Still not configured

Well, I haven't gotten it all configured. So far, I see that my sound card doesn't seem to be working. I can't get my CD drive to play music CDs. I don't have Internet yet, but I haven't put a lot of work into that.

What I've been doing it figuring out what software I need to make my linux machine do what the windoze machine does. I found Insyte's page, and he's got a list of useful programs. I went thru there and picked some.

So far I've got a package installer front end. A page with lots of KDE add-in software. Here is some additional software. KDE decoration for the desktop. Finally, aMP3 database, this is important since I've got about 5000 MP3s.

I'm going to try to get the Internet connection working first. I found that Slackware has a tool called pppsetup. Hopefully it sees the modem. I haven't found out how to determine that yet. I also came up with WVdial, it should help out quite a bit, it's supposed to auto detect the modem. I'll be happy with that for the time being, but I want to make sure that I can configure it manually. I'll post to see if I can do that. Also found a link to a script that a user wrote to simplify pppsetup, it's called ispsetup1.2. Here's another script called gx-logon that connects to the Internet remotely.

So, next thing I'll need to do is find out if I can have WVdial detect the modem and connect up. I guess I'll have to switch my Internet, but that doesn't matter. On to better things.

Workstation loaded, time to configure

I got my workstation loaded to dual boot. It's a piece of cake to get it dual booting. I found that Mepis, Vector and Slackware automatically set up the dual boot for you.

I received the 2 drives on Friday. I installed them into the computer as primary master and primary slave. Booted up with a DOS disk and Fdisked. Set up a 3 gig partition to load Windows 98 and left everything else unpartitioned. That's a limitation to DOS fdisk, it doesn't allow you to create non-DOS partitions. I did a quick google to see if there were any replacements for fdisk that would allow you to create a DOS and a Linux partition and can't find any.

I loaded up Windows 98 and was up and running in about 2 hours. That's one thing I've gotten good at, reloading the OS. Next it's time to install linux. I was planning on loading Mepis and the CD has a how-to on installing. Problem is it talks about a file called mkbootfloppy.exe and my CD didn't have that. I did a little googling and other people have the same problem. So I was going to forget about that and try Ubuntu. I found the install readme and it talks about something called SBM.bin. Found this file on the CD and it's awesome.

This file, SBM.bin, is a floppy image. I burned it to disk with rawrite and booted up. This thing is great. Allows me to boot off of CD. I could also use any other OS loaded on the drives. It sees all the partitions and lets you select them. I found SBM on this page.

I booted off the floppy, selected to boot the Mepis CD and it came up as usual. I brought up cfdisk while in Mepis and partitioned the rest of the drives. I've now got /dev/hda1=3 gig, /dev/hda2=4.5 gig, /dev/hda3=500 meg, /dev/hdb1=4 gig, /dev/hdb2=4 gig. Of course hda3 is the swap partition. I will load up linux distros on the other partitions.

While in Mepis, I told it I wanted to install. Stepped thru the installation. First problem was that the install application would not let me put it on the second drive and put the swap on the first drive. So I killed the install and restarted it. I put Mepis on the first drive. I booted up just fine. It was a bit slow, though, so I decided to whack that and try something else.

I decided to try Vector. I followed the hard drive installation directions located on the Vector linux installation guide. To do this, you also have to use loadlin.exe. You can get that here. So you boot into DOS and go to this directory. Use the loadlin command and it starts up. I ran cfdisk to make sure Mepis was no longer there, then did a setup. Installed to the second drive without a hitch. Let me use the swap on the first drive. Rebooted and came up fine. Then I wanted to change the lilo.conf file to indicate this was Vector and it wouldn't write because they were on different drives. Oh well, it doesn't have to say Vector.

I wanted to put on another distro for that other partition. After much thinking I finally decided to load up Slackware. I booted SBM and then the Slackware CD. Loaded up like a charm. I was able to use that last partition as my /home directory and I wrote out lilo to the MBR. After rebooting, I changed lilo.conf to indicate Slackware. I'm good to go, but I haven't used X yet in Slackware. Next is to configure the system, that's going to be a challenge. I'll try to document that extensively.

I think that since Vector is Slackware based, I'm going to remove Vector. First I'm going to edit lilo.conf and set it up to boot 3 different OSes. But I will remove Vector in favor of some non-Slack based distro. I think I'll try something Debian based, but not sure.

Workstation should be next

Now that I'm about done with the server, I'll get that thing moved over behind a shelf and start playing with some workstations. I'm going to have to replace my hard drive, so I'm going to buy 2 smaller drives and dual boot. This topic it to figure out what I need to do.

I need to do the following on Linux, so I need to troubleshoot. First, I have a SCSI Zip drive that I want to access. There's also my Palm III. So need the serial ports. The GPS uses the other serial cable. The HP Laserjer 6i printer is on the Parallel port. Sony CD writer.

I know that there is software available in linux to send files to the PDA. I feel certain that the serial and parallel ports are not a problem either. I do need to figure out how to move GPX files to the PDA.

I've changed my mind about the server. I want to write up the procedures on how I got it set up, so I need to rebuild it. I also want to see if Samba is included in the main build. That way I don't need to load it up seperately.

I started writing up the procedures last night. This is going to be a work in progress. I need to srite some of it as I do the work. Once it's all finished, I'll make it headless and then secure it. It's not that big a deal since it's a stand alone network.

Working on a server

I had to take the day off work the other day to care for some sick kids. In the down time while they were napping, I decided to set up my server to be a Linux machine instead of Win2k. I figure this will help me out. The best learning I do is when I do something and then later figure just what was happening.

So, first thing's first. Boot up with the Slackware disk and re-partition the drive. Next load up Slackware 10.0. Piece of cake on these machines. After the 2 hours installing, it's time to configure.

I found the Shilo is a Geek page on the forums and it's a real nice how-to. This page spells out just how to set up a home server to run Slackware. Spells it out so a newbie can follow easily. I used it to get SSH running. I found that it was already running and just not configured.

Next I used it to configure the FTP server. Once again, Slackware installed this just fine. I just needed to set it up to start up at boot time. So now I don't need to use my CD-ROM in this machine. This will be a headless server, so it's about done. I can access it remotely and I can put files to it. That's about all I need on this.

Next I was going to set up Apache, but his page is written like a tutorial, so next step became setting up sendmail. I've heard horrible things about this, so it was surprising that it was so simple. This is where I found out about:

chmod +x /etc/rc.d/rc.sendmail

It also got me looking at how it boots. I found that this rc.d directory is used when booting. You basically just make whichever daemon executable and it starts at boot.

Now it's on to Apache. Once again, just a little configuring and it's usable. I immediately moved a web page over and I can read it from there. The page would not display the graphic on the page, so I had to do some minor troubleshooting. Turned out it was just a directory spelled wrong. Corrected that and it displays just fine. I'm going to play around with this a little. I may just make a family web page that we can access from home.

The real problem I had was getting DHCP running. I eventually found the Linux Home Networking page. This had a good sample of the dhcpd.conf file. I typed this thing in and it didn't work for me. I had to do a little troubleshooting and googling. Eventually I solved it myself. Turns out I left off a semicolon. But in my defense, the sample did not have the semicolon either.

Final hurdle for now is getting DHCP working at boot up. I posted a note on the forums and eventually got a response. I added the line correctly the first time to rc.local, but I didn't include the &. This puts it running in the background. Now it's working just fine at boot up.

The last things I need to do on this server is get Samba configured and running. Figure out how to make this a home directory accessable from Windows. Get the time outs fixed on this. The first time out is in LILO. It waits for 1:45 for me to pick a linux to run. Too long, so I'll reduce this to about 15 seconds. Next it waits for me to pick a video mode, this is an additional 30 seconds. Don't want to wait, so I'll have to figure out what to do here. I think it's probably just a matter of telling it I don't want to run a frame buffer.

The final thing is to troubleshoot the boot up. It calls out a couple problems. Fails 2 times while looking for the AT keyboard. Don't have one, so have to get rid of this. Also sees the mouse. If I go headless, I don't need this at all. That's about all I need to do to have this fully functional server. Then it's back to the workstations. I also need a new hard drive, so I'll be setting my main machine up as a dual-boot machine. That will be a challenge because of all the stuff in this machine.

I'm getting there

Well, I started upgrading the kernel. I downloaded the kernel and patch. I found several pages that step you thru the process. So I got started.

First, I don't have Samba set up yet, so it's a matter of copying files from CD. CDs everywhere. I'm really tired of wasting them.

Then I pulled up the Kernel Build How-To on Digital Hermit. This is the only place I came across doing the patches. The rest of the process is on other pages that are written a little better for my use.

While browsing thru the forums, I found that I needed to install the module tools before doing the build. So, I installed this. This is a piece of cake. Just installpkg module-init-tools-3.1-i486-1.tgz. It installs without a hitch. Of course I had to be in as root to do this.

Next it's on to extracting the kernel and applying the patches. Extraction is done by tar xfvj /usr/src/linux-2.6.11.11.tar.bz2. Somewhere I saw that you could do this as a regular user, but that's not the case. After tar finished complaining about not being able to do stuff, I went in as root and it worked fine. I've since found that a regular user is unable to write outside of the /home directory.

The patch was a challenge to extract. I tried to extract it on the command line, but for some reason I couldn't do it. So it's in to KDE to try. This was easy. Just find the file, right click it and tell it to extract here. Then back out of KDE, don't want to screw something up being in there.

Now applying the patch was a piece of cake. cd linux-2.6.11.11 then patch -p1 <../patch-2.6.11.11. I thought it was a -pl at first, but it told me it had to be a number, so I changed it to 1 and it went no problem.

I ran out of time to complete this, so I'll do that tonight. The rest of the process will be done while referencing the Slacker's Bible.

Moved /home

I found that Slackware will look at your partitions and ask about additional partitions on your drive while installing. I started installing it, ran cfdisk and set up 3 partitions. When I installed Slackware, it saw that extra partition and asked if it was to use it for anything. I told it to use it for /home and it proceded normally.

The kernel download finally finished. I didn't have time last night to install. I did pull down the other file that's required. I need to do the patch also. I didn't know anything about a patch, but it's a small file. I came up with Digital Hermit How-To and the Kernel Trap How-To. These are the first places I found anything about a patch. I didn't know what that was all about when I was downloading.

I also burned a new CD for the Build a Minimal System from Source project. I thought I only pulled the 2.6.10 kernel patch, but I had the kernel itself as well. After I get a bit more familiar with linux, I'm going to give that a try. That will probably be on the 300 MHz. But I'm not sure.

After all that, I'll do the Linux From Scratch project. I have the book and CD, so I'm way ahead already. I just don't want to do this without having a background. I want to learn a lot with this.

Time to move /home

Since I've been installing a new distro about every 2 weeks, I've decided to move my /home directory. I'm tired of copying files off of CD and un tarring them. When I move the /home directory, I will be able to move the tarball and extract it. Delete the tarball and install. This will allow me to install some apps and the new kernel with whatever distro I put in.

I had no idea what to do, so a little googling produced some good results. The best seems to be this article. It's broken down so anyone can follow it. It just needs some confidence. I'll do this while I'm waiting for the kernel to finish downloading. I think I'll probably have to re-install Slackware, I haven't learned how to change the partitioning on the drive. I'm sure that I can do that, but since I'm working with a new install, it will be better to just re-install.

I just looked at my previous blogs and see that I never brought up the kernel. I was thinking about moving to the new kernel, and started googling it. Looks fairly straight forward, but it's intimidating. I don't know why I would do this any other time, but I want to learn how to do it. I think it's one of those things that the linux elitists like to do. Squeeze that little bit of performance out of the processor. I came up with some good links to do this.

I started downloading it this weekend, but the thing is 35 Meg, and my slow connection is making it painful. It's mostly done and should finish up today. Then it's a matter of putting it into my new /home and getting it installed. I found the Slacker's Bible page about compiling the kernel and it's probably the one I'd follow. But there's also this How-To on compiling a kernel in Slackware. Finally, there's the Slackware Linux Essentials page. Gives a bit of a back ground for it.

So, tonight I'm hoping to get /home moved and get the new kernel compiled. This should be enough to give me some questions to ask the experts in the forums.

A little side track

After deciding that I was going to set up my server, I got to looking into it and decided it needed to wait a little. I want to have my server headless, so I need to telnet in to make changes once it's set up. To do this, I'm going to need to use vi to do the editting. So I'm now on a quest to learn vi.

I've used it a little at work, but that's been years. It's not all that difficult, but it's not easy either. So I started reading in my Practical Linux book about vi. I did a little practicing, then found I need to know some commands. A cheat sheet would work well here. So off to Google.

I first came across a bunch of lame pages. These basically had all the same stuff. They were just lists of commands. No formatting to them. Or it they were formatted, they didn't print properly. The best of this type can be found here. This is an individual's page, so it could disappear at any time. He did a pretty good job on this, but it just doesn't print well for me. He also has a bunch of other vi related stuff.

Then I found the K Computing vi cheatsheet. Now this is much better. They used PDF format, so it's savable and printable. It's still not quite what I'm looking for, so I kept looking.

This time I decided to add PDF to my search and came up with this cheatsheet. This is just about perfect. It has the most used commands, and it's formatted great. Definately worth saving. This will come in very useful.

If you decide you need a little more explaination of the commands, there's this page. It does not have a cheat sheet, but it teaches you how to make your own. I printed this one off to try to learn something myself. I'll use the printed cheatsheet, but this will help me in the future.

So that's my little trip off my defined track. I'll get this server set up, but it's going to take a little longer. After all, I want to learn linux, not just get a server up and running. It's going to take me a bit longer to get things going, but it will be worth it in the end.

I have seen that my Practical Linux book is not as advanced as I'd like it to be. I'll be switching to Rute soon. That realy has the commands.

Plans for the future

I currently have a Win2k server running on the LAN. I have a share on it, but for the most part it's a DHCP server. No need to run Win2k for this. I'm going to get that loaded up with probably Vector and get it working.

Now I need to do some homework. I need to find out how to set up Vector to be a DHCP server. How to make it work as a file server accessible from a Windoze machine. I also need it to be able to handle authentication. I don't even know how I get it to act as a security server.

Here's another thought. That would not use too much horsepower. I could always use that P2 300MHz as the server. I'll have to check it out and see what kind of power it uses. I would think that this Compaq would use less power. Either way is fine, but I also want to use the 300 as a firewall if I'm ever able to get DSL.

Looks like DNS is handled by BIND. I think I need to download and install that. I found this how-to on DNS. Here's the BIND page.

DHCP is handled in all Linux distros. I would need to configure it, changing the dhcpd.conf file. I found this DHCP how-to. There's also this how-to.

As for Samba, I think this can be set up and run in console mode.

So the plan for the next couple days is to load up that machine. Configure the network card to have a static IP. Configure DHCP on this and test it out with the other machines. Then it's on to DNS. I would need to download BIND. Install that and configure. Then Samba. This one I have already downloaded.

It all starts tonight.

What have I done so far?

My current test environment is a hub with 4 machines hanging off it. There's my internet machine, it's a 450 MHz that I put together from parts. It's got 192 Meg RAM, a Sony CD burner, Adaptec SCSI card with an external Zip drive, 80 hard drive, ethernet and modem. There's another machine like this that my son used to play his kids games. That one has a SCSI flat bed scanner connected as well.

The test machines are identical as well. They are Compaq Ipaq workstations. The processors are 733 MHz Pentium III with 128 Meg RAM. The only legacy connector is video. Everything else on them is USB, inclucing keyboard. The makes it real easy to install. Hardware detection is almost flawless. All the components are supported by almost everything.

Now for my linux track. I first picked up a Red Hat Linux for Dummies at Ollies. I love that store, the book retailed for $40, I got it for $7.99. It included a copy of Red Hat 9. It installed fine, but after using it a little, it left me wanting for something more. I couldn't put my finger on it, but something was missing.

So, I start googling for how to find the best distro. What did I find? The same answer all the time, there is no best distro, you just have to try some to find out what is right for you. So, now I need to find some distros. I came across one of the big on-line CD warehouse types of places. You know the places where you are basically paying for shipping and a relatively small fee for someone to burn some CDs for you. This worked out great for me, after all, I'm on dial-up. I ordered their package special. I ended up with about 12 distros for $29.99. This gave me 26 CDs to play around with.

OK, now it's time to play. First loaded, Mandrake 10.1. I kind of liked this one. Felt better than RH9. I didn't want to tie myself down though. I did a little reading and found that some people experience some slowness using Mandrake. Since almost all my stuff is old, I want to shop around a little more.

Next up, Mepis. All I can say is WOW!!! If Linux ever makes it to the mainstream, this will probably be the big name. This thing installed without much of anything from me. The best part is you boot it up as a live CD and you can play around with this. Then if you decide you like it, you tell it to install. I played around with it a bit and decided it seems a bit comercial. That's not a bad thing, but I want to learn linux, and this is so polished that I won't get too much here. But I can definately see myself installing this on my mother's machine.

The latest install is Vector Linux. Where Mepis was polished, this is fast. Everything you do is quick. I felt like I had a much newer machine. I've only played around a couple days with this, but I think I'll like this one. It's Slackware based, so there's a lot of stuff out there for me to read if I need help. It's also hands on enough where I'm going to learn a bit more. I do think I'll keep this one around a while.

Now for my first failure. My Internet machine runs Win98. I figured this is one to dual boot on. So I partition out the drive. I've got half of it for Windows, a 10 gig partition to share files. I then pulled off the files needed to do the install and put them in that shared partition. Next it's boot off a DOS floppy and start the install. This went well. Installed fine all the way to the LILO install. Then it's decision time. Do I write to floppy, write to the partition or to the MBR? Well, this machine is so old it won't see a 80 gig drive, I have to use WD software to trick it. This is my undoing. I can't write to the MBR or it won't boot at all. I can't go to the partition since that won't boot. My only choice is the floppy. So, I select floppy and I get errors writing the LILO. Since Vector is a bit crude, I can't even step back to the previous step, I have to continue on. So that's where I stand.

I guess the next thing is reading material. Since I'm learning linux, I have to read. I found the Rute User's Tutorial and Exposition on-line and started reading. This thing is great. I'm learning so much from this thing. So I decide that since I'm getting so much from this, I bought it on Amazon. This way, I'm giving a little something back. Then it's on to the forums at LinuxQuestions.org. There I find that many feel the book to get is A Practical Guide to Linux by Mark Sobell, so I got this one also. This is a bit dated, but I figure the info I'm trying to learn is what happens down low in Linux, so this won't change too much.

I also found the Linux From Scratch project. I figure once I have a handle on this, I'll give building my own distro a try. What better way to learn almost everything about it than to build it myself. So I bought this as well. I figure it's a good cause, and my slow connection would take forever to download.

That's it for now. Future blogs will be more on the lines of what I did with linux the previous couple days. I think I'm caught up now, so I can take off with live updates now.

An introduction to my blog

I'm a Windows System Administrator by trade. I owe my entire career to Microsoft. That said, I hate the business practices. I hate that the user is treated as a criminal by M$. We are forced to activate any new M$ software if there's a major change to our systems in a poor attempt to stop software piracy.

Now there is good to M$. Without them, the PC would not be in practically every home. We wouldn't be using a Mac because it would be cost prohibitive to most of us. We would use computers at work, and that's about it. The Internet would be used by the government and businesses primarily.

But because of the negatives, I decided last year that I was going to start researching Open Source solutions. I just wanted to find out if I was missing anything. To my amazement, I found there was software available to do practically anything. I started out with OpenOffice.org. This package is a complete replacement for M$ Office. It works fantastic. That got me looking into other solutions.

Of course, this put me on to Linux. And that's what this blog is about. I want to document for my own use just what I'm doing. What I'm learning, and what I want to learn. If it helps others out, great, but the others need to keep in mind that this is for ME, I won't be updating this on a set schedule, I might do it every 2 weeks, I might do multiple updates some days. You never can tell.

These are the things that I need to start with.

My current set up.
My distros and where I got them.
Which distros I've loaded and what do I think about them.
Which ones do I want to try.
What problems have I run into.

That's it for now.