[SOLVED] Slackware 14.2 install, any thoughts?

Didier Spaier · 12-08-2016, 04:02 PM

@Darth Vader: thanks for this great explanation, my Romanian friend.

OT: I should really extend the bio of my grandfather.

Darth Vader · 12-08-2016, 04:34 PM

@Didier Spaier: How old you are, as your grandfather was born on 1883?

And, thank for appreciation!

Didier Spaier · 12-08-2016, 04:51 PM

I am 67.

EDIT. My grandfather was exactly 39 when his son, my father was born.

astrogeek · 12-08-2016, 06:06 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Didier Spaier

I am 67.

EDIT. My grandfather was exactly 39 when his son, my father was born.

OT

Interesting if brief bio on your grandfather, and maybe an interesting glimpse of yourself!

I am 64. My life-mentor was born in the 1880's, the last of several children born to parents who had been married during the American war of northern aggression (also known as the American Civil War). He was also a teacher and philosopher and seeker of truth, built his own Marconi-wave deices before it was widely called radio, served aboard a US naval vessel during WWI and led a long and meaningful life.

It is sometimes surprising to realize how long a time first and second person memory can span, and how directly our own lives have been affected by those who lived during times we read about in our school history books!

Darth Vader · 12-08-2016, 06:13 PM

@Didier Spaier: BTW, you are curious to know the sense of your surname, on Romanian Language?

A person (as in/or owner of a shop) which sell spare parts for automobiles or trucks, etc.

From English "spare" with the Romanian extension (of profession/occupation) "ier"

How "spareier" sounds strange for a Romanian, as in triple vocals, was probably simplified to "spaier".

How the base word was imported from English, I guess that it referred to automobiles, British and American technology on those times.

EldonCool · 12-08-2016, 08:27 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Darth Vader

Look, while in theory is possible to install a standard Linux Operation System on USB Thumbdrive, I will explain you why that is freaking wrong.

First, a bit of theory. You believe that an USB Thumbdrive and an (USB) SSD are the same? Nothing more wrong, even both use flash chips to store information!

An USB Thumbdrive contains basically two chips: one being a USB controller and an interface to a flash chip, the second one. Let's suppose that they are high quality. Still, this system rely on a specific filesystem, usually FAT32 or EXFAT, and the (USB) controller to implement a basic protection against wearing.

What is wearing? The flash chips cannot be written endless, after some number of cycles go on errors, and usually die or go readonly.

Now the big problem: even you write to this thumbdrive a 100 bytes file, it will work over write pages, which usually have 1MB on those cheap thumbs. Also, the USB controller do no caching, on sake of simplicity and low price, so if you write 100 small files to thumb, which are on total of 100KB, in fact, is very possible a specific flash page to be read on memory and written for 100 times.

It is much? Maybe not, if your thumbdrive the data is written once, read often, as it is supposed to be. Additionally, the FAT32 with the cluster size of 1MB, aligned with the flash page, would help to distribute the operation of writing of data to different sectors, even you will be surprised that you cannot write same quantity of information, like on a harddrive.

BUT, if you format the thumbdrive on a Linux filesystem, able to support the OS, is very safe to assume that you fuck the data alignment, so you will slow down the thumb, and much more data will be written, going to double. That's WHY is better to preserve the original format of the thumbdrive, for the sake of durability.

In other hand, the formatting to a Linux filesystem, specially a journaled one, will wear the thumb freaking fast, because the huge amount of data written to partition metadata or journal, every time even you read a file from.

Long story short, a Linux filesystem, specially a journaled one, is a BIG NO-NO, unless you accept you thumbdrive to wear hundred times faster.

Additionally, installing the operating system on that filesystem, will make your thumbdrive to wear even magnitude faster.

So, what do a Linux LIVE, compared with the traditional ones, to be able to live relatively safe on those thumbdrives?

An educated Linux LIVE minimize at maximum the writing to thumbdrive, using multiple methods:

- It use FAT32/EXFAT as host filesystem, and a educated Linux LIVE should do NOT reformat it, but to speculate the already existent one.
- Its own filesystem is enclosed on read-only file(s), who are only read, and using a special technology, called UNION, it try to simulate the read/write state.
- To preserve its changes, it save the data on memory, but on shutdown, a special procedure is run, to save those differences to a file, eventually with encryption, on its host thumbdrive, which is loaded on next boot.

That's WHY you should use a Linux LIVE on a thumbdrive and NOT a standard Linux operating system.

Also, as plus advantage, an Linux LIVE have special methods to try to auto-configure and it is more prone to be able to run on different computers.

Finally, but very important: a thumbdrive is fucking slow, and a Linux LIVE will be able to offer a much better experience than the standard ones, because usually its files are written compressed on the filesystem, special caching is done be the usual suspect called SQUASHFS, and then much faster to load them.

You convinced me, you sweet talking devil. I loaded the new 14.2 onto my regular drive /dev/sda2/.

Now and it works, so now I am trying to get other things working.

So network manager is suppose to be the default internet thing.

So how do I get it going? My installation is complete, but while
on KDE it tells me networkmanager is not working. what is the
magic path that gets it going? I am on my apple mac right now
to get on the internet.

bassmadrigal · 12-08-2016, 08:34 PM

You need to make sure /etc/rc.d/rc.networkmanager is executable (which can be selected during the setup process... or done manually as below).

Code:

chmod +x /etc/rc.d/rc.networkmanager

And then you need to start the daemon.

Code:

/etc/rc.d/rc.networkmanager start

EldonCool · 12-08-2016, 09:23 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by bassmadrigal

You need to make sure /etc/rc.d/rc.networkmanager is executable (which can be selected during the setup process... or done manually as below).

Code:

chmod +x /etc/rc.d/rc.networkmanager

And then you need to start the daemon.

Code:

/etc/rc.d/rc.networkmanager start

I did those things, as root and got the response that network manager was running.
Still KDE tells me network manager is not running.

Next step?

I rebooted now I am accessing the network but having some trouble getting
on to my network. Probably something I have to work out on my own.

bassmadrigal · 12-08-2016, 09:53 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by EldonCool

I rebooted now I am accessing the network but having some trouble getting
on to my network. Probably something I have to work out on my own.

Try switching Network Manager from dhcpcd to dhclient and see if that helps...

EldonCool · 12-08-2016, 10:10 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by bassmadrigal

Try switching Network Manager from dhcpcd to dhclient and see if that helps...

how would I do that? There is something definitely wrong,
I can connect to my wifi internet, but it disconnects
in about 1 second.

bassmadrigal · 12-09-2016, 06:32 AM

I don't use it at all, but I believe you just need to edit /etc/NetworkManager/NetworkManager.conf and change the dhcp=dhcpcd line to read dhcp=dhclient and then restart Network Manager.

Code:

/etc/rc.d/rc.networkmanager restart

EldonCool · 12-09-2016, 10:22 AM

I tried fooling with the .conf file as suggested, and could get nowhere.
so I put the file back to original
stopped network manager
and will try to setup wicd

EldonCool · 12-09-2016, 02:09 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by frankbell

I prefer wicd for my wireless network manager. Among other reasons, it has a ncurses interface (wicd-curses) that you can run in a terminal without starting the GUI. I've also found it quite stable, though network manager has improved since the last time I used it regularly.

I installed wicd from the distribution cd as root in a terminal windows, not using Windows.
then I tried to run wicd-curses and I get the error message that I need to start the daemon wicd,
that it is not running.

So how do I start the wicd daemon?
I took a wild guess and typed in wind, yep it started it.
Yep, shithot, now when I type in wind-curses it shows
me a bunch of networks found, mine being one of them.

Alien Bob · 12-09-2016, 02:44 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by frankbell

I prefer wicd for my wireless network manager. Among other reasons, it has a ncurses interface (wicd-curses) that you can run in a terminal without starting the GUI.

The ncurses client configuration interface for the Network Manager is called "nmtui". It too, allows you to setup your network connection without the need to start an X session.

EldonCool · 12-09-2016, 02:51 PM

Right now I seem to have wicd installed, and running, but I cannot connect to any network.
There is a bunch of configuration things in wind-curses and I have no idea how to set
any of them. This is under the Config mode. Where can I find some instructions for
choosing what I need in this configuration?
By the way, if you see me refer to wind, I probably mean wicd. This damn spelling
helper keeps changing it on me and I have to retype it numerous times.

It wants:
Use static IP ?
Use static dns ?
Use DHCP hostname ?
Wireless bitrate - allow lower bitrates?
etc.

So how do I go about doing all this.
Also, how do I know the status of wicd?
How can I stop it if I don't want it?