one ancient machine - one modern os

one ancient machine - one modern os

dell xms233 dimension cpu 233mhz, 192mb ram, 1 x 6gb, 1 x 4gb and 1x 3gb hd, nvidia riva 128 video card, sound ?, 3com ethernet

since i was given an ancient dell xms233 dimension to play with it has done very little work, except to test the odd hard drive and to use as an experimental machine to try various versions of linux.

as i have stopped mucking about and am sticking to pclos minime, which seems to suit me best, it has sat there doing no work at all, especially as i gave the monitor to someone else.

my neighbour found a couple of old crts and gave me a daytek, which is actually a nice little monitor, only 14" 'tis true, but a crisp display.

seeing as how i needed to test whether it worked, or not, i decided i might as well install pclos.

before i booted the minime i entered

livecd keyb=uk xres=800x600 return

because the last time i tried i had video problems, i.e. no display.

once booted, i got a console with a message to login as root and run video. i did as instructed and a small panel appeared offering the parameters for setting up, to my surprise, nvidia riva 128. i had to fiddle about and reboot a couple of times because it won't have a higher resolution at any price. i am sure that it can handle the higher resolution.

once i had that done i typed

# startx

and up came the gui. yeeha!

then i set about sorting out the installation.

after a bit of thought, i gave the 6gb hd to root because it doesn't seem to matter how much verbiage i produce, it takes up very little space, so 4gb will do. i gave the 3gb drive to swap. minime seemed content with this and when i clicked done, wrote the fstab file.

moving on, i checked that the correct drives were selected and also set /home to format, even though i had already formatted all three. next to the summary - all ok, next and install.

it is said that patience is a virtue. it's just as well i have >1 machine as it takes over 2 hours to install. quite a comparison with the laptop at 10 mins 54 secs!

after 3h 19m i was sure there was something not right. as i had just remastered a livecd, forgetting to add k3b, which this machine doesn't need, i used that after forcing a shutdown. same old malarkey with the video, but each time i do this it gets more familiar and easier. i have to constantly remind myself that this machine is old and slow and to wait for the system to catch up.

i now know what is meant by the no bootsplash in initrd.gz. it's the jazzy black and white image that appears prior to boot where the system pauses for the user to add commands.

i was more than gratified to see it boot successfully.

i may have been a bit previous with the original version. this one has been at it for over an hour and it hasn't got far. i was just about to intefere when i noticed the info legend change and left it alone. it is wonderful to have more than one machine to play on. when i am satisfied that this old thing works as it should, i shall pass it on to someone who needs a machine and hasn't got even one.

i'm wondering if this thing will ever install. it's got less far in 2 1/2 hours than previously. ignore it for a while.

i think the reason it won't install is because the drive is old and can't read rw disks too well. i know it doesn't much care for dvds. i'll give it a clean and see if it works better then. the pclos 92 in not a rw, so it may be dirty optics.

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that was a redo from start.

i used the cleaner and saw the light come on, so it whizzed around and brushed the lens. my dos floppy failed to boot - could be i reset the bios to boot from cdrom then hd and left out floppy, will check sometime.

booted original of pclos minime 93 as this is on cd-r and the drive can at least read those comfortably enough.

this time decided to see if the whole thing will fit on the 6gb drive and formatted the others to fat2 in case i want to put win98 back on there.

i let root have the biggest chunk of 4gb swap got just over 512 because i can't get the slider do be precise and i gave /home just over a gb.

that seems to have stuck too. perhaps i'll try pclos 92 again. ho hum.

yet another install, because it only takes 11 minutes

scrub a lot of that earlier stuff about reinstall - i ballsed it up when i wasn't paying attention and it now has two brand spanking new, clean installs of pclos minime for me to play with. the first has a total of 768 packages as i have installed some stuff essential for listening to music and playing movies.

why did no-one ever say how goddam easy linux can be? i got the heebie jeebies at the prospect of making my own personal livecd and it's a piece of piss. all i had to do was open a terminal, su to root and say:

# mklivecd return

and there was me thinking it was on a par with installing tarballs, an infinitely trickier proposition.

as it's that easy, i got one going on the laptop. eats cpu mind, but that aint interfering with the music - that's playing on another machine courtesy of juk, which has now been going for eight days non-stop from when i first set it up.

that didn't take long. the iso is 730,546,176 bytes in 00:12:07.

it's become too easy to indulge in m$ bashing so i am exercising my brain in an effort to recall some one thing i liked about any windows os.

i like winamp. i like being able to rightclick and send just one track to start a playlist. hmm.... that's not the os though.

i like forget-his-name's mahjongg. two-thirds of the screen, well designed tiles. that isn't the os either. think harder.

arachnid. oh yes, that was my introduction to the two-deck patience game usually called spider. had a nice little icon of a playing card with diddy legs - eight as i recall. nope. not the os.

have to come back to that later. the search is taking too much cpu.

a big one and a little one

having reinstalled pclos minime for the umpteenth time, it has booted from the first partition, so i have configured the bootloader to (i hope) include the partition hda6, which will give me a choice of two versions of the same operating system, one with masses of stuff installed for me to play about with and decide whether or not to keep, and one skinny version to add to until satisfied that i have it right for mklivecd, as i don't want to have to keep burning the same thing over and over again.

because i am so expert at losing data, i have taken to saving to external storage devices in an effort to keep it safe. this leaves me with tons of space on the internal hd for experimentation and i toy with having several 10gb partitions for installing various versions of the same os.

of all the versions of pclinuxos available, i find pclos-minime-.93 both the easiest and the hardest to get to grips with. much of linux is intuitive, now that it has finely-honed front-ends like kde. the wealth of applications is astonishing and i have found at least twenty text editors, knowing that there are many more. some are simple editors, such as nano, for use in a terminal, going all the way to koffice and openoffice, offering the utimate sophistication in word-processing.

the trickier bits happen when something i want to do is baulked in some way. sometimes it's a matter of permissions and if experimenting with chown and chmod in a terminal don't fix it, i login to root and try to fix it that way. i rarely go into root, preferring to see if i can get the answer in my own user area first. like surgery, rooting is the last resort of failure. i have been trying to make a usbhome key with a 1 gb usb flash pen, so far without success. i shall probably have to rtfm, something i prefer to avoid as much as possible. i would far rather talk to the members of #pclinuxos on irc.efnet.ca in konversation and get realtime online tuition. it tends to stick better.

a friend showed me how to navigate to folders and install tar.gz and bz2 files. while he was doing this, i learned two invaluable pieces of knowledge. 1, i had been navigating incorrectly and, 2, the use of ls to reveal what was available. so now i can:

use the handy dandy extractor to "extract here"

$ cd download - the folder where i keep incoming goodies
ls - look for the extracted goodie folder in question

$ cd copy/paste to relevant folder

repeat until i find the magic green "configure"

then

$ ./ - copy/paste the word (saves typing and typos)

watch while ./configure does its' thing and tells me to "make" - cool. i can manage that

at the end of make

$ su
passwd

# make install - and the system installs all the little bits and pieces wherever they are supposed to go.

for my own amusement i went through the entire database of packages available for installation and found a huge number to install simply out of curiosity. some are games and others are more serious applications. i have no idea what many of them do. that's part of the fun of linux - great explorations.

when first installed, minime takes up about 1.5 gb of hd in 564 packages. to this i have added 493, which will swell the gross by a further 1.9 gb - pure greed. i shall explore the games first. i enjoy daft, mindless games like lbreakout2 and some of enigma. i am addicted to spider patience and have found a way to skirt the statistics while i learn how to scrub round them altogether. instead of clicking on new and increasing the losses, i judiciously saved a few that i had solved, just before the final placement, and open, or open recent. then i can make the final placement for another "win".

there is something about computer games that invites cheating, which is a game in itself. i found this when playing wizards and warriors. certain anomalies in the game enabled the keeping of hit points if issued just prior to reentering a town and saving. once my priest had acquired the toughen spell, i could take my little gang of marauders into the town, where all mana was fully restored, promptly leave town, issue the spells until mana was exhausted and return to town.

later i found an ace way of gaining levels and use that to determine the number of levels a player was able to reach. while doing this i found one of the dire limitations of the game. one of my characters had filled up all his attributes and skills slots leaving only 3 spaces. when he next made level he had five points to award and only 3 spaces available. impasse as there was no way back. an editor helped me get out of that. i reduced his scores in several areas and off he went again. he had been stuck at level 149, but, now, the sky seemed not to have a limit.

the editor was also a handy tool to enable a bunch of novice characters to have sufficient skill and hit points to speed through the boringly tough initial stages of progress. the amazoni mantraps still scared the shit out of me and i took a high-powered mage along to lob really massive spells at them.

none of that has anything to do with linux, of course, but i want to be able to play the game without benefit of woze, and that's where wine comes in. this is the emulator linux uses to enable woze based games to be played. another nice toy to learn.

it would be great fun to port the wizardry series to linux, but i wouldn't have the first clue how to go about it. no programmer am i. i don't even know what language the files are written in but i do know that the series started life on an apple IIe, or thereabouts, using a 6502 chip, two screechy floppy drives and a crummy mono-green monitor with wire-frame graphics. i found out later that the game had colour.

i managed a wonderful cheat in that. by dint of creating twenty characters, pooling their money to one character, deleting 19 and recreating, pooling again and then transferring those characters to the working scenario disk, i could take them to boltac's, the all purpose rip-off emporium and make sure my little band of miscreants had decent armour and weapons against all foes.

it took 10 hours to make my first million and then i got curious as to how long the string was that held the money. a further two hours got me to a billion, by means of exponentiality and at the end of it i had a disk (with backups and backups of backups, of course) describing my team as "shit-hot, tooled up and rich". the string wound up at 12 digits. beats me how i managed work as well. after it ported to the mackintosh and the guts had been reamed out of it, i kinda lost interest in the follow-ups and stuck to the IIe version even though the graphics had improved.

when i left that job, i no longer had access to the machine and lost the disks in life's shuffling about. not until the year 2000 did i rediscover the game, much improved all round and hours of fun. i haven't played it in a couple of years and would like to at some point, though i am massively involved in playing the best game ever invented - linux!

hey! wozers - cop this!

how about some advertising for linux?

a standard feature of linux is the deskspaces. most install with two - the minimum to demonstrate to any new user that such is available - and many will allow up to 20. i started with 6, rose to 8 and now have 10. this enables me to keep different occupations separate and prevent clutter.

how would this go down with wozers?


fed up with clutter on your desktop? sick of hunting for stuff in the taskbar?

move house! try linux. get a mansion. up to 20, yes 20 rooms to play in. have a dozen apps open, each in a different room. always know where you are.

or this:

windows users - get a deluxe add-on for your computer. add a whole range of applications to your system - no charge.

give yourself a break, you deserve it. get an operating system that works. never defragment again. install as many applications as you like without having to reboot. have a pretty desktop and fabulous screensavers. get all the help and support you need for NOTHING. that's right. linux support costs only the effort you put in to get it. where from you ask?

try here:

www.reallylinux.com

dedicated as a no-frills, friendly, welcoming site to new users as well as continuing support for the more experienced. EVERY question posted gets a POLITE and FRIENDLY answer. here you will reciever HUGE ENCOURAGEMENT and every time you post that you had a little success, everyone will yell HOORAY for your achievement.

or here:

www.pclinuxos.com

where you can talk directly to the developers of the os and get expert help from users with years and years of experience. friendly, dedicated users who know their stuff.

and here:

www.opensuse.org

where another of the beauties of linux lives. more helpful, knowledgeable people to aid your learning and enrich your computing experience.

and more:

www.linuxquestions.org
www.linux.org
www.sourceforge.net

and google and wiki a lot.

google for rute and find a great tutorial

and if that aint enough you can always look in on:

http://pclinuxos.blogspot.com/

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there are hundreds of thousands of people all over the world beavering away to improve linux in all its' forms, from the kernel itself, to all the thousands of applications. nearly every distrib comes loaded with at least two and often more than three of many of the applications. like music? xine, amarok, juk and many more. want to write a simple letter, compose a presentation, ? do both at the same time in different apps. do the simple letter in kwrite, kate, kedit or gedit and the big glossy presentation in openoffice or koffice.

all of linux is like that. developers are continuously tweaking the existing software and adding features to make the users experience more enjoyable. linux users like computing and want to enable everyone else to enjoy it too.

there are hundreds of different distributions to choose from, ranging from the minimalistic to full-blown bells, whistles, fairy lights and tinsel.

here is just a few:

for more google distrowatch

pclinuxos
suse
mandriva
solaris
mepis
gentoo
damn small linux
linspire
ubuntu

there are hundreds - go google

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let's say you took the plunge, downloaded a version's .iso and used nero, or some such, to burn the image to cd, after checking the md5 sum of course (md5? der? that was my resonse when i first met it. it's the checksum of the data on in the image) and have a bootable cd. let's add that you downloaded a livecd too. download pclinuxos and you get both in one package.

alternatively you can buy a professionally produce cd from a shop. google linux shop and add country and see what comes up. i got this for the uk:


http://www.thelinuxshop.co.uk/catalog/

click livecd

http://www.thelinuxshop.co.uk/catalog/index.php?cPath=21&osCsid=492bc9b8a72a1e1a08c097de141fa333

and got a range to choose from - pclinuxos is one of them - starting at £3.50, which compares favourably with the price of a woze os cd.

you have nothing to lose and a whole world to gain - go for it!

installing more than one os on a box

people interested in trying out linux are sometimes concerned that it will disrupt, and even destroy, their existing system. this is not so. the existence of livecds even makes it possible to boot a complete operating system to memory and play with it until confident enough to try an install.

when ready to try an install, linux uses a partitioner that enables the user to shrink the windows (woze) partition to make room for linux and this is both easy and a safe procedure.

this is called dual-booting and gives the user the advantage of keeping a system that is familiar while adding a new and exciting aspect to computing life.

pclinuxos was developed with the woze migrant in mind. it is easy to install, simple to set up and beautiful to look at. thousands upon thousands of people, a number growing exponentially daily, migtrate and begin to contribute to the friendly, welcoming linux community. i can vouch for this. in linux i am eight months old and already able to help even younger "siblings" in this wonderful family of keen and helpful, caring people.

many users have at least two, and often more operating systems installed on one computer, usually on one hard disk, but sometimes spread over several. there are two boot-loaders for linux grub, the more recent and the good old standby comfy blow-up bed lilo. for most users with a small system, one or more computers in a home network, lilo does the job more than adequately. grub is designed to be able to handle more and bigger systems and i don't know enough to outline the pros and cons of using either.

my distrib of choice is pclinuxos, of which release i use the minime .93, and whenever i mention linux, that is the flavour and release i shall be referring to. there are others that have varying appeal for different people and therein lies the strength of the linux operating kernel. it is one of the few entities that can be all things to all men, not forgetting to include women.

i adore suse. it is beautiful to look at and full of lovely things to play with, but the limitations i met meant that i was unable to do the things i wanted to with it. so i pinched the wallpapers - especially that for root - and moved to pclinuxos (pclos) from which time my linux knowledge has grown immeasurably.

installing:

i start by preparing woze. shut down the pagefile function, this is equivalent to swap, and defragment the drive. this ensures that when woze starts up again with its' companion in situ, it will run as well as it ever did.

that done, there is a variety of ways of dealing with partitions. you can use a partitioner in woze, a bootable partitioner, or the partitioner included with the pclos installer. i favour booting the live cd, log in as root and use pclinuxos control centre/mount points/configure local hard disk partitions.

for a 60 gb drive, i shrink the woze partition to 30 gb (20 gb these days) and then create the following partitions to accommodate pclos:

root / - 4 gb to 6 gb, swap - double the amount of ram or as much as you like (mine is 4gb for reasons i will explain at another time) and /home - whatever is left.

on my dell inspiron 510m laptop i have root / 4.9 gb, swap 2.9 gb and /home 18 gb

boot to woze, put the pclos cd in the drive and reboot. when the black screen comes up i type livecd keyb=uk and, on one older machine xres=800x600 to make sure the screen resolution is correct, then press return.

when booting is finished, an attractive login screen invites you to enter a user name followed by the password. for installation i use root/root, and for playing about guest/guest. the graphical server will then load the kde graphical user interface (gui) and you will be transported to a beautiful wheatfield with a few icons on the desktop and a taskbar at the bottom.

linux systems come with deskspaces and usually begin with two, or four. kde allows 20. i used 6 until my requirements demanded more and now i have 10. these are great for keeping activities separate and i keep "business" on the left and play on the right. being able to work this way dispenses with the confusion and clutter of a single deskspace and allows me to have many applications open at the same time.

having logged in as root and desiring to install, an icon will be found on the desktop offering to install. double click that and the installer opens. use the dropdown to choose your language and then, if you need to, the partitioner.

click next

the next window shows the partitions to be installed and checkboxes to make sure they are formatted. lower down is the section for home, choose the partition and for good measure check the format box.

click next

a summary of what will take place is shown so that you may change your mind or make corrections, by going back.

click next

you are now committed and the system will be installed.

on my dell laptop this took 9' 54"

when the install is finished there are a few setup procedures to take care of.

click next

the new screen wants a password for root. this is a vital requirement as root is the ultimate boss of the system. choose a password you will remember and find a way of keeping it safe. enter it twice and click write root's password. you may, as i do, get a warning that passwords of less than 8 characters are not secure. i am a sole user and no-one else has access to my boxes, so i can afford to be moderately careless.

next i delete the guest account.

after that i enter the name of the user i want to use, i ignore real name (i don't know how inadvisable that is but it hasn't caused me any trouble) and then twice enter the password. click the accept box and the user is written. repeat for multiple users.

at the end of all this, you can either carry on playing, so you will notice that the reboot box is unchecked, or reboot now. as i am always keen to get to the setting up the network stage, i reboot.

when the booting process is finished, you will see an attractive login panel
the same calming wheatfield will appear and you can begin to play the best game ever invented.

there is a good tutorial for this and when i find it i shall post the url here. in the meantime you could probably find it yourself by going to www.pclinuxos.com and browsing.

have a lot of fun!