Converting from Windows to Linux

[Ledgem]

Originally Posted by Jinto Lin

Though you said you use a 3rd party PATA device. Maybe it is a good idea, to plug out at least the drive, that is on that 3rd party PATA device, while setting up GRUB. Once GRUB is installed, it should be safe to replug it. (Afaik... which means, it is just what I think is probably the reason, it is worth a try).

Now that's an interesting idea, and a relatively quick one - I might be able to try that this weekend. Note that whether a drive is plugged into the card or not, the extended BIOS runs as long as the card is in my system. For the GRUB install, should I remove the card entirely, or just the attached drive?

I'm also curious as to where else GRUB would be installing. With the exception of my fifth hard drive, every other drive is NTFS. I can specify where to install GRUB (root partition, boot partition, MBR) and I suppose that it's trying to install to the MBR, but somehow it's messing up. Should I just tell it to install to the boot partition instead? (Although then I'd have to deal with chaining it to the Windows boot loader...)

Originally Posted by tritoch

Is Ubuntu or Xubuntu any good? I've been a Windows user since I was in 3rd grade [in 2nd grade, I had DOS and had to locate files around just to play doom]

I'd recommend Kubuntu, personally. In Linux, there are two primary user interfaces: KDE (K Desktop Environment) and GNOME. Ubuntu defaults to GNOME. Your impression of it was similar to mine: it feels very Mac-like; except that it lacks the polish, at least before you modify it. If you have GNOME installed, you can still change to KDE; actually, you can also have both, and then you can choose which one to log into. It's a bit weird, though; each interface installs its own default programs (and I don't believe you can use them between the two). If you install both, it does make the menus a little messy - at least until you clean them out.

KDE felt flashier than GNOME when I used it two years ago. It also felt much more Windows-like, only a bit flashier. I liked it a lot better. If you want to make your Mac friends jealous, you should also check out the Beryl project. It's something that adds on to GNOME or KDE, from my understanding, and gives the GUI a lot more visual effects. I don't know how complicated it is to set up, but once I get running on Linux it'll be one of the first non-essential modifications I make.

[Epyon9283]

Originally Posted by Syaoran

How did Gentoo evolve lately?

I haven't used that distro for months now after two hard disks died and both were running Gentoo...

It's probably just a coincidence, but I just can't ignore the fact they were both running Gentoo... And one being the backup system got me completely scared of using that distro again. I should blame Maxtor for it I guess... it's just ... guess you understand it.

I just ditched Gentoo yesterday. Got fed up with waiting for stuff to compile. My decision to download another distro came right after an emerge -uDav world where half the stuff it tried to update couldn't even compile. The quality of the packages has gone down lately IMO. Also a couple of high profile developers left Gentoo recently.

[SeijiSensei]

Originally Posted by Ledgem

It's a bit weird, though; each interface installs its own default programs (and I don't believe you can use them between the two).

That's not really true nowadays. I'm a Fedora+KDE guy, but GNOME programs run just fine when I need them. In the past loading a GNOME app from KDE would require that lots of additional libraries be loaded as well. That seems less true nowadays as both projects are adopting some of the standards developed at freedesktop.org.

Originally Posted by Epyon9283

I just ditched Gentoo yesterday.

Frankly, I never understood the appeal of Gentoo. I suppose compiling everything from scratch might squeeze an extra few percent of performance out of some applications on some hardware, but nothing I use requires that sort of tuning. It's just much easier and more efficient for me to download binaries from repositories for most things. I only ever compile now when some pre-compiled binary doesn't include a component I need. For me lately, that's only been Livna's versions of mplayer which, for some reason, don't include support for KDE's arts sound server. Otherwise I just let yum manage my RPM'd packages.

[Epyon9283]

Yuck arts. I was happy when you could finally compile knotify without arts and still get other notifications.

[Jinto]

Originally Posted by Ledgem

Now that's an interesting idea, and a relatively quick one - I might be able to try that this weekend. Note that whether a drive is plugged into the card or not, the extended BIOS runs as long as the card is in my system. For the GRUB install, should I remove the card entirely, or just the attached drive?

Removing drive should be enough.

Originally Posted by Ledgem

I'm also curious as to where else GRUB would be installing. With the exception of my fifth hard drive, every other drive is NTFS. I can specify where to install GRUB (root partition, boot partition, MBR) and I suppose that it's trying to install to the MBR, but somehow it's messing up. Should I just tell it to install to the boot partition instead? (Although then I'd have to deal with chaining it to the Windows boot loader...)

Hm, at least my GRUB won't work on NTFS. I suppose you might need to make a small partition with a more Linux friendly fs, and locate your GRUB stages and kernel image files there. Once the kernel is loaded, Linux shoud work on NTFS (though I would not recommend its use on NTFS. Though I might just be biased, actually I never heard of someone, who is having problems with it, yet you can read very often that NTFS support (at least writing to the fs) is kinda like only beta stage supported).

[Ledgem]

Originally Posted by Jinto Lin

Your problem is, that GRUBs mbr-part is correctly installed, but the chained non-mbr part is wrongly addressed. I hope you can boot with a Linux LiveCD, so we achieve a little more information on the matter:

First I am interested in GRUB's awareness of the system when it is booted up. Therefore you have to go in the folder where grub is installed (usually /boot/grub or something similar). There you type the command "grub", which brings you to the grub command line, then type "find /vmlinuz". The output should be something like "(hdX,Y)".

I haven't had a chance to do the LiveCD deal yet, but I did have a thought... I can access the Linux HD partitions from Windows thanks to the driver that SeijiSensei linked to. I have found a GRUB directory in there (there may even be others, since I did try to install GRUB to the boot partition as well as the root partition). I found a file that had some device names in it, but didn't do too much snooping around. If you know what the file is called that would contain the information you're looking for, I can get that for you easily, through Windows.

[Jinto]

What I need to know is actually not stored in a file. I need to know where the kernel image can be found at start up (not when the system is completely booted). Or if it can be found at all. Unfortunately you cannot easily get this information, since grub doesn't load stage2. Thatswhy, I was thinking, removing this single drive, would be the next best step. The files located in the grub directory, do not provide the information we need to solve your problem. If they did, grub would work at startup

[Loniat]

I would advise against using that Windows driver to actually write on a Linux partition. I used it some time ago and got corruption problems in one of my partitions. Perhaps is better and more stable now, but take care when using it not to have an unpleasant surprise.

[felix]

...also writing on windwos NTFS partitions from linux is also going to lead to catastrofic failure.
Reading should be Ok

[SeijiSensei]

The original kernel-based drivers were unable to write properly to an NTFS partition, but that doesn't seem true any longer if you use the NTFS-3G driver.

Free distros can't redistribute the 3G driver because it runs afoul of Microsoft's intellectual property. I know they're available for Fedora from the LIvna repository; my guess is that they're also available for other distros like Ubuntu from the usual sources of "non-free" software.

[Syaoran]

I use NTFS-3G on a Truecrypt volume. So far I've never had any problem with it ^^.
It's just slower, but I'm pretty sure it's due to the encryption and not NTFS3G

[Loniat]

I can also vouch for ntfs-3g, but not for ext2 IFS for windows (maybe it is better now, who knows?)

[Ledgem]

From what I've read, NTFS support is now to the point where there's no threat of corruption when reading or writing; writing support just takes more processor usage than if you were using Windows, or if you were writing to a native Linux partition. I know that two years ago, NTFS support was limited to reading. You could write, but it wasn't recommended and you risked corruption. Actually, just now I did come across one relatively recent forum post stating that the user experienced corruption of single files randomly.

I'll keep the Windows ext2 support warning in mind. I can imagine how it could mess things up (it doesn't observe permissions, or something of that sort). I did a quick google check and I don't see anything about it causing corruption.

The only reason I really wanted to be able to share data between both operating systems was to be able to keep my email updated; I plan to use Opera on Linux as well, and I use Opera for my email. Opera users have reported that the files are all the same, so simply moving the folders around is doable. Alternately, I could set up a FAT32 partition and redirect both operating system's Operas to make use of that directory, which would then always be updated. That's a good solution if you find yourself changing operating systems frequently. I don't like the idea of FAT32 too much, though, and hopefully I'll just be sticking with Linux for the good majority of the time and thus a quick copy of my mail folder every now and then wouldn't be a huge issue. (The email dealings can make use of reading support for both operating systems, so the threat of writing corruption isn't really existant - this could also be said for any file sharing between the two, as both can read from the other.)

[Syaoran]

I use ext3 under Windows for my external HD.
It's not bad, but there're issues with UTF-8 filenames...

[Ledgem]

I haven't had the time to try installing GRUB with the expansion card's HD removed (I'll do that this Friday/weekend), but I did try something interesting today and I was wondering if anyone could explain it. This all deals with the master boot record, something that I've read a bit about but found that I don't really understand, especially after today.

I changed the boot priority within my BIOS, such that the Linux HD was now first on the list, and the Windows HD was second. When I installed GRUB this time, it wanted to install to the Windows HD. It also found a second Windows install on the expansion card's HD (which I removed from the GRUB config, as it's an old install). I told GRUB to install to the MBR only. Install went fine. Rebooted computer, and... nothing happened. Not even a GRUB error. The BIOS did its usual thing (find all HDs, examine DMI pool data, check the CD drive), and then just gave me a flashing cursor (which I couldn't interact with). This is also what it did when I changed the boot priority before installing GRUB.

Now, from what I've read, the MBR is a small, dedicated sector within a hard disk that contains some basic information. Basically, the BIOS checks the MBR and then transfers control to whatever is in it. In theory, GRUB should have installed to the MBR of the Linux HD, and, as the Linux HD was first on the list, the BIOS should have detected GRUB and given control to it. Why didn't this happen? And why did GRUB want to install to the Windows disk? When I first ran through the OpenSUSE installation, the Windows disk was first in boot priority, and GRUB only wanted to install to the MBR as I recall.

(I changed the boot order back (Windows HD first, Linux HD second) and it booted straight into Windows - no GRUB.)

[Jinto]

Seems to be some weird GRUB installer problem with your Linux distro. You can still try to install GRUB manually (but I suggest first try to install without the expansion card's HD).

[felix]

@ SeijiSensei
> "Unix shell languages offer a rich command and programming environment that's simply unknown in the Windows world. I've written one-line commands to accomplish tasks in a few moments that would take a lot longer to accomplish if I had to use GUI tools. (For example, sort a list of 35,000 email addresses by domain after removing certain domains and removing any duplicated addresses. One line in Linux, took a couple of seconds to execute. My client would have used Excel and taken half an hour.)"

I've been reading lately of something code named "Monad".
It's available for both Xp and Vista, and is currently at version 1.
It's FREE, you can get it at Microsoft's Home Page, it goes by the name PowerShell.

From what I'm reading and seing it's a visul object oriented command prompt of sorts, with awesome potential. It seems very straight forward, the developers seem to have opted to abandon all traditional-thiking when it comes to names and just create very visually self-explanatory commands. They do have aliases to shorter forms (there are a lot of linux-inspired aliases as well).
Just search for it, if you want to know more, there's some info on the net.

Anyway, getting to the point, it is more then capable of doing what you just described, thus the statememnt: "Unix shell languages offer a rich command and programming environment that's simply unknown in the Windows world." is somewhat obsolete

[Ledgem]

Well, I redid my install with the drive that would normally be connected to the extended BIOS unplugged. I'm currently typing this from Linux. I'm doing a few updates, and then I'll try to reconnect the drive and see how GRUB takes it. Hopefully there will be no problems.

Thus far, SUSE has rejected my dual monitors and is giving me a weird, skewed resolution on my VGA monitor. I'll try updating the nVidia drivers and see what happens. To be honest, Windows doesn't make working with dual monitors incredibly easy from the start, either. Sound works fine, internet works fine, Bluetooth should be supported (with a crappy USB bluetooth dongle that I needed 3rd party drivers for with Windows)... all I need is Opera, a music player, and then maybe I'll attempt a Beryl installation.

Thanks for the help thus far, everyone, and I'll keep you updated with any problems I encounter and (hopefully) overcome.

edit: Added the HD back in, and GRUB is working just fine. I'll have to manually mount the HD into Linux, I suppose, but for now I'm content. Linux isn't as flawless as I'd like, but I'm sure that I'm responsible for pretty much all errors that are coming up (except for dependencies... I'd heard about them).

[Jinto]

Okay your GRUB is running now, nice. In the next step, you can add your drive in the /etc/fstab to mount automatically.

And the weird resolution thing, You may need a so called mod line for your monitor in the xorg.conf. Mine looks like this:

Section "Monitor"

# HorizSync is in kHz unless units are specified.
# HorizSync may be a comma separated list of discrete values, or a
# comma separated list of ranges of values.
# NOTE: THE VALUES HERE ARE EXAMPLES ONLY.  REFER TO YOUR MONITOR'S
# USER MANUAL FOR THE CORRECT NUMBERS.
#    HorizSync  30-64         # multisync
#    HorizSync  31.5, 35.2    # multiple fixed sync frequencies
#    HorizSync  15-25, 30-50  # multiple ranges of sync frequencies
# VertRefresh is in Hz unless units are specified.
# VertRefresh may be a comma separated list of discrete values, or a
# comma separated list of ranges of values.
# NOTE: THE VALUES HERE ARE EXAMPLES ONLY.  REFER TO YOUR MONITOR'S
# USER MANUAL FOR THE CORRECT NUMBERS.
    Identifier     "SonyE200"
    HorizSync       30.0 - 130.0
    VertRefresh     50.0 - 200.0
    ModeLine       "1024x768_100" 113.3 1024 1096 1208 1392 768 769 772 814 -hsync +vsync
EndSection



Section "Screen"
    Identifier     "SonyE200"
    Device         "Device0"
    Monitor        "SonyE200"
    DefaultDepth    24
    Option         "UseModeline"
    Option         "metamodes" "1024x768_100_0 -0+0; 1024x768 +0+0; 800x600 +0+0; 640x480 +0+0; 1024x768_100 +0+0"
    Option         "hw_cursor"
    Option         "NoLogo" "1"
    SubSection     "Display"
        Viewport    0 0
        Depth       24
        Modes      "1024x768" "800x600" "640x480" "1024x768_100_0"
        Option         "UseModeline"
    EndSubSection

I need this modline to run my monitor with 100Hz and the same specs I use in Windows. Btw. the upper modline worked in my old xorg.conf. Since my lasr update, only the metamodes line has any effect. I am showing both, since I don't know which type works in your xorg.conf

1024x768_100_0 -0+0; means 1024x768_100 and -hsync +vsync

[Epyon9283]

If you're using the drivers from nvidia they should auto-detect the available resolutions and refresh rates from your monitor using EDID. It works in my case but I have seen other people have issues with it.

modelines are pretty monitor specific so I wouldn't attempt to use someone elses unless you have the same monitor. Here are a couple of modeline calculators:
http://www.tkk.fi/Misc/Electronics/f...2rgb/calc.html
http://zaph.com/Modeline/