Paging net techies.

I thought you were supposed to be good at linux and all that shit?

 

Unix, which is near enough but I haven't got that far yet. I am stuck
one install away from it but it'll be a fucking breeze when I do get it
working.

 

See now why isn't this shit on the web site in such an easy to find
manner.

And just for the record it is bollox as it won't let me use scsi but is
quite happy to start the fedora install using IDE until it gets to the
point where it worked out I had got the wrong distro and I need a 32 bit
one not the 64 what I seem to have got by mistake. So I am having to
**** off and get the right one.

Hey ho, my pot is half full, downloads are not counted against my limit
after midnight and I get no contention either. Two steps forward one
back.

 

This is the bit where I was not even attempting to do it right.

New copy of the distro on its way after my other little faux pas but not
by torrent at 12 measly k a second and an estimated 8 day download
time!! Who needs that kind of slow shit when I have an 80% efficient 8M
pipe coming into my house. Next time there is a thread on the subject of
how fucking wonderful the torrent idea is expect me to have an opinion.
Ordinary FTP rocketh to the max.

In about 3 hours probably.

 

Err.. what's so hard? I use it all the time at work and home and I've
never had a problem..

Phil

 

actually no. i use a mac you see. so far i have just used parallels, but i
am thinking of giving the new vmware fusion beta a go because parallels is
such a buggy piece of shite.

get a distro with decent package management like debian or ubuntu. you'll
not regret it when you come to having to upgrade the system.

 

hey, google uses a *lot* of python and they are pretty pragmatic people.

 

I've just upgraded parallels on my macbook pro to the latest version -
it's not bad but it does turn a nice fast bit of kit into a very very
slow bit of kit..

Yup. Upgraded my desktop from ubuntu 6 to 7.04 in one easy move and
minimal work.

Phil.

 

Point noted but for the moment I'll stay with Fedora, just to poke
around and get my bearings. Although for the future I will almost
certainly try another more muppet friendly distro[1].

I have at least got a Linux system working[2][3] and am logging into a
console as root and seem to be able to get back to windows without too
much effort and can thus declare this part of the game working.

I remain unimpressed with the fedora (Linux) install process and would
still call it far from granny friendly. I selected what seemed like
sensible defaults and it has not installed to become a working machine
with a nice gui interface and everything you expect these days.



[1] If it wants me to unpack jar files and recompile the kernel from the
command line and all that bollox on patch Tuesday then it is off this
machine faster than ukrm could consume beer and pizza. I expect point
and click for that sort of stuff.

[2] Thanks oggers for the one line that made it all so easy. Now, how do
I get VmWare Tools installed?

[3] Every time I press a key I get an error that starts "exception
Emask" which is a step in the right direction in the sense it knows I
have pressed a key in my new virtual world. And what the **** is a
"host bus error" anyway? Hey ho welcome to the world of Linux.

 

Hardly surprising if you use a system that's for tinkerers and students.
Here, this will put an end to the pain you're suffering ...

http://www.uk.freebsd.org/

D.

 

All you have to do to patch it is type "yum update"

It'll only install patches for the current core release though (in this
case, 7). If you want to upgrade to Fedora Core 8 when it comes out at
some point in the future, you'll need to do a fresh OS install. Redhat
derived distributions are a bit wanky like that.

In theory, VM > Install VMWare Tools...

I think it mounts it as a virtual CD or something, and then you just run
the installer therein. The tools/drivers are pretty much essential under
Windows, but you can do without them under Linux really.

Are you getting something like...

ata2.00: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x0 action 0x0
ata2.00: (BMDMA stat 0x26)
ata2.00: cmd a0/01:00:00:00:00/00:00:00:00:00/a0 tag 0 cdb 0x4a data 8
in
res 51/50:03:00:00:00/00:00:00:00:00/a0 Emask 0x20 (host bus error)
ata2.00: configured for UDMA/33
ata2: EH complete

If so, do what I said before and change the CD-ROM device to be SCSI
instead of IDE (you'll need to do this while the VM is powered off,
natch) and it'll stfu. It's a driver issue between Fedora 7 and VMWare
Server, but this simple change will fix it.

 

there is no patch tuesday for linux.

just what kind of unix was it you were an expert in, anyway?

 

it could be worse. it could be gentoo.

 

I am not sure expert is quite the right word but I taught Solaris to Sys
Admins for Sun as my last IT related role which, by my reckoning, means
I am capable of reading the manual and translating it into sense for
others.

Definitely a case of, "those who can do and those who can't teach."
Sadly though I was just a touch too good at the second to qualify for
the "those who can't do either become highly paid management
consultants" bit.

 

now you tell me.

A bit like this. A lot like this actually.

Don't get this bit at all.

For the install it simply wouldn't let me use SCSI at all so I doubt we
were into Fedora issues at that point. The only way I could get the
install to proceed was to use IDE. Now it is installed it seems quiet
happy to use SCSI. Weird but not really unexpected and for all the
reason the anti-Linuxistii so rightly mention.

Seems to be working and also the other keyboard related error has
(coincidentally) gone. I have a *nix command line available
woooohoooooo!

Cheers dude.

Now I am off to buy some sandals. Does pizza express include body
odour, spots and extreme pedantry in their 2 for 1 deals?

 

I get this as an error

Failed to initiate or cancel VMware Tools installation:
Vmdb error -32: Pipe: Read failed (0x80040120)

It is confusing but I am making progress. I have asked it for the
install again and now it insists I do it when the fedora machine is
powered off, so I power it off and it tells me there are two users on
the machine. That is me as root from the initial log in and who the
**** else?

This is exactly the crap what people complain about and rightly so but
we (me and me the other phantom user) are making progress it seems.
Slowly and hand held every step of the way but it is progress, of sorts.

Now I have got Fedora to boot it appears to be a little more friendly
and co-operative but I am going to cold start the entire system and work
at it slowly from first principles. I am sure it will be happier then

 

You don't know how tempted I am to join the rants about the user
friendliness or otherwise of Linux distros, really you don't.

Not as long as my arse points downwards

 

You should consider it. I was never more than an average sysadmin, but
even I managed to get the school's webserver up in a day, and ..

[desmond@rachi]/home/desmond(58): uptime
6:43PM up 167 days, 20:56, 1 user, load averages: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00

D.

 

At the moment I am more into shooting VmWare technical authors.

Do this they say to get at the VmWare tools:

mount /dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom


Course this is a perfectly good command, nothing wrong with it at all
but to save hassle it would have been nice for the not so expert/rusty
if they had mentioned the usefulness of doing something like this first

mkdir /dev/cdrom




and now we are talking about x and Tar and RPM. Precisely the shit that
makes it so fucking goddam fucking arsehole fucking unnecessarily
fucking difficult. No wonder folks think it is all bollocks.

Fedora is up and running, it is making the bells and whistles work I am
now into.