Re: More dysfunctional Ubuntu-isms

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Author: Brian Cluff
Date:  
To: Main PLUG discussion list
Subject: Re: More dysfunctional Ubuntu-isms
I just had to kill that on my home machine. It was making me wait 5
minutes even though I actually already had a connection... lame.

Brian Cluff

On 11/08/2016 09:54 AM, Stephen Partington wrote:
> I do much the same here. But if you are installing something that does
> not have an always connected network you might want to adjust the wait
> timeout for networking sooner than later. 5m boot delays are weird and
> annoying.
>
> On Tue, Nov 8, 2016 at 8:59 AM, Brian Cluff <
> <mailto:brian@snaptek.com>> wrote:
>
>     In my experience the server install is pretty much just a minimal
>     install that asks you at the end if you want to install certain
>     typical server software.  I just normally just pick SSH server and
>     then add whatever I want after the first boot.  I've always had
>     less problems installing the server over rather than the desktop
>     install because of the odd graphics card problems that pop up from
>     time to time (but hardly ever these days) since the server install
>     uses a text based installer.  The server install will allow you
>     easily install a basic system and then install the proprietary
>     graphics drivers afterwards skipping having to have them to
>     install in the first place.

>
>     The only real gotcha is that it takes longer to install since much
>     of your software (aka your entire desktop environment) will have
>     to be downloaded over the Internet rather than coming off of nice
>     fast flash drives or DVDs.  You could, if you are in a hurry,
>     install via the server install disk and then use the packages on
>     the desktop install to feed your desktop install, but in the long
>     run it probably won't save you any time since you would still want
>     to update everything over the Internet and that would take just
>     about as long.  Then again, if you have the server installed, you
>     can actually be doing stuff to customize your install at the same
>     time that it's installing/updating so it's probably all in all a
>     speed win.

>
>     Brian Cluff

>
>     On 11/08/2016 12:49 AM, trent shipley wrote:
>>     What are some of the gotchas he can expect in installing: server
>>     -> delta desktop repository -> delta desktop gui -> no more than
>>     two days tweaking system? OR:
>>     desktop install -> delta server -> tweak?

>>
>>     I'd expect using the server distro as the base to work better
>>     with a server enabled workstation, but that's just a layperson's
>>     hunch.

>>
>>     On Mon, Nov 7, 2016 at 3:35 PM Brian Cluff <
>>     <mailto:brian@snaptek.com>> wrote:

>>
>>         Plus one for the server install DVD. If you are going to do
>>         anything out of the norm, always reach for the server
>>         install. Then just apt install kubuntu-desktop when
>>         everything is done installing.

>>
>>         Kde neon is pretty good right now and about the only way to
>>         get an up to date kde experience right now, but it will still
>>         use the Ubuntu installer. It would probably be best for you
>>         to use the server install cd, then add the neon repositories,
>>         and then install the the neon-desktop

>>
>>
>>         Brian Cluff

>>
>>         On November 7, 2016 1:17:07 PM MST, Stephen Partington
>>         < <mailto:cryptworks@gmail.com>> wrote:

>>
>>             Wow. you worked much harder with the desktop install
>>             media than i would have. I usually 86 the desktop install
>>             media and just use the server install media to get the
>>             LVM/Raid settings i want to use. i just have to remember
>>             to disable the network wait on boot.

>>
>>             I am about to try something like this again for a while
>>             as Windows 10 is irking me again more and more.

>>
>>             On Mon, Nov 7, 2016 at 12:17 PM, Michael Butash
>>             < <mailto:mike@butash.net>> wrote:

>>
>>                 Sorry for the fire and forget, had to rebuild a data
>>                 center for a customer over the weekend - I was just
>>                 really hoping to have the darn box up before I left
>>                 to work on it remote, such a simple feat normally,
>>                 but I had no time for anyways.

>>
>>                 Rest inline...

>>
>>
>>                 On 11/03/2016 03:54 AM, Steve Litt wrote:

>>
>>                     On Wed, 2 Nov 2016 18:38:24 -0700
>>                     Michael Butash <
>>                     <mailto:mike@butash.net>> wrote:

>>
>>                         This is really why I have a hate/love
>>                         relation with ubuntu, it never
>>                         fails to disappoint.  My road to 16.04 has
>>                         been all upgrades so far,
>>                         this time I'm using 16.04.1 cd's from scratch.

>>
>>                     Curious: What do you love about it? You seem like
>>                     the kind of person
>>                     who could work with any distro.

>>
>>                 Short answer, it usually works where others do not
>>                 with my graphics, a 6-head amd video card which until
>>                 recently, I used all ports on.

>>
>>                 Long story, probably tldr (you asked!), definitely
>>                 love/hate...

>>
>>                 After my last straw with windoze and making the
>>                 decision to force myself to use linux to both learn
>>                 and abandon m$ shitty ecosystem circa 2006, I tried a
>>                 bit of everything disto-wise.  I always loathed
>>                 redhat and rpm hell (no, yum didn't entirely fix
>>                 this, and much later), I came from
>>                 slackware/open|freebsd/solaris background having no
>>                 desire to go back, and oddly landed on Mandrake for a
>>                 bit.  Until I started hacking on it, and things came
>>                 unglued.

>>
>>                 I decided to try Ubuntu after reading about debian
>>                 roots I've heard praised (tried for 2 seconds, got
>>                 annoyed, don't remember now why), I think 6.04 at the
>>                 time, and oddly it "just worked".

>>
>>                 I didn't begin to have any real issues until 10.10
>>                 until the era of unity hell began, and they started
>>                 trying to make Ubuntu install more idiot-proof for,
>>                 well idiots.  Sadly it removed all the good features
>>                 like complex raid, crypto, and lvm setup, making it
>>                 about as stupid as possible, but there was always the
>>                 alt installer and just simply not using unity, if I
>>                 could just get the damn os on a system.  Thanks
>>                 Canonical.

>>
>>                 They then pissed on that, fiddling with (breaking)
>>                 the alt installer removing fdisk (it's what I used
>>                 for my raid+crypto+lvm setup), and ultimately doing
>>                 away with the alt installer all together as insult to
>>                 injury.  Again I worked around them in other ways,
>>                 building my fs manually with an arch cd first
>>                 learning how to build it all manually from busybox
>>                 again, and trick the netboot installer into working
>>                 over it.  Thanks again Canonoical.

>>
>>                 Around 2014, I got really annoyed after dist-upgrade
>>                 blew up my system that I decide to sojourn a bit and
>>                 explore distros again with a new laptop I'd gotten. 
>>                 I couldn't even get fedora's vaunted installer to
>>                 reproduce my raid+crypt+lvm setup, and despised the
>>                 notion of going back to it anyways, but at the
>>                 request of a friend that for some reason likes it,
>>                 tried.  Even tried Red Hat's official installer, more
>>                 broken than fedora, scratch either/or.  Tried Arch
>>                 too, got to a desktop, and found hell with the AMD
>>                 drivers and graphics capabilities in general.

>>
>>                 I settled on Mint Debian edition with Mate, as
>>                 Cinnamon was all sorts of broken with compositing on
>>                 even the most basic intel gpu, which seemed like
>>                 instant fail.  Mate was great, and used that for a
>>                 bit until with some new ssd's I'd begun to rebuild my
>>                 desktop with mint de mate, and found ATI graphic hell
>>                 in my desktop.  AMD only cares about fedora/ubuntu as
>>                 a linux entity, knew it would likely work there, and
>>                 again hacked ubuntu back onto my system.  It's the
>>                 same install I'm using today, and eventually moved my
>>                 laptop back to ubuntu.

>>
>>                 What I really can't fathom is how Canonical can keep
>>                 breaking their installers in such new and creative
>>                 ways each time, and only I seem to notice, but then
>>                 again, I expect linux features most people don't know
>>                 even exist or care about like raid, crypto, or volume
>>                 management.

>>
>>                 If BTRFS or ZFS supported better encryption, I'd love
>>                 to use one native fs to do all the raid/crypto/lvm in
>>                 it.  I think as of this year, either/both might, so
>>                 worth exploring, but I bet ubuntu's installers will
>>                 still suck in dealing with them.

>>
>>                 Yes, AMD is a root evil for linux graphics and at
>>                 times the kernels, but nvidia to this day still has
>>                 not put out a 6-head video card like AMD that I
>>                 actually use all 6 ports of. Now I have 3x montiors
>>                 (well, tv's), so this new one has a nice new 1070
>>                 card in it.  Which thanks to their crappy business
>>                 practices too of not releasing firmware immediately
>>                 (that amd would decompile), I know nouveau has issues
>>                 with, and the binary drive is necessary.  I'm handy
>>                 with cli here, not too worried, more that their
>>                 drivers suck too these days.

>>
>>                         I really don't want to have to make a circle
>>                         of distro's to end up
>>                         back here again, but ubuntu is always so
>>                         basically dysfunctional
>>                         these days with the most basic things, it's
>>                         hard to want to care.

>>
>>                         I wonder how much others have seen this. 
>>                         This is with legacy boot in
>>                         bios, no uefi crap, and just a basic d-i
>>                         based ubuntu server install,
>>                         and/or kubuntu.

>>
>>                     I used Ubuntu for several years because it "just
>>                     works." The trouble
>>                     was, as I got more sophisticated, Ubuntu's
>>                     seatbelts and airbags and
>>                     danger sensing devices and training wheels and
>>                     all that other stuff so
>>                     necessary to the newbie badly got in my way.

>>
>>                 I agree, it feels almost childish to still use Ubuntu
>>                 at this stage, but nothing else has worked suitably,
>>                 and I'm somewhat tired of trying+disappointment when
>>                 history has proven most others to be inadequate or worse.

>>
>>                     So I ditched Ubuntu for Debian, and that was
>>                     great, but then Debian
>>                     went systemd so I switched to Void Linux, and
>>                     after a rocky 5 weeks of
>>                     Void newbie-ism, Void has turned out to be the
>>                     most useful, maleable
>>                     and stable distro I've ever used. I've used Void
>>                     for over a year now.

>>
>>                 That's why I tried Mint Debian Edition - figured deb
>>                 it might suck less and just wanted a modern ui, but
>>                 found that their driver support for AMD, or rather a
>>                 support for modern versions thereof for graphics were
>>                 fairly lacking, and no one from a major org cares
>>                 enough to fix it.  I simply could not get their
>>                 kernel to take the amd driver, which was a
>>                 non-starter. It's actually what drove me finally back
>>                 to Ubuntu natively just for a working video solution,
>>                 and at times keeps me bound.

>>
>>                     I think you've probably outgrown Ubuntu.

>>
>>                 See above.  It tends to work great as long as I don't
>>                 have to 1) install it via "normal" means or 2)
>>                 upgrade it, both often suck these days.  Both have
>>                 simply continued to get worse and worse, and I only
>>                 encounter them every few years out of necessity of
>>                 they are also both my primary means of working as my
>>                 own business.  Once I hit 14.04 stable, I upgraded
>>                 only upon absolute necessity core functions like
>>                 kernel or desktop libs, and only essential apps that
>>                 require them (browsers really), but otherwise didn't
>>                 upgrade core until 16.04 when it released.  That's
>>                 been a current longer evolutionary story I'll get to
>>                 eventually.

>>
>>                     BUT, as far as your current no-booting installer
>>                     problem, I wonder if
>>                     your media are bad. Just for fun, boot System
>>                     Rescue CD and have a look
>>                     around the system to verify no disk or RAM
>>                     problems, and that the
>>                     processor is what you think it is. If you can't
>>                     boot System Rescue CD
>>                     either, that points an accusing finger at your
>>                     DVD drive.

>>
>>                 This is something I'd seen before actually, I'd
>>                 mentioned another time about arch and disk-label
>>                 usage.  I don't think it's media, but who knows.  My
>>                 10 year old spindle of dvd-r's might be breaking down
>>                 by now, but first time I've seen this with a
>>                 anything, why I tried both the built-in, and a usb,
>>                 of which I've used hundreds of times to boot things,
>>                 almost always said linux boxes over the past 10
>>                 years, another not long ago.

>>
>>                     Also, try burning your disks with cdrecord (or
>>                     wodim) instead of a gui.
>>                     I use a command something like this:

>>
>>                     cdrecord dev=/dev/sr0 padsize=63s
>>                     driveropts=burnfree \
>>                     -pad -dao -v -eject myimage.iso

>>
>>                     The padsize=63s and -pad help with the Linux
>>                     readahead bug. Burnfree
>>                     means you don't unknowingly make coasters or bad
>>                     discs if your computer
>>                     can't deliver the data fast enough.

>>
>>                     If you perform the burn like I mentioned above,
>>                     you *should* be able to
>>                     md5 check the disc to the same md5sum as the iso
>>                     file by following
>>                     directions here:

>>
>>                     http://www.troubleshooters.com/linux/coasterless.htm
>>                     <http://www.troubleshooters.com/linux/coasterless.htm>

>>
>>                 Interesting - I've not had to adjust a cd like that
>>                 using k3b on linux ever or nero in win since doing so
>>                 for pirated drm games. Only time seeing something
>>                 like that is using unetbootin to make the usb where
>>                 it doesn't know the iso expects a certain disk label
>>                 to exist.  This seemed more a sloppy iso build in the
>>                 few hours I had with the system and ample frustration
>>                 to write that.

>>
>>                 Thank you for that tidbit, I'll try it after I fiddle
>>                 with the bios more on this.  I'm going to try a kde
>>                 neon build (really what I'm interested in more here),
>>                 I just didn't have the time as it showed up 5 hours
>>                 before I had to pack, sleep, and hop on a plane (sad,
>>                 I know). It's a t7910 precision dell, more a server
>>                 board than desktop, so I'd really expect better
>>                 behaviour here on either pc or ubuntu.

>>
>>                 I'll update when I get to it tonight hopefully.

>>
>>                     HTH,

>>
>>                     SteveT

>>
>>                     Steve Litt
>>                     November 2016 featured book: Quit Joblessness:
>>                     Start Your Own Business
>>                     http://www.troubleshooters.com/startbiz
>>                     <http://www.troubleshooters.com/startbiz>
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>>
>>
>>
>>             -- 
>>             A mouse trap, placed on top of your alarm clock, will
>>             prevent you from rolling over and going back to sleep
>>             after you hit the snooze button.

>>
>>             Stephen

>>
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> --
> A mouse trap, placed on top of your alarm clock, will prevent you from
> rolling over and going back to sleep after you hit the snooze button.
> Stephen
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