Linux

That and quiche.

Funny book

Good thread guys. Good info.
Thanks.

I have followed the various bits of advice in this thread, and cannot get my laptop to load the nvidia drivers- any and all advice appreciated!

Hey Dammit,

Can't be bothered to read the entire thread so apologies if you have to repeat yourself.

What distro are you using?
What model is your card (or laptop model if you're not sure)?
Have you installed the drivers from a repository using, for example, apt/aptitude/pacman blah or have you downloaded them from NVidia?

Answers to the above will help, it may be as simple as needing to config your xorg.conf file -- although there shouldn't be any need in more recent releases.

I now have it working- repeating commands and persistent rebooting seem to have done the trick!

I was upgrading from 8.04 to 8.10.

Now all I want to do is work out how to get the desktop to pivot around it's vertical axis for that "Pimp my desktop" feeling...

Compiz fusion & emerald will pimp up your desktop quite nicely.

Make sure fusion-icon is running (blue square in notification bar).

Right click, choose compiz as window manager, emerald as your decorator.

I like compiz, run it exclusively as my window manager, without gnome etc -- which I hate. it's about 5 time quickerererer without Gnome...

Need a few pointers here.

My plan is to upgrade my laptop to the latest version of Ubuntu, and in the process extend the linux partition to the whole disc, basically nuking XP in the process.

Before I do this I am going to mount the XP partition as another drive and copy across anything I want to keep- music and photographs, films etc.

Is there anything I should look out for that might trip me up here?

The intention is to then install Virtual box, then install XP within that, and bring all the XP only stuff such as itunes back into that.

What's going to trip me up?

Can you extend the Linux partition? Or are you just going to reformat the FAT/XP one as a new (and second) insert whatever FS you prefer to use here?

I would just back up the XP partition to an external drive, and then start from scratch on the laptop (with one big partition + swap).

If I had an external drive that's exactly what I would be doing...

Copy all the files across. As you state and rather than extend your linux partition reformat the partition to ext3 or whatever then install your virtal machine on that partition.

In general you should avoid big partiations.

I have

/

/boot

/home

/mount/data

/mount/windrivec

/mount/windrived

/mount/backup

I'd prefer to resize the partitions anyway- it's a bit blunt at the moment as I set them both to 80 gig when I dual-booted the laptop.

I only ever boot XP now for iTunes, remote desktop and photoshop, so the 80 gig it sits on is a bit useless.

+1 to /boot, but I don't really know why the others are necessary? That being said, my Linux HD is only 40 gig (with a 250 external formatted as a ReiserFS - what a pain in the ass).

Horatio- has your external drive tried to murder its wife recently?

+1 to /boot, but I don't really know why the others are necessary? That being said, my Linux HD is only 40 gig (with a 250 external formatted as a ReiserFS - what a pain in the ass).

/home is useful as it make a reinstall / reformat easy without loosing setting e.t.c

win* are windows partitions and the others are just for organisation and safety. I don't really want the computer accessing and running around in areas unnecessarily. I can have an error in one partition and the others are safe(ish). I keep some partitions unmounted, I have different permissions. It's all about flexibility.

+1 on the ReiserFS. I've found ext3 more stable.

No murder, but it's holding a couple of hundred of gigs of mp3s, more or less, hostage (as there is no OS X support for ReiserFS, so I can only access them through NFS).

I'm getting the format-and-reinstall bug... Hmmm, maybe time to try LFS.

Anyone here got experiences with the PPC distris of Fedora or Ubuntu, and how it copes with old G4 powerbooks?

i ran gentoo on a dual g4 533. worked fine. not sure if that's useful...

I installed Xubuntu on an old Macbook (the clamshell one, no idea about specs). It was slow. Thing was that Xubuntu dropped PPC support so I had to install the server version and do an apt-get install xfce.

Anyone here got experiences with the PPC distris of Fedora or Ubuntu, and how it copes with old G4 powerbooks?

Hmm, not sure whether I should try that one out ... Or whether OSX is just fine. I liked Fedora on a Desktop PC machine, but the prospect of fiddling with the keypad and audio drivers, for example to emulate right click, fills me with horror.

Horatio: try Arch - it's the shit. Bare-bones and no dependency hell like LFS. Bit like Gentoo w/out the rice factor.

Dammit: what format's your linux partition? Some filesystems are resizeable & some aren't. Resizing would be a good option for you...

Whatever the Ubuntu live CD recommended that it be.

I might just contain my raging impatience and buy an external drive

buy one, they're awesome and you get ridiculously large ones for £60-70 from ebuyer these days..

Having adminned Linux professionally for a few years and played with it for an age before that (going back to kernel 1.2 days) I've settled on Xubuntu for my sitting-at computers. Works nicely on everything from an EeePC to this machine (8GB, quad core, RAID1), requires a minimum of faff to install and keep updated and avoids the Windows-alike bloat of a full GNOME/KDE environment. Debian on the servers. I had a job that involved maintaining a fleet of Gentoo boxes and that got old really quickly - the additional admin time involved just isn't worth it. FreeBSD is also worth considering for servers, but a bit of an effort for a desktop.