed to the SuSE's security announcements list and monitor bugtraq regularly, so I am aware of what's out there. Even then, 90+% of the time, software updates do not require a reboot. It's only when the kernel itself is patched that a reboot becomes inevitable, but that's actually quite rare, and in most cases the vulnerabilities in the kernel were exploitable only by local, logged in users (which is a non-issue for my machine).

As for Windows XP, I have it on my Toshiba laptop. I also have a Linux partition on the same laptop. Windows has hard frozen on me on many occasions but Linux never does, so it isn't likely to be a hardware problem. I also noticed that XP doesn't multitask very well... streaming music from the slimserver to my squeezebox sometimes glitches and hiccups when running under windows, but never on Linux.

Kernel panic? I haven't seen one on any of my Linux machines in a few years...

[devwild]

Hi devwild, point very well taken. I am not a newbie when it comes to Unix or Linux.

Indeed, I had a feeling that might be the case, that's why I clarified in my first post. It was just a warning for others because that is a big problem in the budding areas of the linux community.

In general Windows tends to be more finicky about drivers, because of its loose and bloated APIs that have been built upon for so many years, especially when it comes to video and audio (as computer-as-source fans and gamers are well aware of). It also has many more poor drivers written for it by third party companies, big and small (Sony VAIOs are a great example). This leads to far more instability problems. I personally place the blame as much on the moron developers as I do on Microsoft though. Outsourcing takes its toll too...

Modern laptops for example often have cheap and/or bloated wireless, LAN, and USB drivers, where large chunks run in user-land and spin CPU cycles at high priority, try to do more in software to save 10 minutes of battery life, etc. The linux drivers however are kernel modules that just do what they need to do to function properly, and thus tend to be more stable and work much smoother with the rest of the system. Linux in general also doesn't lock on IO and hardware requests like the NT kernel still does, which makes it feel smoother. And if it does bog down, runaways on linux are usually easier to kill (-9) . You might notice that Windows Server 2003 with its default process handling setting is much less prone to locking up than Windows XP as well, thought certainly still not perfect.

Linux tends to have problems as well as soon as you get into third party, corporate developed drivers. Like I said above, my dell laptop dual boots Ubuntu. When messing around with the ATI driver, which refuses to accept my screen's modeline, manually or automatically, the driver would screw up my framebuffer so bad that unloading the module and restarting X by hand with the open source driver didn't even help, and I had to reboot many, many times. Even pro hardware designed to run on linux has problems because the developers don't, or can't account for all the oddities that crop up in modern distributions.

I enjoy working with *nix varieties, and I really wish my current job allowed me more excuses to manage *nix servers. I replaced my desktop with a G5 at home because I wanted unix tools around without the pains of trying to keep linux-as-a-desktop up to speed all the time for my needs. However I have spent much more of my time administering windows boxes, and as a result, I've built up habits that lead to me having far fewer problems with Windows than most people. I generally only reboot my XP laptop and windows server based HTPC/file server for major security patches (I hybernate my laptop the rest of the time, including for booting into linux). I don't have problems with spyware or viruses, and I have the same hardware problems (usually a hard drive failure), I have with any other machine.

It's amazing how that works isn't it.

One last note on uptimes, if someone here ever gets a job administering a *nix server of any type that provides critical services:

If you schedule a downtime, and make any changes, manually or through patches, that modify your startup scripts, swallow your uptime pride and reboot the box. Check that *everything* runs properly and that your services all start with the proper configurations. It is so much better to reboot during the downtime than to have your users scream at you months down the road when their web server or the like isn't working right because you reboot for some other reason.

You'd be amazed how minor changes can cascade into nothing working quite right, even if you were 100% sure everything would be fine.

[Dusty Chalk]

Thanks for all the information all, especially devwild. I'm no stranger to unix, I don't have as much experience as you, but probably more than the average bear. Which, I think, makes me exactly the target market for your comments.

[devwild]

Which, I think, makes me exactly the target market for your comments.

Me? have a target? hell, I'm just prone to rambling

I do enjoy playing with this stuff though. I was one of the handful of people that actually bought BeOS (3, free upgrade to 4), and actually used it a fair amount.

[Dusty Chalk]

Me? have a target? hell, I'm just prone to rambling

I do enjoy playing with this stuff though. I was one of the handful of people that actually bought BeOS (3, free upgrade to 4), and actually used it a fair amount.

And I'm one of the trainload of people who actually knows what BeOS is.

By "target", I mean "target audience", not "bull's eye".