Taking The Linux Plunge - Want to help me learn Linux?

Hey there folks, it's about time that I got into Linux! I see a lot of Linux people here on Trap17 and I've always been fascinated by it, but have never successfully installed it, so I thought I'd take this opportunity to test the waters and have a go at getting it running on one of my machines, with YOUR help. This is a fun way to post some quality, meaningful posts on the Trap17 forums while sharing your experience and helping someone out. Interested? I'd love to have you participate in this little project. Feel free to join in.

In the past I have toyed with Linux a bit. I remember as a Corel reseller, I was once given a Corel Linux CD at a trade show and I dutifully installed it and had a brief play around, then promptly lost the CD in a stack of other trade show goodies. One of my papers at varsity was in Linux, but that was more of an introduction to the operating system and didn't involve us in actually installing or configuring the OS, but just using it. I didn't really benefit much from that. I guess you could say that I have been on the fringes of Linux, dipping my toe in the water every now and then but shying away. Now I am ready to take the plunge!

The Linux Distro
First of all, I solved the initially tricky situation of opening that nasty can of worms of "which distro is best" by making a snap decision of my own, without benefiting from the wisdom of others. I guess that with Linux being freee, I can freely choose which distro to use and can be free to make a wrong decision at first and try again. I know how to FDISK my drive and start again, and it's not like I'm using this for a mission-critical system! This project is just something for me to do, something for me to learn with, and is intended to be fun. So, I have chosen to use Ubuntu v8.4 LTS Server Edition (codenamed "Hardy Heron") as my distro, and I have downloaded it and burned it to a CD-R disc, ready to be installed.

The Hardware
My home computer network is comprised of a variety of different systems, mostly Pentium III tower systems, along with my wife's laptop and my trusty smartphone running Windows Mobile 5. Everything is connected using either Ethernet cables or WiFi. I have selected a system to install Linux on. It currently has Windows 2000 Professional on it, and I'd like to keep that installation working, so the Linux installation will either be a dual-booting system or I'll temporarily disconnect the Win2K drive and run Linux by itself on a spare hard drive. I have earmarked a 40GB hard drive for this project. These are the specs of the system that I will be using....

• 800MHz Intel Pentium III
• VIA VT82C692BX motherboard
• 128MB SD-RAM
• 40GB IDE Hard Drive
• 64MB Nvidia Riva TNT2 graphics card
• Realtek RTL8139 PCI network adaptor

The Ubuntu v8.4 LTS Server Edition distro requires a minimum of 128MB of RAM to install, so this system only just meets the requirements. I have a spare 128MB SD-RAM module kicking around somewhere if I need it.

Objectives
So, why did I chose the server operating system? I have recently trashed my old Windows 2000 Server installation, removing Active Directory, DNS, and other core networking technologies from my network, and am running a fairly plain peer-to-peer LAN at home at the moment. I was thinking of installing Win2K3 Server, but haven't got the money to buy CALs for all my workstations at the moment. This is why I thought I might try playing with Linux and seeing if I could get a decent domain controller set up for free. I would like my Linux installation to, obviously, be able to communicate via the LAN card with the other workstations on the home network. This includes browsing the Internet through the Ethernet connection to my WiFi router, then out to my ADSL modem, and out to the Internet. I would also like to have LDAP and domain login authentication for my assorted Win2K and WinXP workstations. This would be a good start. I would also like to get VPN access and set up a terminal server (such as VNC) so that I can remotely administer the server. If this all goes well, I may well migrate more of my workstations over to Linux installations also.

So, I have an installation CD and I have the hardware. All I need to do is get the 40GB hard drive into the system, and maybe throw that extra RAM in at the same time, and I'll be all set to get started. Any advice on where to go from there? Shall we start with the decision of whether or not to dual-boot with my existing Win2K Pro installation, and also what partitions I should create? I'm open to your advice and suggestions.

 

 

 

Comment/Reply (w/o sign-up)

Well just like the regular ubuntu installation the server edition should have a partition program when install the operating system so that should help you somewhat. As for the RAM itself if you can in some luck drop in 1 or two gigs of RAM, because if I am thinking what your thinking I and I know I don't think to often, you going to have that computer as your main server and everything else is going to connect to it. So would want to beef that up as much as possible just in case you plan on using it for server storage and what not.

Although I don't think it would matter all that much if you got rid of Windows 2000 because it is outdated no longer supported and it could mess around with your dual booted server I think you plan on running through your place. Sadly though I can only give you hardware recommendations since my linux is limited and very limited to the server edition as well.

Comment/Reply (w/o sign-up)

Thanks for that input Saint_Michael. Since my last posting I have added the extra 128MB of SD-RAM to the machine, giving me 256MB of system memory. My motherboard doesn't support anything more than 1GB of RAM, and I believe that the best that I can get is two 512MB SD-RAM modules, and they would cost an arm and a leg these days! I have also removed the 20GB drive that has Win2K Pro installed on it and replaced it with the 40GB drive. That was one of the drives that was previously in my old Win2K Server computer, which had a Dynamic partition that had to be destroyed. Fortunately I was able to recover all the data from it first, and have it now stored on my external 500GB drive instead. With the Linux Server system now prepared, I have started installing Ubuntu v8.4 LTS Server Edition.

I spent time verifying the system memory and verifying the distro CD first, just to make sure that everything was properly prepared for this, then I began the installation. You were right about the partitioning utility, Saint_Michael. One of the options for partitioning my drive with Ubuntu was to set up an LVM which I chose. I have no idea yet what it does, but I am assuming that it allows me to dynamically repartition my drive on the fly. Still nervous about that from my experience with Windows Dynamic Partitions, but I'll see how it goes.

During the installation procedure I selected to install all of the Server services, including DNS, LAMP, Print Server, and File Server options. It will be interesting to get this system to talk via USB to my Brother HL-1430 laser printer and share it on the network for my Win2K / XP clients to print to. I'd also like to see how Ubuntu handles my external, USB-based 500GB hard drive.

The installation appears to be complete, and I'm staring at what looks like a DOS prompt of sorts, in form of username@host~$ and I guess this is where it all begins. While I am familiar with DOS and some Linux commands, I prefer the familiarity of a GUI that uses a mouse pointer. I recall from my limited past experience with Linux the names GNOME and KDE, and I guess I need to find out how to start the GUI for this Linux installation. Any suggestions?

Help! Does anyone know how to start the GUI for Ubuntu? I'm stuck at the DOS-like prompt!

Okay, panic is over, I have found the answer to that problem on The (k)ubuntu Community website, which tells me that the Server Edition of Ubuntu v8.4 LTS does not install a desktop by default, so to add one I have to use one of the following commands from the DOS-like prompt:

• sudo apt-get install ubuntu-desktop (for the GNOME desktop interface), or
• sudo apt-get install kubuntu-desktop (for the KDE desktop interface)

So, I have decided to use KDE, and it is currently extracting the files. Despite me putting the distro CD back into the drive, it looks like it is accessing a website via my ADSL connection to install this package, which is quite impressive considering that I haven't done anything to configure the LAN setup yet other than what was done during the installation procedure. I haven't even specified a TCP/IP address yet! It must have grabbed a DHCP package all by itself. Smart Linux! I like it so far.

Things didn't go as well as I thought they would. Half-way through the installation of KDE (I think it was up to extracting the ttf font files) it suddenly decided that I had a "Read-Only File System" and would go no further. Now whenever I try to boot the Ubuntu Linux server, it comes up with messages saying that the "root contains a file system with errors, check forced", and that "Inodes that were part of a corrupted link list found", and that there is "UNEXPECTED INCONSISTENCY; RUN fsck MANUALLY" because "fsck died with exit status 4". Damn! I don't know what half of this means, but I guess from my windows experience that this means that there are some lost clusters and that scandisk could not fix them in non-interactive mode. My guess anyway. It then puts me into a sort of "Safe Mode" with the DOS-like prompt having changed from username@host~$ to now being root@host~# and I guess that the hash mark on the end of the prompt is somehow important. It says that I can exit this safe-mode by using CTRL+D, and when I do it just reboots the machine and I get the same messages over and over again. Looks like I have successfully killed my first installation of Ubuntu in under 1 hour, just by trying to install the GUI. Not a great start! Any help or advice offered would be great. As you can see, I'm not doing too well!

Now my choice is to try to recover from the aborted installation of KDE or start again from scratch, reinstalling Ubuntu from the distro CD. For now I will go with the first option. I did as suggested and ran fsck from the DOS-like prompt, fixing all the problems that this utility found along the way and then rebooted (also, I found out along the way that CTRL+ALT+DEL, the three-fingered salute, doesn't reboot a Linux installation). I am now back at the DOS-like prompt and have logged in again as my username. I decided to try re-doing the KDE installation using the command sudo apt-get install kubuntu-desktop as I found earlier on the The (k)ubuntu Community website. However, this time it recognized that a previous installation had failed, and demanded that I run manually the command dpkg --configure -a to correct the problem. When I tried to do that it complained that I needed "superuser privileges" to run that command. I guess this is where I have to change from my username to the "root" user. Any idea how to do that? The second option, to reinstall Ubuntu from scatch, is looking more and more inviting!

I have now been using Linux for about 3 hours, and have not seen anything other than a gross DOS-like prompt. This is why I kept on dabbling with Linux in the past but never getting into it properly. I am starting to hunt for my original Windows 2000 Server installation CD. At least I know with Windows that I can get a GUI interface within about 30-45 minutes!

I have fixed it! I booted from the distro CD and used the recovery option to "Rescue a broken system". When I got to the shell prompt I entered the command dpkg --configure -a and it seemed to finish doing the extraction and installation of the KDE desktop and applications, including those pesky ttf font files. Then I started the GUI using startx, and I am now looking at my first Linux desktop since I played with CorelLinux about three years ago.

Time to go playing! I want to find out how to have KDE start automatically when I boot the server, and also start configuring some of my hardware. Any further advice or suggestions would be appreciated.

Latest update:
I'm back to the start, reinstalling Ubuntu from scratch! It turns out that the first aborted installation of KDE somehow knocked out all sorts of things, most of all the network settings. All sorts of network related services were not running any more and with my lack of knowledge about Linux network configuration as yet, I decided that it would be faster for me to just reinstall it all from scratch rather than try to fix the problems. The OS is installing now, and I should soon be back at that now familiar DOS-like prompt, ready to have another go with KDE.

 

 

 

Comment/Reply (w/o sign-up)

There's really no difference between the server edition and the desktop edition of (K)(X)Ubuntu, other than the server edition bringing no GUI. If you download the desktop edition, you can skip most of the hassle you've been going through. Ever since 8.04, i believe, you can skip entering the LiveCD environment and go straight to the installer. With the amount of RAM you have, i'd suggest Xfce rather than KDE—that is, Xubuntu. You can still install KDE programs within Xubuntu, the package manager will take care of all the dependencies, without having to install the entire KDE package.

Comment/Reply (w/o sign-up)

Thanks for the input, truefusion. You may well be right about the amount of RAM that I am consuming using the full KDE environment. I haven't even worked out simple things like how to see the amount of free and committed RAM yet, so I still have a lot to learn. When it stops running because I filled up the RAM then I may well consider your suggestion.

In the meantime, I got everything back under control last night. I reinstalled Ubuntu v8.4 LTS Server Edition from scratch, and reinstalled Kubuntu, the KDE Desktop for Ubuntu. Nothing stopped half way through this time and it all seems to be working. I managed to get a driver working for my Riva TNT2 graphics card, so now I am not stuck on 800x600 resolution any more. My current struggle is trying to set a static IP address. This machine is going to be a server on my network, so I can not very well have it getting a new dynamic IP address every time the lease expires or every time that I reboot. However, while the networking seems to work quite fine with a DHCP packet, whenever I assign a static IP address I can no longer connect to the Internet. I have specified my default gateway and DNS servers manually, exactly as they appear in the DHCP packet, I have the IP address set well outside of the DHCP scope so that I don't cause an addressing conflict, but I cannot reach the Internet with a static IP address specified, only when I have the DHCP client enabled. Any ideas? This is key to me making further use of Linux as a server platform.

As for apps, I have a copy of KeePassX installed now, which is the Linux port of my favorite free password manager. An absolute essential as far as I am concerned! I have also added some system tools using Adept Manager. I quite like the software distribution idea within Linux, and it definitely beats the Windows software distribution model. I have added apps to help me manage the network services that I intend to run from this box, including the DNS and DHCP servers, the print server, etc.

I can see and access the shares on my Windows-based computers, but I am currently in a different workgroup to them, and haven't yet worked out how to change my workgroup under Ubuntu. Any advice? By the end of this I would like to be able to see all the computers in my network, irrespective of platform, all together from any other computer in the network. I would also like to have them all hanging off the same local DNS server, so that I can ping them all using a FQDN that is resolved by the local DNS server on the Ubuntu machine.

Currently all of the Windows-based machines on my network get a DHCP packet from my WiFi router, and they can all browse the Internet happily. I have added the (intended) IP address of the Ubuntu machine as a third DNS server in the DHCP packets that the WiFi router sends, in preparation for this change. I have a multiple NAT router configuration on my network, with many NAT routers in series cascading, as per the example from Gibson Research. I don't think that this configuration will hamper my intended plans, as all NAT activity is translated at the NAT router and is transparent for the clients. I don't need to do anything special to the NAT clients to make them NAT clients other than point them to their local NAT router as the default gateway and say "go for it"! Then on the WAN side of that NAT router it points to the LAN side of the next NAT router in the series as well, and it all happens transparently to the client. Eventually the final NAT router in the series, my ADSL router, spits everything out onto the Internet via my ISP's default gateway, and the internal network is fairly well protected. I do not normally use a proxy, but have been known to occasionally. This gives a brief overview of my network, to aid in advising me on how to overcome any problems that I encounter with my Ubuntu networking.

Again, thanks to anyone who offers any advice and suggestions for this project.

Comment/Reply (w/o sign-up)

Sounds like you get everything working perfectly now that is a tutorial I wouldn't mind seeing on trap especially since I am taking a class in LAN right now and being able to network up you have would bring great relief to me.

Comment/Reply (w/o sign-up)

I only have two tutorials published on the Trap17 forums, and both are about subjects that I have at least a couple of years of experience with and could answer questions about them if asked. I wouldn't presume to write a tutorial about networking with Linux after only two or three days of playing with it. I'm sure that there are plenty of people out there with much more experience than I have in this field, so I will gladly leave the cultivation of Credits for publishing such a tutorial to someone else. I wouldn't want the responsibility of putting you or anyone else wrong!

Comment/Reply (w/o sign-up)

A big problem with making a tutorial on getting everything working is that there is so many different distributions and there is so many different hardware configurations that it would be quite difficult to address all of those options. Many drivers and settings will be unique to each of us. For example, there is a specific wiki for getting ubuntu to work properly on a macbook pro, and within that there are different sub sections depending on what hardware your macbook pro is configured with.

Comment/Reply (w/o sign-up)

I now have two of my home network computers running Ubuntu! The second one is dual-booting with Windows XP. I have successfully gotten my 500GB external USB hard drive to work, but I had to temporarily put it back on the WinXP machine as the last time I used it I didn't "safely remove" it and GNU/Linux complained about that. Apparently there is a way to overcome this problem in GNU/Linux from the Command Console, but I'm not confident enough with that yet. So I put the external drive back on the WinXP machine, turned it on, and then safely removed it. When I put it back on the Ubuntu machine it worked perfectly.

My next task is to take control of my Samba network neighborhood. I want all of my machines, whether they are running Windows or GNU/Linux, to all be in the same workgroup. Eventually, they will be in the same domain instead of a workgroup, and will be using LDAP for authentication. I may even start looking into RADIUS for authentication, but that will come a lot later on. Centralized authentication, centralized logon, and roaming profiles has been something that I am used to under Windows 2000 Server, and I want to see if I can get similar functionality under GNU/Linux. Anybody want to give some advice on how best to achieve this?

I'm really enjoying delving into GNU/Linux now. I spent the day yesterday building a useful set of Internet bookmarks of sites that contain information to help me. I will be taking one of those online training courses soon to give me a head start with learning GNU/Linux. Oh, by the way, if you're wondering why I keep referring to "GNU/Linux", have a look at this website.

Comment/Reply (w/o sign-up)

i'm glad you have decided to try out ubuntu linux... personally i dont think there is a better linux distro and i have tried serveral
i have a few websites that might help you out
this one will teach you a little about the shell (command line)
http://linuxcommand.org/
this one has a few tutorals that might help you
http://howtoforge.com/
and this one is the ubuntu community.. best site for help on ubuntu
http://ubuntuforums.org/

Comment/Reply (w/o sign-up)