Partitioning Peril

Knoppix is the favourite Live distro so far.
Though, it has the distinction of royally screwing up the partitions on my drive making a few GBs of downloaded content inaccessible. The excess of options are interesting, but if two tools for the same job offer contrasting solutions, the user (ignorant user) is left in limbo, or worse, as in my case in loss.
Gparted and Qtparted were two tools offered by Knoppix to deal with partitions. Since I already had Mandriva on the drive, I knew the partition numbers and this allowed me to conclude that Gparted was showing the proper layout. The layout had hda1 as a primary, hda2 as extended which contained hda3, hda5, hda7 and hda9. When viewed in Qtparted, the partitions were shown as hda1 to hda6. Hda7 and 9 contained data, and after I formatted and recreated hda5 to install knoppix, the data in 7 and 9 was gone. The partitions were there, the size was reported correctly, but the contents were missing - only a lost+found folder remained.

Data recovery options are limited, especially thanks to the limited knowledge about the file systems themselves. An online search revealed the presence of two free tools - Rtools, and Diskrecovery (or something similar). Diskrecovery scanned a partition and showed a bunch of image files and nothing else, though there were about a few hundred nested empty folders "recovered" as well. R tools did worse, just returning the Lost+Found folder. TestDisk is an excellent partition table tool, but it couldn't help me this time (it had saved my data many times previously with Windows partitions) since the partitions were intact.

A few enquiries online suggested using the fsck tool, which was inbuilt, could help. But, I saw no benefit in using it. A write off is imminent.

The lesson to be learnt is avoid Qtparted and ergo Knoppix installation.

Fedora Core 6 Application management

As a veteran Windows user the addiction of Linux Distros to online communication is irritating. When I have an entire DVD of rpms, why would a distro not consider it as an installation source was puzzling and irritating?

This experience underlines the conclusion that it is best to start off by selecting ALL the bundled applications at OS installation time, and removing the unwanted ones later on; rather than selectively including a few applications at OS installation time and then adding applications later on.

In FC6's case, clicking on any rpm from the DVD will generate an error that an online connection is needed to test for dependencies. The solution, according to the knowledgeable folks at linuxquestions.org, was to reconfigure YUM - the FC software management utility, I think - to accept the DVD as a source as well.

Not too keen to rectify what seems to me to be a blunder on FC6's part. I'll just have to reinstall the whole DVD the next time.

Fedora Core 6

This was the only full blown distro I had. With a non Live DVD loaded with goodies, FC6 promised a lot. The advantage of the DVD was that the rpms on it could also be used to install applications on other rpm compatible distros, like Mandriva (or so I thought).

Interface wise, FC6 offered the most pleasing option. I like lean UI design with maximum space being allocated to the work area. I found the padded and rounded interface of Ubuntu 6 a bit unsatisfactory. And the fonts were also too huge. It was similar to using a lower resolution monitor. The wanton waste of screen space in Ubuntu is not appreciated.

FC6 was all lean and sharp and this was quite appealing. For all the ranting over the inavailability of a proper control panel in the other distros, I was dismayed that FC6 also did not offer a wholesome control panel that allowed easy access to ALL system hardware and software configuration options. I had believed that FC6, being a serious distro, would have this facility.

Update:
In hindsight, FC6 was probably the only distro that managed Opera installation smoothly. It automatically downloaded all dependencies leaving the user thankfully watching the progress. Since I am a Opera addict, FC6 seems to be a frontrunner to be THE OS.

Knoppix

Knoppix is a class apart.
Knopper's educational tool surpasses the best Live distros offered by those calling themselves professionals in Distro making.
What strikes one after popping in the Knoppix CD is the brimming Start Menu. Unlike other live distros, Knoppix doesn't seem to have cut corners to be able to fit into a CD. It is KDE based and the sleek, lean UI rivals that of FC. Besides KDE, it also offers the ICE Windows Manager which is all business, and hence appealing.
After dealing with the retarded inbuilt CD burner in Nautilus in Mandriva, the K3B burner in Knoppix was a real surprise and pleasure. The sleek interface was quite well received.
Unfortunately, knoppix does not have an easy way to install the CD contents to the hard disk. The other live distros have a prominent install to disk icon right on the desktop, no Knoppix. An online search revealed the "knoppix-installer" tool which could be used. Compared to the polished interface, the tool is jagged, and not just visually (But knopper does not recommend installation, so can't blame him). For one, it is not a straight forward tool that can be compared to other distros. The installer is a common staging area for other tools: like Qtparted to create a partition, another tool to configure the options of the installation, and finally another tool to do the install per se. A real let down compared to the rest of the Knoppix experience, the installation is not for the faint of heart (or full of data). Qtparted, the partition tool, can be careless in handling paritions, and as in my case can be cause for grief (subject of another post).
But as a live distro, it offers unparalleled features. The concern that an optical drive is continuously running makes long sessions with Knoppix a conscience pricking experience.

Mandriva 2008

This was another distro I was eager to try out.
Unfortunately, it was the only distro that failed me totally.
On the Presario with the ATI motherboard and onboard graphics, I was left with a terminal. Probably manually configuring the X server could have worked.
On the Athlon 1700 with nForce chipset and onboard graphics, the system would always crash with the NVidia logo.
Sad.

Mandriva 2007

I always had a preference for Mandriva, having tested the distro when it was named Mandrake. The installation was the smoothest of all the distros I'd tested then.

Mandriva 2007 was another distro I had with me, along with Mandriva 2008, probably downloaded sometime back.

In contrast to the "user is too dumb to be given access to root account and control panel" approach of Ubuntu, Mandriva is more liberal. The 2007 live distro was fun to work with, installation was smooth with all hardware getting recognised properly and drivers installed.

Mandrake 2008 for some reason would always stop with a command prompt rather than the desktop. I concluded that the ATI drivers were the cause.

The insistence on a password that was atleast 6 letters long was part of the Unix tradition of security. But since only the user could be autologged in (and not the root account), and everytime the control panel or some other admin tool was accessed the password had to be entered, the best way to use Mandriva was to login as root always.

For some reason I faced a lot of incidents of data corruption, with almost every boot being accompanied by a disk check. I have doubts that had the user account been used the incidence of the data corruption could be minimised.

First Jab : Ubuntu

I had chanced across the shipit.ubuntu.com site a few months back. Probably a post in some forum. Thanks to the poster.

The free shipping was too good to be true, and mostly just to test out the claim I ordered 5 copies each of Ubuntu and Kubuntu 6.04. I was quite surprised to see the CDs at my doorstep. Canonical, the people behind Ubuntu seem highly motivated to spread Linux.
I remember looking closely at the shipping label just to check if indeed the package had not been shipped locally. No, it came all the way from some place in Europe ( I think).

A few months after that I shamelessly ordered three copies each of the the 7.04 versions as well. Aah, what the heck.

The CDs had been lying unused. I had tried all of them, it helped that they were live CDs. Clicked on a few icons, browsed the net and rebooted back to windows. The interface was a refreshing change to the usual Windows XP interface that I was accustomed to. The brown colour interface of Ubuntu was also captivating.

This time I fiddled around longer.
I have a Presario Laptop at home. Sempron 3000, ATI X200 chipset (video and audio onboard), 256 MB DDR RAM (32 MB Shared), 15" screen, DVD combo, 56 Kbps modem, Wireless, LAN, 2 USBs, etc.
At work, I still use a Athlon XP 1700, nForce chipset (onboard Graphics and audio - turned off in BIOS), 19" LCD, 256 DDR 932 MB shared), DVD Writer, CD Writer, LAN (Via Rhine chipset),


At home, the 6.04 version would boot to the desktop. The dark brown colour scheme was interesting to say the least. All peripherals were correctly identified and installed. The screen though remained stuck at 800 X 600 (while the monitor and graphics were capable of 1024 X 768). Trying to increased the resolution proved futile, since Ubuntu does not present the XP equivalent of a Control Panel to the user. This was quite frustrating as well. I did not bother installing 6.04 to the hard disk, mainly for this reason.

The 7.04 version of Ubuntu offered better looking interface. The shiny toolbars were quite appealing, though I would have preferred a more sober look. Here too the resolution remained stuck at 800 X 600, and the control panel remained as elusive.

Ubuntu puts up two taskbars, one at the top and the other at the bottom. This reduces the viewing area for the user, which I frown upon. Compared to the leaner menus of Windows, Ubuntu is all about space and cushioning. For someone seeking a sleeker interface, Ubuntu will be disappointing. The treatment of the windows bar is also not satisfactory. Open a windows and its length expands to occupy half of the taskbars' length. Irritating, especially when trying to close the windows.

Distro Orgy

How many are there?
As many as can be.

"Distro" refers to a Distribution, or a software package/bundle. Linux per se forms a small part of a Distro - the Kernel. The central part of an Operating system that manages the allocation of system resources to different routines.
It is the routines that are of interest to the user, since the Kernel is in most part not directly interacting with the user.
Routines take on different forms, most notably like applications like word processors, browsers etc.

Thanks to the open, free, cooperative community nature of the Linux movement, anyone can bundle along the Linux kernel and a handful of routines to create a distro.

It is an orgy when it comes to distro selection.

Distros can be classified into different types based on different criteria.

1. Liveness

A Live distro can be used without installation to the hard disk. Knoppix is probably the first such distro. It has many advantages, most important is the ability to test the distro without worrying about the effecting the existing data on the hard drive.
A Non live distro need to be installed before it can be used.
Many distros which were non live to start with are not available as Live versions as well. And a Live distro need not support installation to the hard disk, meaning you may have to download a non live version to install to the hard disk if you liked the live version. But this is a rare event.

2. Size
Distros can be slimmer and contain fewer routines making it possible to create a installation CD of sub 700 MB (Damn Small Linux is a distro that lives up to it's name by offering amazing functionality in a 50 MB installation size). Or distros can go the whole nine yards and pack in enough routines to fit a 4.7 GB DVD. Both cases are Live. So depending on the willingness to download stuff, or availability of a DVD writer, one can choose which distro image to opt for. If a CD is used, and the user needs additional routines, they can be downloaded on a case by case basis. This need not be that straight forward in practice, though.

3. Desktop Environment
The "face" of Linux is the user interface - the windows, the menus, the buttons etc. There are mainly two user interfaces - KDE and Gnome. Others also exists like IceWM. Most live CD distros are based on KDE or Gnome. DVD distros can pack in all environments. Gnome is a product that syncs well with the ideology of the free software movement, that also includes the Linux kernel. KDE on the other hard includes some non-free code making it principally incompatible with the free software movement. But this is just for academic purposes. Functionally, both UIs are good.

Some more popular distros are mentioned next.
1. Ubuntu, Kubuntu
2. Fedora Core, Red Hat Enterprise Linux - FC is free, RHEL is not.
3. OpenSuse - probably the free version of Suse
4. Linspire, Freespire - Linspire is not free.
5. Mandriva -
6. Centos - based on Ubuntu, live with difficult hard drive installation options.
7. Debian, Slackware - one of the earliest distros.
8 . Knoppix - Live with easy hard drive installation options.
There are many more distros, and many of those - including many on this list - are based on more popular distros like Fedora Core or Debian. "Based on" means repackaged : take a Fedora Core distro - modify routines - change default colour scheme - add new label.

File systems schizo

EXT2, EXT3 were the only two file systems that mattered.
I read somewhere then that EXT3 due to its greater data security features was more CPU intensive of the two. So henceforth I used only EXT2 for all installations.
Reiser File System later made an appearance with Knoppix. It is rather strange why Knoppix would insist on using RFS.
All Linux distros can read NTFS file system, and REad and Write FAT32 file system which are the main Windows file systems. While Windows cannot natively read any of the Linux file systems, there are many freeware applications that can do this. Google for this.
I read somewhere that some distro also allowed writing to NTFS, though I do not recall the distro - but it was a matter of time anyway.

Motivation

Why did I turn to Linux?
One word : Virtob

As a regular Windows user for close to a decade, it was the first time that I felt helpless in face of a viral attack. As a prudent user who rarely visited dubious sites without precaution, I concluded that the only way the virus could have entered into my system was through someone else's thumb drive.

After the initial infection was detected by with a clean sweep with AVG and Avast and NOD and online Kaspersky, I found the virus rearing its head repeatedly, successfully, frustratingly. I concluded that AVG itself was probably facilitating the transmission of the virus, infecting every executable that it scanned. So I needed Avast just to scan AVG as it loaded, to ensure that it was not infected. Virtob would cause a system file to create a connection to a specific IP and begin download of additional files. So a dedicated Firewall was also needed. Comodo was the first preference. Fortunately, the latest version (3), also has a suspicious activity monitor that can alert the user every time a file tries to modify another, and if needed prevent such modification. Threatfire was another utility that I needed to ensure better control over file activities. Finally, Spybot was needed to check for infection from spyware. Hijack this was also used
The result of all this monitoring was longer load times and sluggish performance. And configuring the Firewall to allow all the needed online connections while preventing unwanted communication was causing some applications to act strangely.
Additionally, Virtob has an affinity for executables, making no distinction between system files and others, so usually after the first time the virus is found, the system would not boot again since some system file would have become corrupted thanks to the infection. Ultimately, the only way out was a fresh install. Fortunately, since no data files were corrupted, the critical stuff was left unharmed. (A Gentleman Bandit?)

I had sampled Linux a few times previously. But it was mostly to satisfy a curiosity rather than assess it's viability for regular use. But, this time around, a few factors, besides the virus contributed to increase the motivation.
1. A broadband connection meant I was spending longer times online. I was too anxious to avoid a reinfection.
2. Work mostly involved using Openoffice to create documents. And this was available in Linux as well.
3. Improvements in the interface meant that I could get away with minimal command memorisation. I prefer the point and click ease to figuring out the switches that accompany the many arcane commands.
4. The broadband link allowed download of ISOs making it easier to sample many distros. So no longer waiting for the computer mag to include distros.
5. Live ISOs are more popular. Knoppix was the sole live distro, then came Ubuntu and the rest. This immensely increased the interest to try out every distro before finalising one.