Hey guys,

Recently I had some trouble connecting via VPN to one of my ASAs. It was working and then it stopped out of nowhere. I swore once I got this working again that I wasn't going to change a single thing on this installation. But as you may have gathered from the title, that didn't last long.

If any of you can help me resolve this issue however, I vow unto thee my super bestest ultima oath that I WILL LEAVE THIS INSTALLATION ALONE. Pinky promise, cross my heart, I just want this to work again ):

So I am running Ubuntu 14 LTS on my laptop with Ubuntu's built-in full HDD encryption. I installed basic networking/office/file management programs but other than that it is pretty vanilla. Tonight however I installed plymouth-manager. I used sudo to run it, installed the "Seven" splash, and set it to active. I then went to reboot to see the effects, and to my dismay all I am seeing is a purple screen. I don't see the Ubuntu logo or get prompted for my encryption passphrase.

I have a live Ubuntu USB drive with persistence which I am using now. Does anyone have any suggestions for getting this working? In all honesty, I blew away my Windows image on this laptop over the weekend to install Ubuntu (finally switching over from the dark side of the force), so if re-installation is neccessary I'm really not set back that far. However, if there is a quick fix for this that would be amazing!

Please let me know if there is any additional info I can provide to help troubleshoot.

The first thing to try is to, when the grub menu comes up, hit the "e" key to edit the menu entry, remove "splash" from the instruction string, hit Ctrl + x to boot that modified menu entry.

Do that and see if it boots correctly.

I actually wasn't seeing the grub screen at all as I had with previous linux installations, but I pressed "e" anyways and voila! I followed your instructions and everything booted up just fine. I was then able to restore the original Ubuntu splash and it is all working the way it was before; the stars have aligned, the force has been brought back into balance, peace and order hath been restored across the galaxy.

Good and kind sir, I tip my hat to you! As promised, this installation shall be preserved in its current state for all of eternity. Changes will be made over my war-torn rotting corpse (; LQ, you guys are always savin my hide!

If you would like to see your menu so that you can have a reminder that kernels need removed, boot to recovery or any other reason. Do;
and you will find a line that hides grub. Can't tell you exacly where, won't have Ubuntu on here anymore. But the Ubuntu installer, when setting up a new install, by default, hides the grub menu if this is the only install on the box. Comment out that line and run;
Will show the screen menu from then on.

If you hit, I think, the Shift key this should show the menu.

Have never understood why they do this. There are a lot of reasons for needing your menu. Hiding doesn't make a difference in the time from the menu read by the system to booting the default install. Just won't show you the menu. And at times like you just had this is a very nice thing to see.

I am sorry that I never thought of that when I posted but am glad to now hitting e at least brings up the edit on the default menu entry.

This is what you will need most likely anyway. However there are times that booting to an older kernel would be a better choice for instance if you have a bad kernel upgrade. This can, and does occasionally, happen.

Sudden loss of power during a session if you don't have some sort of ups connected may cause a boot problem that simply will be fixed by booting to recovery.

Anyway comment out that line if you want to see your menu.

Good to know! I will definitely be re-enabling the grub menu.

Any insight on why you won't use Ubuntu?
It seems to get a pretty bad rep in the linux community. I chose Ubuntu LTS x86 mostly in the hopes of getting the most compatibility from it. I use it for work and need to be able to connect to Cisco ASAs, RDP into windows machines, and mount SMB/CIFS shares. Id be open to building a few USBs to try out a few different distros if you could recommend a few, my only requirements are the connectivity and basic office apps.

It is a bad idea to ask people things like that. Can start flame wars.

I started with Ubuntu 8.04. I read all the propaganda about how it was really the only easy to use Linux that they promote and being me had to try that extremely hard to use Debian on which Ubuntu is based. This was in my first month of ever laying eyes on a Linux system and I found, with the help of the sticky on sources.lists in the Debian section of LQ that Lenny (Debian 5) was just about as easy for me as Ubuntu.

I stuck with Ubuntu however while maintaining a multi boot (8.04, 8.04 and Lenny - second 8.04 to try things on so as not to break the "real" install). Ran Ubuntu-testing for 3 years as my production OS. During that time the jackbooted thugs took over the UFs. Canonical had never treated testers with respect. Then they started treating us as some sort of threat. This is why between 10.04-testing and 12.04-testing they went from at least 150 experienced and good testers to 13. I left and made that 12 at the end of 12.04-testing.

I do not use Ubuntu or Ubuntu derived systems because I don't think the testing is sufficient and their sales pitch is decieving. Nor do I recommend it to new users for those same reasons.

Linux for years has been the Windows system recovery persons friend. Long before Ubuntu existed. Red Hat has more servers out there than anyone. I believe even BSD has more server deployments than Windows. They all have no trouble communicating with Windows. And haven't for at least 18 years. Since the advent of Live Session disks all data recovery tools of any account for Windows systems have been based on one Linux distro or another. I actually prefer an external drive with a full Gnu/Linux install and a large, empty data partition for data recovery.

I do not like doing that work using sudo. It is best done, in my oppinion, as root.

I use Debian because I prefer APT to RPM. RPM systems have a longer history of large server deployments however. As all base distros contribute to the Linux kernel, however, it really is simply a matter of personal choice.

You will find that the cli is a great tool. This is contrary to Ubuntu cult teachings.

I am a late comer to computers as I was well into my 40s before my first experience with MSDos. Since 98 I used Windows until 08 and am really a guy that tends to think of gui tools before cli tools. With that in mind I can say that many cli tools are easier, much faster and more reliable than any gui tool.

Dealing with Window, which we do not have in this house at all, is quite easy with Debian or Fedora or Magia. I maintain my rather elderly Dreaded Mother in Laws Vista (my reason for not using Windows is our acquisision of a Vista box) machine. Hers has a dual boot with Debian and a back up data partition formated to ext4 for safe storage inaccessable to Windows. So her system can be cracked and hopefully not loose any thing of importance. Actually this is less of a problem now as she is now using Wheezy.

You will find that there are not many differences between distros. The main thing is package management. I think you should stick with one type until you have pretty complete understanding of it. I know APT pretty well so now when going to something else know that they all do the same things it is just a matter of learning to commands for package management. I can use Yum. Am pretty proficient with Urpmi (Mageia).

If you want a real easy distro for noobs you should try the original which was Mandrake. Mageia is the direct decendent. Using it you will find that long time users have little experience, indeed maybe none, with the cli. The old MCC (Mandrake Control Center - now Mageia Control Center) is the finest gui tool of its kind. The Gnome Control Center is a pale shadow of that MCC.

Mandrake forked from RH in 98 with the same intention as Ubuntu claimed to have in making a noob friendly OS. Mandrake succeeded however. Their downfall was due to stupid naming. Calling a distro Mandrake and using a Wizard as a logo was almost insisting on being sued. Mandrake the Magician obliged and bankrupted them. Has bounced around the world, owned by corporation after corporation mainly has Mandriva. Mageia was formed a few years ago by Mandriva devs that quit around the time of the last sale and has been a community developed system since then. With some nice corporate sponsors.

Mageia 4 is the current stable. Default DEs are KDE and Gnome but all others are available of course. They have sort of the Debian attitude in favoring the FSF definition of "free" but if you use the install DVD (non live) it will detect and install any non-free firmware and so forth your sytem needs. The live offerings do not do that. Can be done after install just like it can with Debian.

The only 2 thngs that Ubuntu offers that Debian doesn't are those non-free packages and eye candy. As all the tools you need to deal with Windows are actually free I am not sure why you would think you needed Ubuntu although maybe the eye candy helps somehow.

If you leave Ubuntu at all the default settings I would stick with it. If you like Unity you had better stick with it. Fedora and, I think, Suse actually started porting it to their repos but gave it up as crap. I think it was actually in the Suse repo for a very short time. Fedora just pulled the plug on it after messing with it for a couple months.

Debian has never been big on eye candy on the assumption that the user will never use the default look anyway. All the themes and icon sets are installed. More are in the repos. You can set it up yourself. You can even, without the flashy looks and sales pitches that come with that superior Ubuntu Software Center, install Software Center if you like the slowest possible gui package manager in Gnu/Linux (it does have a nice serch function - I prefer "apt-cache search" on which it is based - see "man apt-cache").

All base cli commands other than for distro specific commands like for package management are all the same in all Gnu/Linux although some may not be installed by default but will be in the repos. This is because they are used in all headless servers. Including Ubuntu servers that come with Plymouth installed by default.

A complex, unstable splash system is very important in a headless server of course.

There, now aren't you sorry you asked?

Who do you think is the best superhero? (;

Yuck, no thank you!

It's funny you mention that - I am working with three Ubuntu 14 LTS installs on three laptops and each instance is way more buggy then I remember Ubuntu being, back at say version 10.

CLI and I are well-acquainted (; Though coming from an MS world I am much more comfortable at a CMD or PS prompt. I am also done with MS for personal use however.

I've been recommended Mandriva before, maybe I'll take a look. I don't need anything noob friendly, I've been dabbling in linux for some years, just something stable with good compatibility. Interesting take on the distros though, I understood there was a fork in the nix chain that separated debian based distros from arch based distros.

Lol.
I had Gnome, KDE, and LXDE installed and liked each DE better than Ubuntu's "Gnome", Im definitely not attached to it. I also prefer APT, Synaptic, or just about anything to the Ubuntu Software Center.I liked Ubuntu though and it had been a while so I was hopeful to see where it is now. Was surprised to see all the Amazon/Google/Facebook internet/social integrations that are turned on by default.

Nonsense. Spiced up my 6AM (;
I think I'm going to start sampling more distros and see what's out there, will be interesting to see just how similar the different linux systems are.

If you have plenty of cli experience managing packages with APT then non Debian branch distros will not be too tough to deal with. It is all Linux based, the package managers have to do the same jobs pretty much the same ways. They use different names and do the processes in slightly different ways.

There are usually some cheat sheets for the cli package management commands for any system.

The rest of the commands are from upstream at the kernel (Linux) or gui (GNU) projects so are all pretty much the same. Some commands may be missing as the packages for them are not installed by default, they will be available. There may be some commands that are installed by default that Debian branch distros don't install normally.

I prefer APT. RPM, for no good reason I can think of, irritates me. I think it is part of grumpy geezer syndrome.

The thing that really shocks me about the Mandrake decendents is the relative ignorance of cli use among the common user. This is caused by the exceptional functionality of the Mandrake (substitute Mandriva or Mageia) Control Center. Really an impressively easy to use, well laid out, made self explanitory for most users gui system I have seen in any OS although I am not really real familiar with Apple products so may have missed something there.

urpmi, the cli package management system, is very good. You can do anything with it.

Problem is that the original intent of the Mandrake project, as I understand it, was to make the cli very much a background function rarely, if ever, needed in itself by the user. So this leads to things being designed, from the ground up, for gui use. The file that is used to configure the "repos" (media in M speak) is HUGE and really hard to manage manually.

Closest thing to a sources.list is the /etc/urpmi/urpmi.cfg file. Sources.list for Wheezy, including the deb-multimedia repo, is all of 13 lines counting the spaces I add to make reading easier and including a couple comments. The /etc/urpmi/urpmi.cfg file for my Mageia 4 install is 323 lines.

But it is extremely easy to set up, including the "tainted" packages (similar to the deb-multimedia packages), in the MCC with its handy list of boxes to simply check or uncheck.

Using urpmi is the next easiest way to edit it. The ignorance of the normal user about these cli options is not for lack of really good documentation. On my old Dell box I couldn't boot to any Linux distro desktop without nonfree firmware. When I installed Mageia 1 this was not included. It took me 2 hours to read the documentation, get the "media" configured and install the firmware and be booted into the system with no prior knowledge of doing that sort of thing at all. Doing it in a chroot helped because I had a working system to read the documentation on while doing it but it is good documentation. Normal users just don't need the cli except very rarely.

I actually use it for package management by preference because wading through the documentation I found the uses for urpmq, the search function of urpmi, which is great and I find quicker to use than the gui package manager.

Which ever you use you get real good notification of what is going on and pretty much why it is going on. Really nice set up. But it is RPM based and I am prejudiced against it.

Forum is very nice and helpful. There are some grumpy geezers who are a bit gruff but also extremely experienced and helpful even if terse.

Part of my attraction to it is that it is kind of a mirror image of Ubuntu. Ubuntu is a corporate entity putting out a Debian (community based) based distro. Mageia is a community based distro based on a corporate background in both Mandrake and Red Hat. Just the kind of thing that I find interesting in a sort of socialogical way.

My favorite super hero is Tux.
http://www.picgifs.com/graphics/tux/...049729-814843/

All very good info, thanks for taking the time!

I ended up downloading a handful of distros and installing to USBs so I could try them out for a while before deciding on any one. I start with Arch, Fedora, Mandriva, Mint, Kali (not ready yet IMO, still in alpha), and openSUSE. I have to say that I was pretty impressed with openSUSE! It definitely suits my needs but it also easy enough for non-technical people to use daily without needing to tap into the CLI. I now have this installed on a few PCs around the house including my own. I also found it interesting that only openSUSE and Kali detected my 32GB SSD (it is in integrated 32 GB integrated Intel SSD that is supposed to be used as a RAID cache). Installing Kali to the SSD was unsuccessful, but openSUSE was able to pull it off no problem and that is what I am now running on (:

In the excitement of going SSD for the low low price of 0$ however I did not think to use my HDD as the /home partition, so I will need to address that, but aside from that hiccup which was my own fault I can't say I have any complaints so far. Every program I need as well as quite a few non-essentials that are just nice to have are all available out of the box from openSUSE repos, and lots more of course in others like packman. I would definitely recommend this distro to anyone looking to try out a new OS. I think I'll keep the USBs around though, it will be nice to have all these systems readily available to work with.

At work we just took on an all-Mac customer (we are an MSP) and boy have I gotten my feet wet. My two cents? The GUI is great for most users, the systems seem pretty stable, and there are a lot of packages available - more than I would have guessed. The problem though is that OS X and its server software lack a lot of functionality needed for the enterprise environment. It was interesting to note the striking similarity of the GUI to the Ubuntu GUI, all that's missing is the launchpad and the white color scheme.

Well, I feel a need to jump in here. I first got seriously into Linux back when Mandrake was at version 8.1, when I installed that distro on a machine with only 80 MB of RAM, and a 20 GB hard drive. It served as my router and LAN control center for my home office LAN, with four Win95 (later Win98SE) boxes doing my actual work.

It did quite well until the machine itself suffered a shorted power switch that caused a surge which fried the motherboard. By that time, Mandrake had become Mandriva and undergone significant changes. A replacement machine with more RAM and larger drive wasn't happy with the available Mandriva version so I looked into Ubuntu, which was at version 7.1 (Feisty Fawn) and getting lots of press coverage.

It appeared that Ubuntu itself had too much eye candy for my needs, but the Xubuntu variant seemed well-suited so I loaded it up and gave it a try. It worked well, and I've stayed with it ever since. Currently I run 14.04.2 LTS on one machine (which still serves as my LAN controller, FTP server, DNS server, and general workhorse), and 12.04.4 on the other (with acquisition of newer, more powerful machines, and the discovery of virtualization, the four Win boxes have been reduced to just two, both running Xubuntu).

I use only LTS releases, and don't upgrade until the x.x.1 version appears, to allow time for most of the bugs that slip through testing to be found and fixed. Xubuntu has avoided much of the "new look" introduced into the main Ubuntu distro, and acts much as did the old Mandrake system. I've explored Debian a bit, but find the security-update process of Xubuntu a better fit for my needs. Also looked at such distros as Mint and Puppy but none of them approached Xubuntu for me...

As mentioned, Your Mileage May Vary. Try a bunch. Back at the start, for instance, I tried just about every window manager available to Mandrake, and settled on IceWM. Now, XFCE suits me best. The CLI is a standby tool, of course; I learned it on the original MULTICS mainframe system that inspired Unix itself, and very little has changed over the years...