Help linux for beginners

[Ch3tan]

Yeah - that's probably the issue, not enough ram for a live cd. It's one of those old woolies fujitsu-siemens, so 256mb I think.

 

[MYstIC G]

That would likely be it then mate, I had an old box that wouldn't run the installer for ubuntu because it needed 384mb ram to run. Try running a text only install.

 

[Ch3tan]

peppermint doesn't give me the option - any suggestions?

 

[Yaka]

i swear by formatting usb sticks with hp usb format tool first

then https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation/FromUSBStick preety sure its the same for other linux builds

 

[Ch3tan]

It's working from the USb stick, but it's still the same problem/ Install peppermint option crashes it.

checked the memory usage and its saying 191mb available, and it's using 105mb from boot.

 

[MYstIC G]

peppermint doesn't give me the option - any suggestions?

Hmm, that's a bit crap. I used ubuntu on the work box. You might find it or debian will do the job.

 

[Will]

CrunchBang Linux - A nimble Openbox Linux distro

Debian based, same lightweight Openbox window manager.

 

[Ch3tan]

Crunchbang is a bit gay trying to install from a USB. It can't detect and mount the US drive, it keeps trying to find a CD-drive.

 

[Wij]

I'm sure there's a frig out there somewhere to get Peppermint working but in the meantime you could try Puppy.

 

[MYstIC G]

HOWTO copy a CrunchBang 10 Statler ISO image to USB in Linux [CrunchBang Linux Wiki]

 

[Wij]

Oooh - didn't realise Puppy had this

ScottJarvis.com: Puppy Arcade 10

 

[Wij]

Actually Ice should work fine:

Peppermint Ice resuscitates an elderly Thinkpad

:/

 

[Will]

I'll admit, I've never tried a USB install only CD.

 

[strangely brown]

I've found with my own ancient Sony Vaio laptop (must be about 8 years old now), installing Linux has been a little tricky.

I think this is because some of the early laptops had dodgy implementations of power management, so on mine, I found that to do the initial install (Ubuntu), I had to add the command lines noapic and acpi=no to get the installer to work.

I still have to use the noapic switch today to get Ubuntu to boot properly...

I'm not sure how you get to add command line switches on peppermint, on the Ubuntu CD, when booting you pressed escape or F1 (can't remember which), then from the menu, pressed F5 to select command switches...

I certainly recommend that you try these switches to see if it works for you...

Regards,
SB.

 

[Wij]

Did you ever get it working Ch3t ?

 

[Ch3tan]

I'm going to put peppermint on my 2nd lappy tonight to play with it. Need to create a partition for it first. It runs win7 pretty sweetly at the moment, but want to see if Ice will boot faster.

My sisters old laptop was being an arse still. I'm going to partition that and try crunchbang again, but from a livecd this time, sometime later this week.

 

[MYstIC G]

While we're talking Linux, how do you safely switch settings between installs? Just copy the user directory?

 

[Ch3tan]

So I've got peppermint on my 2nd lappy, quite nice.

Still having problems with my sisters laptop, gparted refuses to let me resize the XP partition, and the crunchbang install doesn't give options for resizing or creating a new partition - it wants to use existing ones.

 

[Wij]

Tried this on a Live CD ?

start

 

[Ch3tan]

Gparted won't touch the disk because it thinks there is a bad sector. No chekcs find a bad sector.

So gparted and pmagic are both failing me.

Any other options?

 

[Wij]

fdisk ?

 

[Ch3tan]

hmmm, yeah I suppose :/ I wanted a nice graphical interface and an easy drag and click job Fucking XP not having a proper storage controller :/

 

[TdC]

I can talk you through fdisk if you want. drop me a pm of you need buddy

 

[Yaka]

ch3t needs talking thru fdisk:/ say it aint so

 

[Ch3tan]

It ain't so, iv got hirens boot cd somewhere, I'll give that a bash first.

 

[MYstIC G]

Find partition magic...

 

[Ch3tan]

It's on hirens boot cd, which I completely forgot about until earlier.

 

[TdC]

While we're talking Linux, how do you safely switch settings between installs? Just copy the user directory?

which settings?

 

[MYstIC G]

nothing major tbh. for example I know mozilla will store everything in /home/user/.mozilla so I guess what I'm getting at is if I stuff a copy of that on a USB stick, nuke from orbit, reinstall and copy that back, will it be "just like it was before".

 

[Wij]

Don't do that often but yeh it should.

You could try having home on a separate partition for all your installs