How I spent my day!

[Swart]

I'm afraid I got sucked into it one more time. Despite owning a T-shirt that proudly says "No! I will not fix your computer" I said "yes" in a moment of weakness when my wife asked me to "take a look" at her friends computer.

Fortunately it was relatively new (not like some of the dinosaurs I get): an Athlon 1800 with 256MB ram, Canon i250 printer, an internal modem with an Intel chipset that didn't sound like a winmodem, nVidia chipset, GeForce video adaptor and a decent monitor. System was running XP with Norton AV but noticeably WITHOUT any service packs.

Uh huh. I though as pictures of dozens of Trojans, spyware and who knows what else. I quick check revealed 60 odd trojans including the Bloodhound trojan. Connecting to the net was almost a waste of time, there was that much outgoing activity it was almost impossible to download anything. Having encountered Bloodhound in a previous life, I knew the best course of action was to admit defeat.

Armed with the futility of going any further I announced I could possibly solve all her problems by installing Linux. What was best was that I go the go-ahead. By this time I was sure I would be out of there in an hour or so.

A quick perusal of the distros at hand led me to the conclusion that SuSE 9.1 personal edition wad the way to go. So I resized the NTFS partition and installed away! All the devices recognised, however the modem required the intel-536ep package installed. Of course, this meant that I couldn't get on the net to download it. Not a problem. Simply reboot, select "Windows" from GRUB, and boot XP.

Nothing.... Not a sausage.

Houston, we have a problem.

Hmmm. Maybe the problem is with NTFS3? Boot to WinXP in system recovery mode, do a fixboot and fixmbr. Reboot to see if that works.

Nope. Now Linux won't boot either.

Okay, recovery install of XP. Nope. Still doesn't boot. Install XP in a separate directory. Still doesn't boot. Okay, blow away the NTFS partition and install into a FAT32 partition.

Still no dice.

Okay, now I need to save the files on the Linux Reiser partition, but I can't boot Linux. Take out my SuSE liveboot edition and startup. Mount the linux partition - no problem, try to burn the files to CD-R. No dice. CD-R not recognised by Live Boot for some reason. I'm tempted to try knoppix. Instead I break out my pen drive and strugle to mount it. Finally I copy just the critical files over to the pen drive. Takes about 20 mins to delete all the unnecessary garbage so that it will fit.

Now I'm safe. I pull out my killer boot CD and blow away all the partitions. Next I kick off the install of Win2K on a smallish FAT32 partition. At this point I leave with instructions to answer the questions it asks. Frustrated, I make the trip back to my place of work-when-I-feel-like-it to put in an appearance. By now it is nearly 11AM and I look irritated enough for anyone to think twice before asking "where have you been".

During this period of unfettered Internet access, I check out the intel-536ep only to find out to my horror that it is a winmodem, but yes, there are linmodem drivers. I quickly snatch the SuSE RPM and the official intel source and whack it on my Pen drive. After work I pick up the kids and its back for round 2 (complete with the kids for moral support and inane questions).

I arrive to find the owner was stuck on the "Enter your Name" question and the installation of Lose2K had stopped at this point. I continue with the fun only to find that 2K doesn't want a bar of this modem either. No problem, I've go the LinModem drivers. Pull out SuSE 9.1 PE, install. Reboot. Mount Pen drive. Copy user files and the drivers. Uncompress the drivers. RPM the driver.

Nothing again. Check the archive. Requires compilation. Gaaah. SuSE personal edition has no C compiler. I can't connect to the Internet because I have no driver for the modem. I can't install the driver because I need to download the compiler. Maybe I can fool it! Time for some lateral thinking!

Fortunately I have a complete copy of SuSE Server. I copy the server files from 3 of the 4 CD's (never worked out what the 4th CD was for) onto the Linux partition and configured YaST to look for installation files there. Bingo, the C compiler comes up but it is OLDER that the already installed cpp - this means I need to backrev cpp. There are a couple of hundred warnings that I ignore to get the compiler installed.

Unfortunately, now nothing else works. Next plan, boot to Windows, get the modem working, manually downloaded gcc and all dependent files and go from there. Reboot. Select Windows.

Nothing.... Not a sausage. I have this feeling of DejaVu.

In desperation I pull out Fedora Core 2. It never lets me down. Sure it's harder for the end user, but I'm more familiar with it, and right now I couldn't care less how hard it was for the end user. Boot to FC2 install and I get the message "Drive geometry is incorrectly reported on the partition table. This may prevent correct booting for some boot loaders."

No S*** Sherlock.

I kick off a vanilla installation of FC2 and by this time the kids are asking which leg they should eat first. I take my leave with instructions to change the CD's when asked (I'm not hopeful about this). I hurry out before the installation finishes, fill the kids up with Pizza and hurry home.

Back for round 3 tomorrow...

 

[rdale]

my condolences... isn't it handy to be so, err, uhmm, handy...

 

[Agape4u]

HEY SWART, WHEN YOU GET THROUGH WITH THAT ONE, WOULD YOU MIND TAKING A LOOK AT MINE? EVERY TIME I TYPE SOMETHING, IT'S IN CAPITAL LETTERS. PEOPLE ARE GOING DEAF FROM ME HOLLERING AT THEM ONLINE. PLEASE HELP!

THANKS

 

[epiclesis]

Wow. Horrible day, you have my sympathy.
the thing about not entering the name box really cracked me up.

HEY SWART, WHEN YOU GET THROUGH WITH THAT ONE, WOULD YOU MIND TAKING A LOOK AT MINE? EVERY TIME I TYPE SOMETHING, IT'S IN CAPITAL LETTERS. PEOPLE ARE GOING DEAF FROM ME HOLLERING AT THEM ONLINE. PLEASE HELP!

THANKS

LOL! Smart aleck in the thread.



Everytime this friend of my father's gets something new, they call me down to hook it up... new printer, i hook it up, new scanner, i have to hook it up, new computer, i have to be on the floor putting the wires together while they're asking all sorts of questions. I wish some people would just learn to do some basic stuff on their own. =p

 

[marduke]

wowsers mate, i feel for you! although im always doing something on someones computer.. lol so i know how you feel.. i remember trying to network win 95 and win ME (and share the internet connection)...... oh boy was that ever a pain of a task... i gave up after 4 hours... lol i got the network to recognise both computers.. but as soon as i went to share the connection the whole lot stuffed up... and i couldnt restore it just so the computers recognised each other... im so glad Win XP networking is a breeze. makes life so much easier

 

[wgjones3]

When I started reading that, I thought you were going to say you had to clean up that harddrive. My girlfriend bought a really nice AMD 2100+ system off a guy for $25 bucks. He built it himself (I know the guy and remember when he built it last year) and was moving to California and said he didn't feel like fooling with it anymore. The reason it was $25? He had broadband access and no firewall or AV of any kind. It was exactly like you described, except that even basic apps took forever to load because of the drain on system resources. She asked me to get the computer running for her (which came with no CDs for OS or any apps except for a Roller Coaster Tycoon expansion pack CD that was in the drive, but the game wasn't installed on the system).

I can't remember what all it had. The Anti-Vir software I installed sounded like a telephone ringing with all the viruses and trojans it picked up. Spybot found something like 600 or 800 instances of spyware and kept choking on coolweb. I had to download the tools to manually get rid of that piece of junk. I don't think I ever completely cleaned it but it works well enough for her to check her email and play Literati (or whatever it is she plays on Yahoo).

I didn't even think of switching to Linux. But the last time I tried to install a Linux OS (Lindows 4.5), it came out about like you're describing. Except, thank goodness, I was able to restore my NTFS partition without having to reinstall Windows. I couldn't even get Lindows to aknowledge my modem at all. I didn't know about the LinModem drivers, though.

Good luck to ya. Here's hoping and praying all goes well in round three.

 

[Swart]

I decided I couldn't face the machine yesterday, but today being Friday and with nothing more important to do than catch a movie, I decided to spin the Karmic wheel once more and have another crack at the computer. It was an off the cuff decision, so I didn't have my bag of tricks with me. Always a fatal action.

I arrived just as the family was going out to dinner. "Not to worry" they said "we don't mind you staying behind."

A dinner invite was what I really had in mind.

I was pleasntly surprised to find Fedora fully installed and operational - apart from the drivers of course. I quickly concluded that the 13YO son must have stepped in to save his mum.

I plug the pen drive in. Copy the RPMs. Gah. These are precomplied for SuSE. Copy the source over, no problem. Then I remember I kicked off the basic install last time, no development tools.

Okay, I kick off the installation of the development tools. This is when I remember I only left two of the CDs behind. Hopefully it won't ask for CD3. It does. Mongrel!

I drag my 11YO away from the games console and its back home for my bag-of-tricks. I reminisce of the time when I could carry all my precious programs around on 10 x 5.25in double density floppy disks instead of 250 odd CDs.

Back with the offending CD, the installation of the development tools finishes and I compile the intel-536ep LinModem driver. It surprises me by working first time and within 5 minutes I'm on the net. The only problem is that because it is proprietary it spoils the kernel.

Next step the Canon i250 printer. Now I have Internet access it is a breeze to find an official Canon driver for Linux. Things are looking up. I download the driver files (RPMs - great!) try to install and bomb out again. Looking through the Canon documentation - which is quite good once you ignore all their 'we don't support this' clauses - I find dependencies in both the x-development (libpng) tools and Gnome development tools (can't remember which one).

Okay. Now I install the tools which results in swapping between CDs 1,2 & 3 about a hundred times. You think they would have worked this out a little better.

With the development tools installed, both the RPMs install without a hitch. Canon have a quirky method for installing and registering the printer, but hey, they provided the instructions, I may as well follow them. For some reason they insist on restarting the computer. I do that. Restarts fine. Then I'm presented with the login screen.

Hmm. What username did they use? What password? Nobody's here except me, my 11YO fixated by some game he's playing, two pet rats and a cat that thinks my kicking it when it comes near me is a display of affection. I go for the predictable and after a few guesses I get it right. I'm gonna havta talk to them about security; right now I'm happy it's lax.

I do few test printouts. Everything is peachy. I create a launcher icon on the desktop for the Canon Printer tool and for Internet access. It looks good now and is starting to look professional. A couple of more tweaks and my USB pen drive appears on the desktop just by plugging it in. It's actually starting to look better than my own system.

Next I work on getting sound up and running. After agonising over why the left speaker is not playing any sound I realise that the speaker is faulty. A few minutes later and I have Don McLeans "American Pie" blasting out in glorious mono.

Only think left is the webcam now. Hmmm. Logitech Webcam. A search of the net reveals a driver for it. I download it and try to install. I'm relieved when it doesn't work first go. What's good is the driver is well written and actually tells me why it didn't install. I need to get xawtv. Off to sourceforge and surprise surprise, its level 5 - production/stable. This is a far cry from most of the alpha software I find myself installing.

Of course, it has a dependency too: libjpeg-devel. Now I know I have that one installed, so it's just a linkage problem that is quickly fixed. Running ./configure causes /lib/cpp to fail its sanity check. Why, I don't have a clue. I fiddle some more with it before giving up, after all it's only a webcam. By now it's 9:30PM and I've been there since 5PM (including the trip home and back). So, I leave with everything up and running. I'm hoping they will be grateful.

That web-cam is still bugging me though. By now I've spent about 12 hours on this 5 minute job and I figure maybe just another couple of hours will have it running smoothly. A bit of research here and there. Shouldn't be a problem.

I'll save it for Round 4.....

 

[Agape4u]

Good Job, Swart. Didn't mean to be a smart aleck with my earlier post, I was just trying to add a little humor to your day. I'm sure they will be most grateful...I would be.

 

[Morrog]

Ahh yes, it seems _you_ have been infected by the trojan and are now plagued by its dirty tricks!
But yay, I kinda feel for ya. I spent half my dad one time trying to get one of my Canon printers to work under Linux without success. I eventually hooked it to a Windows and 6 months later got my Linux system to print to it. ....uh huh...
Well, Good job anyway. Kindness is great isn't it?

Now for suggestions:
1) Couldn't you have just whipped the drive, installed Windows XP again, and then patched it up and filled it with goodies? (Firefox 1.0, Thunderbird, etc.)
2) Bring a laptop, give it access to the net there, network it with the computer, and get internet access that way for whatever you install (I would have installed Gentoo because I'm most famaliar with that, but that's just personal choice).

Ok, Good luck for round 4!

EDIT: Oh and these stories are entertaining

 

[Swart]

Now for suggestions:
1) Couldn't you have just whipped the drive, installed Windows XP again, and then patched it up and filled it with goodies? (Firefox 1.0, Thunderbird, etc.)

I could have. But I'm working to an agenda here. I live in an ultra small community (<800 people) with a very small school (<100 students) that I want to convert completely to Linux.

In pursuit of this goal I am purchasing nearly 100 second-hand computers at the end of this year that I will be selling for $100 pre-loaded with Linux. That way, nobody should ever have to bother me again. The rule will be: You want my help? Buy my computer.

2) Bring a laptop, give it access to the net there, network it with the computer, and get internet access that way for whatever you install (I would have installed Gentoo because I'm most famaliar with that, but that's just personal choice).

No NIC in the PC.

Ok, Good luck for round 4!

EDIT: Oh and these stories are entertaining

Thanks!

I think I might start a "war stories" thread, starting with my experiences with a UNIVAC 1100.

 

[Ave Maria]

HEY SWART, WHEN YOU GET THROUGH WITH THAT ONE, WOULD YOU MIND TAKING A LOOK AT MINE? EVERY TIME I TYPE SOMETHING, IT'S IN CAPITAL LETTERS. PEOPLE ARE GOING DEAF FROM ME HOLLERING AT THEM ONLINE. PLEASE HELP!

THANKS

Turn off the caps lock! If that don't work, buy a new keyboard!

 

[CSMR]

Uh huh. I though as pictures of dozens of Trojans, spyware and who knows what else. I quick check revealed 60 odd trojans including the Bloodhound trojan. Connecting to the net was almost a waste of time, there was that much outgoing activity it was almost impossible to download anything. Having encountered Bloodhound in a previous life, I knew the best course of action was to admit defeat.
Armed with the futility of going any further I announced I could possibly solve all her problems by installing Linux. What was best was that I go the go-ahead. By this time I was sure I would be out of there in an hour or so.

Linux... I heard that was a virus of some sort. So you take a computer with 60 viruses and decide to install another one?

 

[Word of Peace]

Makes me glad I don't have any Linux machines on my network to support.

 

[doofus125]

I think throwing an OS onto a computer that belongs to someone who doesn't know how to use the computer very well is a bad idea. You are teaching them to use an OS that isn't mainstreamed and when they go elsewhere they are going to have no idea what they are doing, plus the program compatibility is going to cause problems when they have to take stuff elsewhere. Putting it on your computer is one thing because you know how to deal with it, putting it on someone's computer that they don't know jack is just a bad idea period.

 

[Lecarde]

I'm going to install linux on a friend's computer. He wants to learn more about computers, I figure thats a good place to start

 

[doofus125]

I'm going to install linux on a friend's computer. He wants to learn more about computers, I figure thats a good place to start

I totally disagree with putting linux onto a system that is going to be used by someone who is learning how to use a computer. There isn't any tech support for them if they need it in the future from the pc manufacturer. And even if they do get a hold of tech support the first thing they are going to tell them is to format the hard drive and reload windows, trust me I know this first hand. Linux is ok for those of you who know what you are doing and want to modify your computer, but at this time I see it as a poor choice for someone who isn't already well versed on how to use their computer.

 

[Lecarde]

I totally disagree with putting linux onto a system that is going to be used by someone who is learning how to use a computer. There isn't any tech support for them if they need it in the future from the pc manufacturer. And even if they do get a hold of tech support the first thing they are going to tell them is to format the hard drive and reload windows, trust me I know this first hand. Linux is ok for those of you who know what you are doing and want to modify your computer, but at this time I see it as a poor choice for someone who isn't already well versed on how to use their computer.

I never said he needs to learn how to use it. He wants to learn more about them, he's going to college to learn about them.

If someone was just learning how to use their computer, I think linux would be a good a choice as any. There's a learning curve with any OS, including Windoze. Its when people get so ingrained in any particular OS that they have trouble changing their mode of thinking enough to learn a new one.

 

[Swart]

After a few weeks of avoidance, I finally bumped into my wife's friend today who complained she could no longer print for some reason. Since my plans for today had fallen through I agreed to pop around after 2PM.

I rolled up to find the PC sitting there happily logged in. Checked the printer was plugged in. Yep. Tried a test print: spooler error.

Since Fedora Core 3 had recently been released, I decided this just might be my shortcut. I installed FC3 at home and lots of things that had never worked started working (except my Sony Clie hotsink ).

Reboot. Put in the CD, began updating, bombed out on disk 3. Fatal error on zlib, corrupt archive. Reboot, restarted installation, jumps straight to disk 3 (great improvement that) and this time there is no problem. FC3 up and running like a charm. However, in the process the WinModem driver didn't take. I'll have to deal with that later.

Printing still doesn't work, so I uninstall the canon packages and re-install them. The method is a little quirky but very well documented and within 10 minutes I'm prinitng again. The problem comes when I try to print from OpenOfficeOrg. For some reason it starts printing halfway down the page. Hmm. Quick check shows the printer is set to A5 from within OOO. Every time I change it, it shifts back to A5.

I work on this for about 45 minutes before I give up. I tell the user I'll install Abiword. However, when I try it fails on a dependency for libroco. Huh? I know this is installed. After some mucking around I realise it must have something to do with the upgrade to FC3. Originally I installed from the K12LTSP-4.1.0-FC2 CDs which are a modification of the FC2 distro to include LTSP and the K12 packages. Never mind, I 'll brushg up on my RPM skills and install abiword manually. Nine dependencies straight up, with the first dependency having three of its own. This is going to take forever.

Instead I pull out an older copy of OOO and install it in a separate directory. Works fine. I place an icon on the desktop with instructions to the user to use THAT one when printing.

Now to the LinModem drivers. One annoying thing about Fedora is that paths to /sbin and /usr/sbin are not standard, which stops many install scripts from work. I export the new path before unpacking the intel-i536 tar file and run the following:

make clear
make 536
make install

Instantly the modem is working again.

Now that webcam is till bothering me from last time. I pick up from there and install xawtv. The install script for this is a thing of beauty. Run './configure' and then 'make' With xawtv installed, the way is paved for the driver installation. Again the install script './quickcam.sh' is another beautifully written script. Despite a few warnings it was very soon up and running.

Hmmm. I just remembered I forgot to add 'modprobe quickcam' to the init script. Oh well. I guess another visit might be necessary.

Todays efforts took about 4 hours, of which about 1 hour was waiting to swap CDs. Not a bad effort and all of her peripherals are work (which is more than I can say for my PC). So, I came home today quite chuffed and ate my now cold dinner while I contemplated the experience.


Over the last two weeks I have been evaluating linux distributions for two 2nd hand hardware platforms for end users (I intend to distribute 60 of each). I have come to the conclusion that SuSe 9.1 is THE way to go. SuSe 9.2 is way too heavy. Really nice, but you need 256MB RAM minimum. SuSe 9.1 requires 128MB minimum to operate effectively, and while 9.0 will run in 64MB, it is a dog with anything less that 128MB.

FC3 is still lacking in peripheral support, and with Gnome as the default (and only really effective) desktop, it falls short for workstation use. As much as a like Gnome, KDE is beating it left, right and centre. udev is only now supported on FC3.

I tried Xandros and ended up with machines that would boot when they felt like it and freeze the mouse quite often. Occasionally, Xandros reboots for no apparent reason.

Mandrake is, well, Mandrake. The problem with SuSe is that I only have the PE which hamstrings you from doing ANY devlopment work or compilation at all. I would like to try the full version.

I'm starting to wonder if there is a distro out there for me. One that can serve as a great desktop, allows development and can run the services I want.

 

[Arnediad]

Bleh, dependency hell. I'll be staying away from Linux, if you don't mind =

As for the 'distro' that you're looking for, why not give FreeBSD a shot? I use it at home for all of my desktop work, development, servers, etc.

 

[Swart]

Bleh, dependency hell. I'll be staying away from Linux, if you don't mind =

As for the 'distro' that you're looking for, why not give FreeBSD a shot? I use it at home for all of my desktop work, development, servers, etc.

Hmmm. I might. Can you point me to download site?