Tag Archives: gnome

Software RAIDS (and return to fedora, using xfce).

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I must confenss that I like xfce, In my view, it has acheived the goal of a good gui — it goes away and allows me to work. It is not (yet) bloated. And it is available as a fedora spin.

I find this useful, as Fedora understands RAID 1 and RAID 0 devices. This allows me to mirror my main (“root”) and swap partitions, and to stripe my ?home partition. And it will boot directly from the RAID, so I don’t need to have little /boot partitions that — at least in my hands — generally go wrong.

I managed to bork the main home computer trying to transfer a large teaching file. Machine froze, and would not reboot. Had a backup available (from previous day). so…what to use?

Xubuntu is prettier, but… it does not handle RAIDs well. Arch does, but it is a pain to set up, and on a server I want some stability. Chakra in my view is not ready to the real world. The new debian installer… is flakey (it probably needs a few more weeks) and Debian is a little conservative in userspace. So… back to fedora.

So get the iso, burn it and boot it. It looks pretty. It recognises both screens. It allows different pictures on either screen: so far, so good.

Then I try to install it. A failed install had locked one of the two hard drives.

Invoked mdadm. Removed the offending section (/dev/md0. Delete offending portions, and resize, combining old /boot and /(root). Set type as “fd” ie linux software raid. Reboot.

Check raid is in place. modprobe for raid0 and raid1. Then… use the installer. It finds two raids, and allows you to format the resized partitions as raid partitions and then make a new /.

Rest of install is unventful. Reboot — which takes some time as all three RAID partitions have to mount. Then can finish installation by adding user and switching ntp on.On

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Once that is done…. update. I prefer to use the command line… yum update indicated that 278M of deltaRPMS and new software required — the iso was under 600M. The big decisions for tomorrow are to choose between libreoffice  and openoffice (one is needed), restoring data (from usb drives) and working through the unofficial fedora FAQ.

Then… if (and only if) that is stable and fast, consider moving the laptop and work machine to the same system…. and ditching gnome and kde for the forseeable future.

Seamless Linux.

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There are three big distros for Linux — ubuntu, opensuse and fedora. In the last few months I have used all three.

The criteria I have are:

1.  Must be backed up and supported by my work (Ubuntu LTS, Fedora)

2. Must be able to handle and encrypted LVM

3. Must be able to do a RAID

4. Must play nicely with dual screens using NVIDIA and RADEON.

5. Must support my essential software list: gnome,  openoffice, skype, R and bibus.

Ubuntu LTS does all of these. So does SUSE. Fedora — does not work on the work box (a toshiba).

However, there is now a fourth requirement. I enjoy playing with OS, and I want to be almost current. I therefore want a rolling release. You see, the problem with SuSE and Fedora is that upgrading either requires you go to their bleeding edge (rawhide or factory) or you download each release and lose two days getting everything back the way you like it.

There are three approaches to this. One is to use a source based distro such as gentoo or linux from scratch. Haven’t done that for a few years now. The second is to use a rolling version of debian, either testing or sid with a safety net — aptosid. The final idea is to use Arch Linux.

Herein lies some problems. Aptosid can’t handle my R710 card. Arch can… but can’t dual screen easily (and the person who turned xorg.conf into thirteen seperate files needs to he introduced to a LART).

Ubuntu — at least the RC version of 10.10 — does not play well with any of my hardware. SuSE just works.  But that leaves me on the upgrade cycle. There may be an ideal OS — and Arch is close to it — but I have not found it yet.