Linux

[Kami-Tux]

e) Make sure to state its a Home Edition, hence no Aero.

If you have Beryl, you can state it is one off the more advanced versions

[C-Chan]

I wouldn't DARE let anyone think that Aero were as advanced as my darlin' Beryl.  Nah, he can have his "Home" edition.... -v-

[Kami-Tux]

meh... That person will be really disappointed once he sees a real Vista. And after that, you have a convert to Linux.

[Bella]

I reckon I should give that distro a look too (the logo's a dolphin if I recall....). -v-

It's officially a dolphin, but one can't count out hot air balloons XD (while starting the desktop, and the GIMP, you see hot air balloons)

Firstly, looks. I've always liked Xfce, but the zenwalk defaults were particularly Mac reminiscent, especially in comparison to Win 2k running next to me. Twas the fist assumption of my colleague after bootup.

I kinda thought the same thing...And today while messing around I found the transparent "terminal"....Oooooh, transparent

Hurray! It worked. I've got one running DamnSmallLinux and one running Xubuntu. They're working wonderfully despite the horrific hardware defects. All of your friendly proddings were exactly what I needed to finally make the switch. I'll tell you if I come upon any problems or have any questions

DamnSmallLinux? How do you like it? Because I've heard DSL can be a little hard do get used to (but FAST, I bet!)...Xubuntu seems like a pretty nice OS.

[Shateiel]

Well, it works pretty well. It certainly is different and maybe a bit difficult, but it works much faster than what I had before and there aren't the problems which I was experiencing before with Windows. But that almost goes without saying.

And Xubuntu is a nice OS. I enjoy working with it.

[C-Chan]

meh... That person will be really disappointed once he sees a real Vista. And after that, you have a convert to Linux.

Aaa sou sou.... I didn't quite look at it like that.  ^__^

Fufu!  ^v^
I could just imagine the looks on his Vista buddies' faces when he starts talking about the amazing "Cube" and "SkyDome", and starts to get THEM curious as to what the heck he's talking about.  MWAHAHAHA!!!  ^v^

Good job, Oh Great Penguin God.  There may yet be hope for you in the advertising business.  ^.^

It's officially a dolphin, but one can't count out hot air balloons XD (while starting the desktop, and the GIMP, you see hot air balloons)

I'm actually surprised they had GIMP prepackaged on what's marketed as a light system (you have to install GIMP on Vanilla Puppy after the fact).  Hopefully it runs okay on your Compaq.  ^__^

I kinda thought the same thing...And today while messing around I found the transparent "terminal"....Oooooh, transparent  

While you're there impressed by transparencies, I'm here impressed by how quickly your using the Terminal.  ^___^

*sniff*

[tearfully] Oh,.... i still remember when Bella was this tiny.... *measures with hoof*
...and now she's developing l33t hacking skills on the console and pretty soon will be compiling her own kernel.....

*cries tears of joy*

*sniff*  *grabs tissue*  Indeed, youth is best spent on the young..... -v-

DamnSmallLinux? How do you like it? Because I've heard DSL can be a little hard do get used to (but FAST, I bet!)...Xubuntu seems like a pretty nice OS.

Presumably DSL-chan is even FASTER still than Puppy, and can be used in computers as old as the 486 series (very early 90's).  Very similar to Puppy in that it's also a dedicated portable OS/Rescue System that uses its own home-brewed apps as well as its own packaging system (while most of the mainstream Linux distros use DEBs and RPMs, Puppy for example uses PETs and PUPs.... ^^;).

Wasn't really my cup of tea at first, but then I really didn't spend too much time on DSL-chan as I should've (my heart was stolen by Puppy very quickly after).  ^^

Xubuntu is a very nicely packaged system, but it's hard for me to call it pretty by default.  The *Buntu's by far tend to prefer a more down-to-earth approach to their graphics, which is alright in its own respect but certainly won't make them showstoppers.

SAM Linux, on the other hand, is not only prettier but faster too.  ^__^
Except for the HUMONGOUS *Buntu repository, SAM can easily best it in many other categories (an opinion I've had to come to terms with through personal experience....).  -.-

Added after 10 hours 48 minutes:

WAFOO!!!!  ^v^
Just got ma-Puppy-Onna-Gatway hooked up to the Internet, and as a matter of fact I'M WRITING FROM HER!!!  ^V^

Even went to the Puppy Forums as well to get the driver problem fixed, so now I'm lookin' at a nice clean 1024x768 16-bit color display....!!  

What do they say in a time like this.... -v-

*ponders*

...

Oh right,... "Ph34r m4 n33d f0r B33r!!"  ^v^

....

No, that's not right....

........

No, they don't say anything,... they just post puppy pictures.... ^^



On the downside, I also broke my mouse scroll wheel functionality somehow, but between having to use the scrollbars and staring at a screen with only 4 or 16 COLORS,.... I guess I can live wth that minor inconvenience for now....  -.-

[Bella]

I'm actually surprised they had GIMP prepackaged on what's marketed as a light system (you have to install GIMP on Vanilla Puppy after the fact). Hopefully it runs okay on your Compaq. ^__^

I tried GIMP, it runs fairly good (just a little slow, as usual).

While you're there impressed by transparencies, I'm here impressed by how quickly your using the Terminal. ^___^

*sniff*

[tearfully] Oh,.... i still remember when Bella was this tiny.... *measures with hoof*
...and now she's developing l33t hacking skills on the console and pretty soon will be compiling her own kernel.....

*cries tears of joy*

*sniff* *grabs tissue* Indeed, youth is best spent on the young..... -v-

Mehopes that was sarcasm, lol....I said I "found" the terminal, not "used" it XD

I believe my l33t hacking skillz are at "Windows-trained-GUI-hugger-who's-in-awe-that-she-even-booted-a- computer-into-Linux"

Just above the "What's Linux?" level, and below "competent-Linux-user" on the scale.

In other words, not good XD  

that picture is...the Worlds CUTEST puppy!

[Shateiel]

Hmmm, I'm having a small problem. The computer running Xubuntu was showing this weird screen depicting an impossible geometric figure which I couldn't get out of, so I cut the power. I then tried to boot up the computer and it shows the Xubuntu boot screen for a few seconds, but then turns to a black screen with a little white bar like its waiting for a command. However, typing has no effect. What went wrong?

[C-Chan]

Ouch!  >_<
If that's what you call a small problem, I'd hate to see what you deem a crisis....  ^^;

Can you give me the system specs for that machine?  I recall you said it was one of your older ones.  The screen you mentioned reminds me of one of the screensavers it comes packaged with.  Canonical, unfortunately, decided it was a good idea to include the OpenGL screesnavers by default,... so even though I did not have a complete lock-out on my old computer, I do remember those particular screensavers being very taxing on the CPU.

I do know (from personal experience) that Linux is robust enough to survive multiple abrupt power offs, so I don't believe that played a problem here.  But till we find a solution, let's keep all possibilites on the table.  -v-

In any event, the first order of business would be to see if we can identify the problem as software or hardware-related.

First, restart again and before you get the black screen with the underscore, try pressing CTRL+ALT+F1 (or CTRL+ALT+F2) to see if you can switch to verbose mode at least briefly.  This way we can attempt to identify where it's actually freezing.

If that doesn't work, try booting up with Xubuntu's System Recovery option to at least boot a verbose mode.  If it freezes, it will freeze during some text that we can use to identify the problem.  However, if it reaches the login prompt, then login using your user and password, then type "startx" to [try] to boot back into your system.  

If that doesn't work, use a lightweight LiveCD like Puppy (you can use DSL if you know enough how to use it) to boot up a working environment and see if the hard drive at least can be read.  If you do have work you put on there, now would be your chance to get it out using a USB stick or floppies or something...

Both distros come with diagnostic tools, although like I guessed correctly you caught me at a time where I can't try any myself.  ^^;
We would definitely need either an MBR repair tool (in case you loaded GRUB on the Master Boot Record) or a Grub installation tool (in case you loaded GRUB in the same partition as Xubuntu,... generally the recommended option).  We can devise strategies based on those particular scenarios.

BTW, if you haven't really worked on that machine much and don't mind installing another distros later down the road, keep that option on the table.  The *Buntus aren't without their bugs (thanks, ironically, to a rigid release cycle and some experimental tools), so if this happens with Xubuntu but not with, say, SAM or Zenwalk, then at least we know its software-related.  I don't want to recommend reinstalling Xubuntu since so far I've read (in other threads detailing problems similar to yours) that that doesn't work.

[Shateiel]

Well, its an older Gateway. I don't recall much more than that, however and its difficult to get in and check the specs due to the circumstances.

I pushed CTRL+ALT+F1 and it gives me another black screen with the following message:

Starting up...
Loading, please wait...
kinit: name_to_dev_t(/dev/disk/by-uuid/3c0d152b-d14-4c7d-9ea9-6e31cce15a6d) = hda5(3,5)
kinit:trying to resume from /dev/disk/by-uuid/3c0d152b-d14-4c7d-9ea9-6e31cce15a6d
kinit: No resume image, doing normal boot...

And then it just sits there motionless. I suppose it wouldn't be too big a deal to just use a different OS. I don't mind. Its just more work. >.<

[C-Chan]

Oh okay, that does explain a little more about what's going on.  ^__^

See,... I hate to gripe about the *Buntu's given that I appreciate their mission statement -- even though I will transition to PCLinuxOS as my primary OS, I'll still keep Xubuntu to stay on top of the Ubuntu community, especially during this era of M$ FUD.  -.-

But one thing that did cause me headaches at one point was that Ubuntu used UUID codes for partitions rather than the actual device partition names (e.g., /dev/hda1, /dev/hda2, etc.)

I'm guessing the drive label got messed up somehow (happened to me to at some point when repartitioning) and now it can't find it because it's looking for "uuid/3c0d152b-d14-4c7d-9ea9-6e31cce15a6d" rather than just plain old physical name of the partition:  "/dev/hda1".  ^^

In any event, if you don't mind, can you hold off on reinstallation for a few days?  I think we can get this fixed.  ^__^

But just to make sure we're on the same page, consider preparing a copy of Puppy Linux 2.16....

http://www.puppylinux.org/user/downloads.php?cat_id=1

...not to say we couldn't do diagnostics with DSL or Knoppix, but Puppy's a real easy and fast LiveCD to use, especially on old systems, and automatically premounts all your drives with super user access (whereas in the Xubuntu LiveCD you have to mount them manually, a real pain to do when accessing Windows NTFS drives).

Basically, what we'll do is....

A)  Use GParted to get a visual map of your hard drive.  (that way we know which partition its in).

B)  Determine if your GRUB is located in MBR or Boot.

C)  IF MBR, we'll create a new Bootloader using Puppy -- perhaps not the prettiest option, but with the right knowledge we can get it to look real nice.  If Boot, I'll show you how to rewrite it so that you MIGHT be able to fix the problem and boot back normally.  Contrary to how it may sound, this is fairly easy.   ^.^

Suddenly things don't look bleak anymore,... I think we can really fix this.  ^___^

One last thing, if you do decide to get Puppy (only a 100MB download) and you try it on your own before coming here, don't be surprised if it doesn't automatically detect your network connection (assuming the Gateway's connected to the Net).  Puppy waits until after you use the Network wizard to connect,... I guess it's to make the initial boot-up faster.  ^.^

(oh, and see you're using a reconditioned Gateway like I am,... oh joy.)  ^.^[/url]

[Bella]

And then it just sits there motionless. I suppose it wouldn't be too big a deal to just use a different OS. I don't mind. Its just more work. >.<

Can I ask how long the screen remained motionless before you turned off the computer or whatever...because I know when I first booted up Zenwalk (and this was in verbose mode) the screen would hold still for minutes at a time...
Probably not the explanation if it booted up quickly other times, but I'm mostly just curious.

[Shateiel]

Wooh! Its good to know its not impossible to fix or a something that's completely out of my power.

Okay, so I have a Puppy Live CD. I'll see where GRUB is right away.

And I think 3 hours is enough time to wait when it usually takes maybe 7 minutes.^^

[Bella]

And I think 3 hours is enough time to wait when it usually takes maybe 7 minutes.^^

Ooookay, rules my theory out...and I thought my startup was slow at 15 or so minutes...
Good luck with Puppy, though!

Now I just need to modify the windows so that the close buttons are on the left ^__^

I actually found out how to do that  ;010
settings manager>Window manager>button layout. You can drag and drop the buttons the way you want--right or left.

Combined the left-hand buttons with the XP-esque "Wallis" window manager theme, and the "Redmond XP" user interface, it looks like a eerie Windows/Mac lovechild XD

[C-Chan]

Haha!  ^v^
Windows/Mac Lovechild...... ^___^

In any case, standing by Shateiel-san!  ^v^

Once you get into Puppy, there will be a little icon on top that looks like a USB stick which reads "Mount" if I recall (I should probably load this, eh...?).  -.-

In it should be a map of all the devices attached to your computer (including CD-ROMS).  The hard drives should be (naturally) /dev/hda1, 2, etc.

Mount as many as you need to locate the one that has Xubuntu on it (in the ROX file manager that opens, you'll see folders like bin, boot, dev, etc, home, initrd, lib, etc.)

Once there, look in two locations for me:

A) the "boot" folder if there is one, and if there is locate a folder named "grub"

B)  Go into the "etc" folder and locate a file called "fstab"

If you find them and you want to read ahead on how to edit them, feel free.  Otherwise, if you do find them, copy the text inside "fstab" (and Grub's "menu.lst" if there is one) and find some way to post them on this forum.

I'll tell you how to change it from there.  ^___^