Gentoo deriv. easier than Ubuntu / Fedora (RANT alert)
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| Author | Content |
|---|---|
| hkwint Mar 03, 2010 3:02 PM EDT |
((( RANT ALERT - walk out while you still can ))) So one of the disks in my RAID0 - array crashed - due to the insane people which made such a stupid design of the SATA-connectors. The connector broke the first time I plugged it in, and that's a bit sad for a brand new $70 drive, but anyway. Second-glue (is that an English word?) held for about two years, but now the HD spews dmesg-errors and halts about thrice a day. Rebuilding your ReiserFS trees about twice a week ain't fun, so: Time to remove the rotten apple. All my mobo's IDE-connectors (1 mobo connection, but a cable has two connections) are used for 2 old loyal IDE (PATA) harddrives. The IDE hd's never break down, stupid SATA drives! As I wanted to build something 'green', I chose the AMD mobo chipset with only 1 IDE connector and 4850e CPU. So the optical drives are physically mounted, but no cables connected. I have been pretty pleased with my floppy-less / CDROM-less / DVD-less system, until it broke of course. BTW: I have a recent back up this time! Result: I have been looking for a kind of 'USB rescueCD' for a while, to re-order the RAID0 array (shrink it from four to three partitions). And heck, why not download something I can use as a LiveCD as well? So next time Linux crashes (uhm, my hardware does) I can still continue to rant on LXer forums using Firefox? Tried Mandriva, OpenSuse, Ubuntu and Fedora but none of them 'user friendly' distro's is able to start Xorg on my nVidia 6600 LE, and they let Xorg just throw an error on the console and quit. The 'newbie' here is left with a 'DOS-like' screen, the dreaded / horrible Command Line (TM). How userfriendly is that. Just fscking great. Apart from the horribly broken USB-procedure Ubuntu needs, the least user friendly of them all. Not to say that I'm an 'expert', but if some 7 year Gentoo-user barely pulls it of I suppose there might be a problem. Once I found myself having to loop-mount some file in Ubuntu because it just wants a device file (/dev/.....) before it will boot, it doesn't accept a file! But it accepts /dev/loop0 as a cdrom device? And after that, the user has to run $sudo X -configure by hand, needs to use sudo to copy the resulting Xorg.conf from root to /etc/X11 and then needs to substitute for Vesa by means of manual conf-editing followed by $startx, then how is some newbie supposed to pull this of? Yes, I know, download the Ubuntu LiveCD, boot it, and from there use the bundled utility to create LiveUSB. Excuse me, but last time I needed some random 'fixing utility' to do what some command line commands should have been able to do, I was using 'Daemon tools' on Windows to mount ISO's. Note: The same Xorg-mess goes for OpenSuse, Mandriva and Fedora too, with honorable mention for F12 (nouveau I guess?) for almost blowing up my monitor. So I thought about repackaging all my important Gentoo-packages into some image, when I found out that's just what SysRescueCD does. See sysrescuecd.org. MDadm, parted, cfdisk, lvm; the whole bunch is included and all my lvm volumes on top of MD-raid are even recognized. Best of all: When I run #wizard I have 4 options to boot X. The first one didn't work, but the second one, bingo! Maybe I have to admit I used 'forcevesa' as a boot parameter, but nonetheless this is the first LiveUSB which is able to boot X without me having to edit config files and using sudo to move them (why is there a non-root user on an Ubuntu LiveCD?). Sadly it doesn't just start my dhcpcd, it requires some manual intervention (Gentoo 50MB minimal install CD just works out of the box). But anyway, here's what I wonder: -How is it that Ubuntu, Fedora, OpenSuse and Mandria are not able to boot Xorg on a rather mainstream nVidia 6600LE? -How is it that "them distro's" still don't have some "fallback" system, like good ol' Windows? I mean, if I change display settings in Windows it asks me to click OK within 30 sec, and if I don't it assumes the display is garbled and rewinds. Why don't Ubuntu and Fedora have stuff like this? Like 'rewinding' to VESA if crippled Nouveau and messed up Xorg (insert newest version in which whole Xorg has been rewritten _again_ here) doesn't work? -Why doesn't Ubuntu have some easy means of booting from USB which doesn't require to boot from a CDROM / emulate CDROM using loopback first? -And how is it that something Gentoo-based is the only thing that does work without having to edit config files? I just don't know. I guess I should file some bugs or something. But ranting is still easier - and why file a Ubuntu bug if Gentoo works out of the box and is easier to use. So here it is! Happily written from XFCE/VESA. |
| Steven_Rosenber Mar 03, 2010 5:42 PM EDT |
We're in the same boat, except my leaks are due to Intel video, not Nvidia. |
| hkwint Mar 03, 2010 7:46 PM EDT |
Glad I'm not the only one. All 'fixed' now though, but I might give the mentioned distributions a new chance anyway and this time do some more 'thorough' documentation of my efforts. |
| Scott_Ruecker Mar 03, 2010 10:05 PM EDT |
Would have made a great article...:-( |
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