Knoppix - connection?

[phppete]

I am running Knoppix on my Dell from a CD, all is OK apart from it being a little slow which is to be expected. The main issue is I can't connect to anywhere, http via Konquerer and I can't ping to my Mac.

I am assuming I need to set something so Knoppix works with my Dell wireless network card?

Pinging my Dell/Knoppix from my Mac shows 'Host is down'.

Any ideas gratefully received :)

[Kevin]

I have never really used wireless but I am told that the live CD versions of PCLinuxOS and Ubuntu Linux are better at auto-configuring wireless than Knoppix is.

Wireless in Linux is a bit of a pain as not all of the chipsets are directly supported.

[Randall]

Dell typically uses Broadcom chips — you should be able to tell by looking in Control Panel, since I think they install a control panel for the hardware. Might have to dig into Device Manager to know for sure.

Broadcom appears to be less than Linux friendly, and could stump Ubuntu as well unless they've incorporated the driver in recent releases.

http://linuxwireless.org/en/users/Drivers/b43

Presumably the firmware has already been loaded from Windows, so if a Linux distro has the driver it should (?) work.

But, I don't know if that applies to all of the Broadcom chips Dell may have used, or just that particular series.

Randall

[Kevin]

From what I have heard Broadcom is the absolute worst wireless chipset for Linux support. I believe the firmware needs to be loaded at each boot which makes things rather difficult.

[phppete]

Thanks for the replies. I will have had to abandon this for a while, too busy with work at the moment. I have tried netcardconfig and wlan under network settings but to no avail.

I just wanted to play around with it while expanding my unix knowledge without destroying my Mac by using it as a playground. It looks like my experiments on it will be rather local since I can't connect to the outside world.

I need to get a Vista laptop sooner or later so I'll do some research and see which will play best with linux.

[Randall]

I believe the firmware needs to be loaded at each boot which makes things rather difficult. Ick. You'd have to make a custom live CD to make it work. I just wanted to play around with it while expanding my unix knowledge without destroying my Mac by using it as a playground. Is your Mac an Intel machine? VMware would make a great playground — better than a live CD because you can do a real installation of the OS, and the virtual machine takes care of the hardware compatibility for you. Easier than falling off a log.

(Now that I have some more hard drive space to spread out in, I oughta make a small Ubuntu VM. Been a while since I used it, so I'm sure it's changed more than a little.)

Randall

[phppete]

Hi Randall,

Yes my Mac is an Intel, I'll do some digging around about VMware, I've never used it before.

[Kevin]

VMware and the other virtual machine packages are a great way to try out an operating system. You get to run some other OS in a window without affecting your primary OS other than eating some disk space.

However, if your goal is to try out Linux I would suggest Ubuntu or Kubuntu instead of Knoppix. Knoppix makes a good emergency live CD only system but the *buntus make a better general purpose desktop distro. Also, since they are currently the most popular Linux distros you will be learning what you are most likely to encounter.

[phppete]

Kevin, Randall,

Thanks again for the info, much appreciated. I will download a 30 day trial of VNWare Fusion for the Mac and assuming all goes well I will buy it.

Kevin, is Ubuntu suitable for someone who ultimately wants to learn unix with the end goal in mind of being able to run a server. Ideally I would like to learn enough to be able to run a dedicated server so which OS would be most suitable, I guess probably Redhat or is Ubuntu just as suitable?

Thank you for your time.

[phppete]

I assume I would want to go with the server version?

http://www.ubuntu.com/products/WhatIsUbuntu/serveredition

Thanks :)

[Kevin]

Ubuntu is more desktop oriented which is what I assumed you were wanting to do.

I have never seen the server version of Ubuntu and I haven't heard many fans of it either.

CentOS, OpenSuse, and Debian are much more popular choices for servers.

[Randall]

I've never tried Ubuntu as a server either. VMware and the other virtual machine packages are a great way to try out an operating system. You get to run some other OS in a window without affecting your primary OS other than eating some disk space. And don't mistake VMware (or Parallels, which never got along with my MBP) for anything like the old Virtual PC emulation, which was slower than a slug with a hangover.

I actually use my XP virtual machine to do my work at Job #2 — which involves a lot of heavy-duty accounting software — and aside from slower network performance, I can't tell it apart from a real PC. (Still wondering if the slow networking is normal, or if there's something I haven't done to optimize my system.)

So my PC also happens to be my Mac ... plus I have another minimalist Win2K VM for browser testing with IE 6.

One Laptop to Rule Them All. :winky:

Randall

[phppete]

I installed Ubuntu Desktop via VMWare Fusion, but my Mac on several occasions got very hot, 79º and the fan was running at over 6000rpm.

I was very impressed with Ubuntu Desktop though, a dedicated Ubuntu machine is definitely on the hit list, I don't think VMWare (unless it is my low 1GB RAM) is an ideal solution, very choppy and way too slow IMHO.

I installed Virtual PC 2007 to run the IE8 VHD from MS but as with most things MS it failed miserably, it seems impossible to get a connection and that was slower than a slug. Perhaps I should get a mega powerful 4GB RAM laptop and dual boot Ubuntu and Vista (only for IE - very frustrating!).

If any more bits of plastic fall off my MacBook I'll be switching to Ubuntu for good, while I really like Macs the build quality is a joke.

[Kevin]

I installed Ubuntu desktop for an old Dell diskless box I had spare. It is a P3 866MHz with 512MB of RAM and it works pretty good. It does take a little bit for it to load Gnome but that is mostly because of the fact that it is doing it over NFS.

I originally set it up just to try out Ubuntu and see how well it kept current but I have kept it around as a workstation for visitors to use if they want to check their email or whatever. It works surprisingly well for that and I don't have to worry about visitors screwing up my browser (I REALLY hate it when they hit File>Exit and close ALL of my windows and tabs).

[Randall]

With 1GB of RAM, you may not have enough to run both OSes efficiently (this could also depend on how much RAM you allocated to Ubuntu).

When I started with VMware I had 2GB, which seemed to work well enough with a 640MB XP VM. Kicking it up to 4GB has given me more breathing room.

Another factor could be the version of VMware you downloaded. I'm still using 1.1.3, because the video performance on 2.0 was slow and choppy. But I'm not sure if that's a general problem with 2.0 or something specific to my setup.

Randall

[phppete]

I have just fixed my old Desktop PC, installed IE8 on it so that sorts that issue out. Unfortunately this revived desktop pc only takes a max of 512MB RAM so it is good for storage and IE8 testing only.
I will still be looking to get a new laptop for Ubuntu in the very near future. With all this hardware around me I feel like I'm on a Borg mother ship!

[Randall]

I have never seen the server version of Ubuntu and I haven't heard many fans of it either. Well, somebody (http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20081009-wikipedia-adopts-ubuntu-for-its-server-infrastructure.html) has taken a liking to it, and in a big way. Real big. :wink:

Randall

[phppete]

With 1GB of RAM, you may not have enough to run both OSes efficiently (this could also depend on how much RAM you allocated to Ubuntu).


I've just ordered 2 x 1GB for my MacBook so I am hoping that will help.

While running Ubuntu last night I noticed it was the memory which was the issue not CPU idle. I have assigned 1 virtual processor and 512MB RAM at the moment. I will increase the memory when I get my delivery from Crucial. :smile:

[Kevin]

If you are running Ubuntu with 512MB of RAM I would suggest tweaking the value of vm.swappiness in /etc/sysctl.conf to 10 or less. Maybe even 0. That will tell the kernel to shove less things into swap to make room for the disk cache. Since your host OS is also caching the disk the VM machine doesn't really need to bother.

You can check and set the value with the sysctl command instead of rebooting each time. Then put the value into /etc/sysctl.conf when you find the right one.

On my diskless Ubuntu box I added an old 1GB USB thumb drive for swap just in case it was absolutely needed and set vm.swappiness to 0 so it would only be used if RAM was all used. The system runs surprisingly well like that.

[phppete]

Thank you Kevin, that seems to have made a big difference. Running top in my Mac it shows 10MB of free memory, so I suspect I will see an even bigger difference when I get the extra 1GB.

[phppete]

My RAM arrived this morning (now have 2GB, the max for this MacBook), I have installed it and Ubuntu is very fast with VMWare. VMWare doesn't hang and is very quick to start and shutdown.
So the extra RAM along with Kevins tip of changing vm.swappiness has done the trick.

[Randall]

If you are running Ubuntu with 512MB of RAM I would suggest tweaking the value of vm.swappiness in /etc/sysctl.conf to 10 or less. Maybe even 0. That will tell the kernel to shove less things into swap to make room for the disk cache. Since your host OS is also caching the disk the VM machine doesn't really need to bother. Interesting ... is this the Linux equivalent of turning off virtual memory in WinXP? I've never felt brave enough to try that, since it sounds like a sure way to blow up the system.

As it is, I need to give more RAM to XP now, because we've got a new app that tends to push me over the 640MB mark. Hitting swap on a virtual machine isn't fun. :eeww:

Randall

[Kevin]

In Linux the vm.swappiness setting is a knob to tell the kernel how to balance the memory usage between swap and cache. Normally you have lots of programs running in the background and most of them are just waiting for something to happen. The cron daemon would be a good example or maybe a minimized application. The Linux kernel can toss that program's memory into swap to free up real memory for other applications that need it. But it can also toss that program's memory into swap to allow the disk cache to be bigger. This tends to make the applications you are using run faster but there will be a delay if you try to use whatever was shoved into swap.

Reducing the vm.swappiness makes the kernel less inclined to move a program into swap just to free memory for the cache. It will still move things there if it needs to because it is low on memory. If you set the vm.swappiness all the way to 0 then the kernel will not swap things just to make room for the cache. If you use up too much memory you would still find yourself running from swap.

The reason I used vm.swappiness=0 on my Ubuntu desktop is that the only swap device it has is a USB thumb drive. Not only is that a slow storage device but I didn't want the system wearing out out writing a bunch of junk data to it. So that machine will only swap if it has to.

I suggested it as a VMWare optimization because in a VM setup the host OS is already doing disk caching (and swapping) so there shouldn't be any need to optimize the cache on the guest OS.

BTW, I have several Linux and 1 OpenBSD systems running with no swap at all. This is because they are diskless and have nowhere to put a swap device. As long as I don't run more apps than fit in memory it is fine. The only reason I have that USB thumb drive for flash on the Ubuntu box is that it only has 512MB of RAM (max for that system) and because Ubuntu with Gnome is much more memory intensive than the Gentoo with fvwm I usually use.

[Randall]

I suggested it as a VMWare optimization because in a VM setup the host OS is already doing disk caching (and swapping) so there shouldn't be any need to optimize the cache on the guest OS. It's not totally clear to me how Windows operates, but I found this discussion (http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000422.html) interesting enough to turn off the swap file.

Good thing I raised XP's RAM to 1GB first, because right now my memory usage is at 855MB. :eek: I guess I've been using swap more often than I realized.

Not sure that I'm seeing much of a performance gain, if any. :dunno:

Randall

[Kevin]

I believe Windows now does like Linux has always done and uses any "free" memory as cache. Therefore the "free" memory metric is simply memory that isn't doing anything because the system hasn't found anything to put in there yet. If you have a bunch of memory "in use" by the cache then it is still available to be taken by an application even though it isn't "free".

Free memory is unutilized memory.

[Randall]

If any more bits of plastic fall off my MacBook I'll be switching to Ubuntu for good, while I really like Macs the build quality is a joke. If you've read about the new MacBooks and Pros — or better yet, seen the presentation (http://stream.qtv.apple.com/events/oct/0810rtdws876/m_08100053744wuasd_650_ref.mov) — I think you'll find it reassuring. They don't have many plastic bits left to fall off, and if the fit and finish is as good as they say, these are going to make my MBP feel like a creaky old 70s jalopy. They look more like an iPod Touch (which still has a steel back, not the iPhone 3G's problematic plastic) or the aluminum Nanos.

Solid. :yeah:

Apple makes mistakes — G4 Cube, anyone? — but like I've said, they can learn from them (and from their successes too). Don't let it get you down too much ... your particular failure-prone plastic bits notwithstanding. :hrmm:

Randall

[phppete]

If you've read about the new MacBooks and Pros — or better yet, seen the presentation (http://stream.qtv.apple.com/events/oct/0810rtdws876/m_08100053744wuasd_650_ref.mov) — I think you'll find it reassuring. They don't have many plastic bits left to fall off, and if the fit and finish is as good as they say, these are going to make my MBP feel like a creaky old 70s jalopy. They look more like an iPod Touch (which still has a steel back, not the iPhone 3G's problematic plastic) or the aluminum Nanos.

Solid. :yeah:

Apple makes mistakes — G4 Cube, anyone? — but like I've said, they can learn from them (and from their successes too). Don't let it get you down too much ... your particular failure-prone plastic bits notwithstanding. :hrmm:

Randall

Well that has just about convinced me to abandon Apple for good. The price of the new MacBook 13" http://store.apple.com/uk/browse/home/shop_mac/family/macbook is £949 which is about $1700.

I have already spent the following:
£899 - iBook - screen went dead after just over 12 months
£699 - MacBook 13" White - plastic bits snapping off 13 months

I really look after my computers, my g/f jokes that I treat them like babies, yet they still break.

A 13" screen is a little bit small, so I really need the 15" and that starts at a huge £1399 which is about $2550, more like $2800 when the exchange rate gets closer to $2 - £1 again.

I can pick up a similar spec laptop for half that, such as a HP or even a Dell (or is that Hell :)).

I did hear a report Apple are bringing out a cut price notebook for £475 but no doubt it will be very low spec and 12" screen or something similar.

With the MacBook dropping to £699 from the iBook £899 I thought Apple had learned the lesson of not charging silly prices, obviously they have decided to reverse the trend and rip people off again.

Unfortunately we aren't all living in the US with cheap gas prices - we pay close to $10 a gallon here, everything else is way more expensive, wages lower and our elections are so much duller than yours ;).

I really like my Mac but at the new prices they have got to be joking. When this one totally disintegrates I'll be sending it to Steve Jobs along with my broken iBook and he can decide if his crap products are value for money. I would prefer to code on slate with my blood as ink than spend anymore at Apple :grr:

[Randall]

Unfortunately we aren't all living in the US with cheap gas prices - we pay close to $10 a gallon here, everything else is way more expensive, wages lower Ouch. I thought the weak dollar would make these more affordable outside the US. But if everything costs you more (Macs included), then I guess it doesn't help much. :sad: and our elections are so much duller than yours ;). Normally I'd be willing to trade, but this election is interesting even by our standards. :rasberry:

Randall

[phppete]

Normally I'd be willing to trade, but this election is interesting even by our standards. :rasberry:
Randall

Just like over here, you can guarantee whoever gets in they will screw it up. In 1997 when Tony Blair came to power we all thought it was the second coming, over 10 years on we are well on our way to pre 1990's depression and another 'Winter of discontent (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winter_of_Discontent)'