Category: Linux

OK, well, I’ve got Ubuntu working now. Here’s a few notes, in case they’re helpful to anyone else.

My machine is configured with one SATA drive and one older IDE drive. The SATA drive is my main drive, with Windows XP installed on it. I put Ubuntu on the IDE drive. The install went smoothly, but to get into Ubuntu, I had to go into my BIOS and change it so I’m now booting from the IDE drive rather than the SATA. The IDE drive now has GRUB on it, so that allows me to get into either Ubuntu or XP. And I customized GRUB to default to XP using Startup Manager, which I installed from the Add/Remove application, which is quite nice.

I’ve got an ATI video card, which worked fine by default, but of course I had to mess with it. I installed an ATI driver, then got the eye candy working using the method described here. It seems to be working OK.

I also installed a couple of other things that are pretty much necessary: The “Ubuntu Restricted Extras” package has the stuff you need to play MP3s and DVDs. And, for some reason, emacs isn’t installed by default, so you have to pull that down.

I decided to spend a little time this week playing around with Ubuntu 7.10. At work, I installed it on two old Dell Latitude notebooks that we had lying around. They’re pretty pathetic machines at this point. They’ve both got just 256MB of RAM, which is the minimum you need to get Ubuntu up and running. And, at that level, you really can’t run the graphical installer. Rather, you need to run the text installer from the “alternate” install CD. Once I figured that out, though, the installs went pretty smoothly. My plan is to use these laptops for some device configuration and network troubleshooting when we move to our new office. The one thing these laptops have that our new ones don’t have is a 9-pin serial port, which is pretty helpful for doing initial router configuration and stuff like that. And Linux is usually a bit better for general network troubleshooting than Windows.

Just for yuks, I’m now trying to install Ubuntu on my desktop XP machine, on a second drive. I’m hoping that I’ll be able to dual-boot cleanly, though I’ve sometimes had problems with that in the past, with other distros. I guess we’ll see how it works out.

Up until recently, I’d been kind of skeptical about Ubuntu. There are certainly a lot of Ubuntu fans out there, but I really didn’t think I needed to bother playing around with yet another distro. In the past, I’ve used Red Hat, Corel, Fedora, and probably three or four other distros, including some fairly oddball ones. I’m pretty fond of Red Hat and Fedora, mostly just because I’ve got the most experience with them. And I kind of liked the user experience on Corel Linux, but of course that got dropped after just one or two versions. Ubuntu definitely looks like a nice, user-friendly package. I’m looking forward to playing around with it.

Well, while I’ve been typing this post up, the install finished, and I rebooted the machine. It went straight into Windows XP, so I guess I need to do some research on the whole bootloader thing.

I’m still working on setting up a NAS server for our new Pennsylvania office. I gave up on OpenFiler in favor of FreeNAS today. There’s nothing wrong with OpenFiler, per se, but it just wasn’t looking like it would work well for what I needed. FreeNAS looks just about perfect, though. I was a little reticent about using it, at first, since it’s based on BSD rather than Linux, and I’m just not that well-versed in BSD. It doesn’t seem like you need to know much about the underlying OS, though.

I’m setting up a new Linux server at work to run ASSP, a spam-filtering SMTP proxy. This’ll be my third ASSP server. On the first, I used Fedora 1 (or maybe 2). On the second, the one that’s currently live, I’m using Fedora 4. The new server will be running Fedora Core 6. The reason I keep building new servers for ASSP is largely that I don’t have any budget to go out and actually buy a server for this, so I just keep recycling old workstations into servers, and, eventually, they fall apart. Or our mail volume increases to the point where the old server can’t handle it. Either way, it forces me to keep somewhat up-to-date with Linux.

The new wrinkle in Fedora 6 is SELinux. I hit one SELinux-related snag today that got me browsing around a bit for SELinux info. I stumbled upon Dan Walsh’s LiveJournal page, which turns out to be pretty helpful.

I’m wondering if I should keep using Fedora for this. On the one hand, it’s free and I’m pretty familiar with the basics of the distribution, since a lot of stuff in there goes back to the old Red Hat distributions, which I’ve been using on and off since, I think, Red Hat 5.2, in 1998. On the other hand, it’s not terribly stable. It’s on something like a six-month release cycle, and the legacy support for old releases is a bit questionable at this point. See “Why Fedora Matters” for some thoughts on the subject.

Something like CentOS might be better for a production server like this. It’s based off RHEL, and as such, ought to be a lot more stable that Fedora. I did download CentOS 4.4, and tried to get it working in a virtual machine to try it out, but I had some problems, and just gave up for now.

ASSP, by the way, is a wonderful spam-filtering solution that doesn’t seem to get nearly enough recognition. I’ve followed it through a few releases, and watched as it has changed hands from one developer to another. It’s a pretty good example of an open source project that works well. The original developer stopped working on it a while ago, but other folks have picked it up and added stuff to it where it’s been needed. At this point, it’s a fairly stable, and very configurable, spam filter, probably comparable with serious commercial software.

Hey. I’m posting this from Red Hat 8. Okay, not a real big deal, but I installed it, and it works. And it seems to support most of my hardware. I haven’t tried everything, but the obvious stuff works — mouse, videocard, sound card, etc… Thus far, the only thing useful I’ve done is installed MP3 support and downloaded a Grey Eye Glances song from EMusic.

I spent some time today trying to get Red Hat 8 working on my laptop. It works fine, but I couldn’t get it to recognize my wireless card properly. Oh well. Also, I don’t like the way the interface looks on my wimpy 800×600 display. Oh, and there seem to be a number of bugs in various things. I probably could get it all running well, given enough time, but I’m getting lazy in my old age, so I wiped it out. I may try Madrake 9 on the laptop next. I’m curious. It sounds like a lot of people are using Mandrake now. I can’t do any Linux stuff on my desktop right now, since I’m just about out of room on my hard drive. Maybe I’ll get a new one and set something up next weekend.