Linux Hell

[Eldmannen]

Cool! I'm really interested in you sharing your results as I'd like to have something stable that doesn't need to be constantly reinstalled on my old Win98 compatible PC. For some essential programs head on over to SourceForge.net

 

Or http://www.freshmeat.net/

Most distributions come with plenty of software for all kinds of various purposes.

[rridgely]

Yes, the username shows up when you type it. But nothing shows up when you type in the password, not even masked stars. This is a security feature, I guess.

 

This was the dumbest thing about the whole process. I actually installed the thing three times and each time I got to that log in screen and thought it was freezing when I typed in a username. Knowing this now just makes me even madder because no where in any documentation that I read(and yes I read wikis, forums, faqs, ect) did it say that nothing would show up in the password field. It really makes no sense.

[Admiral Ross]

This was the dumbest thing about the whole process. I actually installed the thing three times and each time I got to that log in screen and thought it was freezing when I typed in a username. Knowing this now just makes me even madder because no where in any documentation that I read(and yes I read wikis, forums, faqs, ect) did it say that nothing would show up in the password field. It really makes no sense.

I had a similar experience with my Endian Firewall. It does the same thing but the password is hidden. You don't see anything no stars no symbols, nothing. All you do see is the blinking curser moving to the right. Figured at first it was a problem. After the second install I figured it out.

[Humpty]

Glad to see you got it sorted Rridgely.

 

Think I prefer Puppy over Ubuntu ATM running off the CD.

 

Actually made a bit of progress booting puppy off my usb.

 

First I boot off the CD and from there you can install puppy to the zip drive.

 

Prob is it boots so far from the usb then stalls at a certain point.

 

So tried a puppy usb boot floppy and still stalls at the same point.

 

Oh well,have given up for the time being as I have started another project with the USB drive using synchronisation,a slave hard drive and ghost images.

 

Will be quite good if I can achieve what I am aiming to do.

[Eldmannen]

This was the dumbest thing about the whole process. I actually installed the thing three times and each time I got to that log in screen and thought it was freezing when I typed in a username. Knowing this now just makes me even madder because no where in any documentation that I read(and yes I read wikis, forums, faqs, ect) did it say that nothing would show up in the password field. It really makes no sense.

 

Well, that is quite funny that someone actually reinstalled the whole operating system three times over such an trivial matter that was never really a problem.

If you would have pressed "Enter" then it would have told you wrong "Access denied" and asked you to re-enter the password.

 

You could also ask people in some Linux channel on freenode (irc.freenode.net).

[rridgely]

Well, that is quite funny that someone actually reinstalled the whole operating system three times over such an trivial matter that was never really a problem.

If you would have pressed "Enter" then it would have told you wrong "Access denied" and asked you to re-enter the password.

 

Ah but what is quite funny how many people have probably done the same thing.(even someone above me said they did the same thing.) I had so many crashes I wasn't sure the thing was even installed right.

 

Anyway I've given up on linux and I'm as we speak running the win 98 installer on that computer. I tried 5 different distros and on every one they either crashed while installing or crashed once installing. Most of the time I got an error from "X" which from what I can tell is what gives you the graphical interface. It seems to be used on all the distros I used(all were debian based so that might be it) it just wasn't stable on this computer.

 

Again I was using an older computer, so maybe there were just hardware incompatibilities. One thing I do recommend to people is keep a live cd of puppy around. It could save your data if your windows install ever becomes messed up. You could mount you hard drive and allow it to help you get your data back. I also like gparted the disk partitioner on it.

[Eldmannen]

Yes, X (X Window System) is what provides the graphics interface. It is used by (pretty much) all Linux distributions that have an graphical user interface. It is also used on BSD. Mac OS X use Apple built Quartz, but also offer some kind of X implementation.

 

You might want to try Linux again some later time, in a year maybe after some new versions have come, or maybe in the near future a different distribution on a different computer.

 

Or try it as server, router or firewall instead of a desktop computer.

[rridgely]

Ut oh.... I think I know now why the linux installs were not working. I think the HD in that computer went bad. I don't use that computer much(it is networked to my other 2 but it doesn't get turned on much). I did turn it on and make sure everything worked before trying linux so maybe the HD was on its last leg and partitioning it was the nail in the coffin.

 

I'm going to go get a new one tomorrow. I'm going to put windows 98 on it for sure but I'm going to partition it so that it has 40gb for windows and 40gb for linux. Ugh there goes another $60.

BTW if anyone has seen a good in store deal on hard drives let me know.

 

What makes this even worse is I just bought a sata HD on sale for a spare and I cant even use it on that computer.

[Andavari]

I'd run a thorough scandisk to check the disk surface to be sure before shelling out the money for a new hdd - especially for an old system that may not get used that much.