Contest and Projects

Due to a mix-up, I ended up with two copies of Linux Format #126, the Christmas 2009 issue. I figure I'll run my first ever contest here at Daemon Dancing - after over 6 years of writing on this blog, why not? Let's make it a simple one - just drop me an email at jdarnold@buddydog.org and next Monday, when I get back from my work trip, I'll randomly select one entry to mail it out to. No strings attached and, believe you me, I won't be keeping your emails around! And heck, I'll even make it open internationally, just to make it even more likely I'll get at least one email entry:)

So I get a 1.5 out of 4 for my holiday projects. I did get the girls' computer up and running. The new power supply took a bit of forcing to get it to fit into the old case, but then it was up and running just fine. I was bit stumped as to what to install for an OS on it. For obvious reasons, the old Windows XP installed on the hard drive failed to boot. Really, all they do is play flash games on it at this point, save for R10.4 playing some Day of Defeat with me and my clan buddies. So I moved her onto the Windows machine and had to pick a Linux for the new box. I went with OpenSUSE 11.2, as I'm most familiar with that and so it would require the least amount of thought. So far, so good.

I get a half a project because I did try to install a new Linux on my own box, but wasn't really happy with it. I installed the latest Sabayon (v5.0), after being pretty impressed with how well the Live CD ran. But I immediately ran into a problem after the installation - GRUB refused to boot it up.

Because I run my own boot manager (TerraByte's BootIt NG), I always install the GRUB boot loader onto the first block of the OS's boot partition. One test of an installer is just how hard this is to do, and I'm happy to report it wasn't too hard for the Sabayon installer - just select the Advanced Options and it was one of the choices. But on boot, I just saw "GRUB " and I knew immediately what the problem was. My machine is a homebrew one, with both old fashioned IDE drives and newfangled SATA drives and this isn't the first time an installer or LiveCD called the drives something different than what a full boot calls them.

Unfortunately, I had formatted the partition as an 'ext4' drive, so I couldn't get at it with my OpenSUSE 11.0 boot. And it may also have had something to do with why GRUB didn't work either. So I redid the install using 'ext3' and still had the problem. After rebooting the Sabayon Live CD, the usual GRUB steps to fix a broken GRUB install didn't quite work:

# grub
grub> find /boot/grub/stage1
(hd0,0)
(hd0,3)
grub> root (hd0)
grub> setup (hd0,3)
....
grub> quit

I do the ",3" part to (hd0,3) so that it installs in the root block of partition 3 and not the root block of that whole hard drive, to not overwrite my own boot manager. But I knew this was still wrong, because after a "normal" boot, the boot drive is hd1, not hd0. I think there is a way to tell grub this using another parameter to the setup command, but I had a better idea - I just booted into my OpenSUSE boot and changed all 'hd0's to be 'hd1'. After booting, things got a little further, until I realized that the setup command doesn't seem to fix the /boot/grub/menu.lst file, so I had the make the same s/hd0/hd1/g change there too.

Now I was able to boot into Sabayon. And because they aren't afraid to install binary drivers, I got the nVidia drivers and was quickly able to turn on my second display, which was nice. But the update process left me a little mystified. I couldn't really figure out how to get it to select packages and install the updates. And even when it was downloading, it was incredibly slow and, in the end, didn't seem to do anything.

So in this age of instant gratification, I sort of gave up. I think I'll try the Sidux distro next, although I should just stop wasting time and install OpenSUSE 11.2, as that is the one I like and use.