Patrik Duditš » Linux

Distribution for rather old computer

Patrik Duditš — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 19:13:16 +0000

My nephews have an old K6–350 with 64 MB RAM, 2.1 GB HDD, and S3 Trio64 graphics at their grandparent's house. They used it to play about 6 windows games they have installed, until one day when boot files were suddenly gone. Unfortunately (or not?), I already thrown out all Windows 95/98 instalation disks. I also don't posses working floppy drive for few years, so all the floppies are already gone (except for few, but as I found out, those are unreadable anyway). So I went on a quest finding a linux distribution that:

would run on i586
would run some desktop environment, while leaving some of the 64MB of RAM unallocated
would run recent wine
would run X with GL/DRI, so those games could be run

Well, I've got some bad news – there is no such distribution. Here's why:

Damn Small Linux

DSL installed OK to the harddisk, but it only allowed it's ownmyDSL extensions to be installed. Those doesn't include dosbox or wine >0.9.4×. Switching to apt didn't work on that version, because package statuses were broken, and it would mean downloading and forcing installation of each deb. (Well, I'm writing it after few more days of expermimentation, and it doesn't look like big deal now :), so maybe I'll return to that).

Vector Linux Lite

The LiveCD didn't boot, and installation was too big for 1.8GB partition. Where's the ‚Light‘ part?

Deli Linux

Looks nice in VM, however, there are no packages for it – neither wine or dosbox.

Debian

I installed XFCE environment, but it looks too heavy for the machine space- and memory-wise. Maybe if I started without X and then added JWM and ROX session, and configure it properly… well it would take some time to have it done.

TeenPup 2008

This is a puplet – spinoff of Puppy Linux 2.1. It contains many applications, games, nice icons. But getting packages for puppy linux is a quest itself – searching forums for .pet files, finding passwords for password protected repositories, and fighting incompatible versions of libraries. This distribution helped me getting acquainted with ROX file manager, which is actually quite nice once you understand the philosophy of it. However, wine package didn't work because of incompatible libc. I also managed to lead it to the state where it wouldn't reboot intead it always just restarted X session. So it was time to move further.

PuppyLinux 4.1.2

So after spending few days with TeenPup I understood desktop and bootup process of PuppyLinux, so I picked generic one. Installing wine went smoothly. But DirectX games wouldn't run on Xvesa or Xorg with vesa driver. The solution looked simple – just download full Xorg 7.3 and finally have answer to question, whether the system is actually capable of running those games from Wine. However, there is bug in Xorg 7.3 – xorg-server 1.3.0 doesn't export some of basic symbol properly, so enabling S3 driver results in linking error „Symbol RamDac not found“. So I tried to find a puplet that includes X.org 7.4

LXDE puplet

I found that one, burned the ISO, and found out it's i686 only.

Arch Linux

and arch linux is i686 only as well.

TinyME

This is the last distribution I tried. Looks quite momry heavy (still LXDE is way heavier than ROX/JWM) and still has xserver 1.3.0

Conclusion

There's no out-of-the-box solution. So I will either return to DSL or Debian, or get some bootable CD with win95 bootdisk and just run sys c: (to find out, some other system files are missing :)) – but getting such CD is not easy, who needs win95 anymore?

Special device UUID=xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx does not exist (especially with LVM)

Patrik Duditš — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 21:10:19 +0000

UUID partition was mystery to me – according to all documentation available they make life easier instantly and you no longer have to worry about your partition letters. Since I'm using LVM on all servers I manage I already stopped worrying. But since this is preferred method now, I wanted to use it (especially after last time udev created /dev/mapper/vg-lv device, but no /dev/vg/lv device after boot and I realized that after my backups were week old and I had to restore corrupted file :().

But here's the problem with UUIDs and LVM: After you create new LV, vol_id and blkid will show their UUID. But as soon as you want to mount that LV via /etc/fstab, it yields Special device UUID=... does not exist. Today I learned this special command:

sudo partprobe

It updates the /dev/disk/by-uuid directory and your uuid mount works like a charm.

Compress your /usr to save space

Patrik Duditš — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 10:30:44 +0000

I just found clever post with steps to make more space available to your root partition by having /usr compressed with squashfs and overlayed with unionfs. So I'm adding it here as note to self to try it on my Ubuntu on USB disk, where I devoted to much space to NTFS partitions :) It also could be fine for Aspire One, if my wife will start to actually store any files there, not just do the browsing.

http://po-ru.com/…-the-eee-pc/

Oh yes, and according to this comment, Ubuntu 8.10 works nicely on Aspire One, so if I'll be willing to sacrifice nice bootup times of Linpus to more standard way of administration (at least for me), I might give that a try.

Setting up Acer Aspire One

Patrik Duditš — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 12:09:14 +0000

I recently got this cutie from Acer. It's purpose is to be my wife's browsing machine. For that I had to modify some things:

Install Skype
Install Pidgin
Upgrade to Firefox 3
Instal mscorefonts
Video player with subtitle support

„Advanced Mode“

First thing to do is to enable Xfce menu a. k. a. advanced mode.

Skype

This one was fairly easy, just matter of adding skype repository to the package manager, as described on my-guides.net :

First you must install the Skype repository. Open a terminal and type:

$ sudo nano /etc/yum.repos.d/skype.repo In that file copy the following lines:

[skype]
name=Skype Repository
baseurl=http://download.skype.com/linux/repos/fedora/updates/i586/
enabled=0
gpgkey=http://www.skype.com/products/skype/linux/rpm-public-key.asc
gpgcheck=1

Now you can easily install skype by typing:

$ sudo yum --enablerepo=skype install skype

At any time you can search for updates like that:

$ sudo yum --enablerepo=skype update skype

If you are asked if it is ok to import the GPG signature just type y and press Enter.

Pidgin

If you want to use ICQ on your aspire one, you will need recent version of Pidgin. Acer's IM has some dependencies on same libraries that pidgin uses, so installing is not so straightforward, however, there is this forum post.

remeove the OLD libpurple plugin
1. In package manager, go to List tab (a popup window should appear to read the software info), and type libpurple
2. once found, then unselect it (a red dahs will appear at the left); then click apply.
install pidgin 2.4.3
1. go back to Browse tab (it was only this way it worked for me)
2. click application in the left window, then go to graphical internet applications
3. click on optional packages
4. select pigdin and pidgin-libnotify
5. then click close
6. then click apply

If I remember well, I had to install libpurple by hand (though there was a dependency) as well. Pidgin just wouldn't start without it.

Firefox

Now the harder part: If you want your firefox to be installed the proper way (via yum), you should add remi repository :

wget http://rpms.famillecollet.com/remi-release-8.rpm
rpm -Uvh remi-release-8.rpm

Following many Fedora 8 howto's you try to yum upgrade firefox , but nothing happens. This is because installed firefox is not a „Fedora firefox“, instead an „Acer firefox“. You cannot do yum remove firefox as this would uninstall half of the desktop environment, as it relies on firefox. What you can do, though is:

rpm -e --nodeps firefox
yum install firefox

The first one will forcibly remove the old one, without uninstalling packages that depend on it, and yum will install package with highest version available, which is firefox 3 in this case.

Microsoft Core Web Fonts

WHen you start using your freshly installed browser, you may notice, that some of the sites doesn't look quite right (e. g. including aspireoneuser.com). That's because they rely on some of the windows font's. Their linux package is called msttcorefonts, but is not available in Fedora 8. You either need to build it or use package from over here (not tested, I was just looking for the previous link).

Video player

For proper playback of DivX files, and subtitles, included Video Master application is not enough. I installed gnome-mplayer from livna repository. The bad thing is that upgrading mplayer breaks the Video Master, so it's good to replace it in the desktop menu as well.

OpenSwan and Cisco PIX: ISAKMP:not zero on reserved payload 5

Patrik Duditš — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 11:47:14 +0000

Now this was another long night: I was trying to create IPSec tunnel between Cisco PIX and Ubuntu-based router with OpenSwan. At first, I was unable to estabilish ISAKMP communication as PIX always rejected it with SA not acceptable. That was solved with adding

ike=aes-sha1-modp1024

into ipsec.conf configuration file. And once I got though this I came to thegreat showstopper, that is mentioned in the title. Cisco and various forums state, that my pre-shared key was wrong (but it wasn’t), that I should do clear crypto sa on the PIX (but it didn’t help), or that my access list was wrong (but they seemed right). After giving up and getting some sleep instead I decided to change the encryption (I used AES with SHA1). I added new policy for 3DES with MD5 and suddenly the message was gone!

But there was a new one, saying Proxy Identities Not Supported, and finally I found where I should have had 192.168.8.0 instead of 192.168.1.0 – in the ipsec.conf.

And from that time on, the tunnel works perfectly.

One more note:

After you’re happy that your tunnel has been estabilished and you’re re looking forward to trying it out, you may get disappointed that no pings to remote internal network will work, and that ssh will return No route to host.The secret ingredient is to use internal network interface as source, so use

ping remoteinternalhost -I routerinternalinterfaceip

ssh -b routerinternalinterfaceip remoteinternalhost

Samba DFS link refers to a location that is unavailable.

Patrik Duditš — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 23:35:42 +0000

If you ‚promoted‘ a Samba share to DFS root, a try to access the DFS link right after the change, you may receive rather long and useless error message from explorer, that starts with refers to a location that is unavailable. This is all just a result of your impatience. Log off, log on and try again!