Fear of flying...Linux

[nishtya]

The trials of Cuddles and her poll over in support section have given me a mind to ask this here: how much guts does it take to run Linux really? :lol:

Beginning meaningless whine: I am well aware of my "chickeness" . When it comes to keeping my main box running, hardware and software-wise I err on the side of cautiousness. That seems reasonable. I am expert in hardware, can troubleshoot, swap out whatever. Keep at least two boxes around of a similar generation that I can swap out components with very little downtime. And while not an MCSE but earned a living for number of years in IT and am quite competent enough with windows that I can fix what needs to be fixed (often by hours of searching the knowledge base :wink: over you-know-where) to keep it up and running. And I got into doing disk images and always back up and can reimage to ultimately fall back on.

When I embarked on my linux journey I started with the knoppix live CD that cannot screw up anything. Then dug out an old junky hard drive and threw it in my my main box so I could play with knoppix harddrive-installed more comfortable then on the edge of the bed on my #2 spare machine :D . Screwed up knoppix a couple of times with ALSA and just did the el-wipo and reinstall.

Got real cocky and dedicated a new big harddrive for linuxes. And then I got comfy. I had my eyecandy and my docs and hard-won installed goodies. And I got scared. I needed just "one more" thing to make my linux life complete. Temp monitoring. I then spent a week or two in hell. Never screwing up knoppix enough for a reinstall over it alone but ultimately failing at getting the sensors installed and running. I switched to kanotix where Kano had a script for installing the kernel source, I got lm sensors installed with no problem except for having to install bison first. And now I am comfy....again.

Now here I sit after having upgraded KDE, got past two bugs in that upgrade and now I am scared witless. I have held back on some upgrades because they contain "aRTs" or alsa things and I don't want to break ALSA and my sound or worse, my system. :oops: I have all the sound I want, I actually have alsa playing nice (ok, uneasy truce) with arts, I have mplayer really installed (not just as local user contained thing, I really went and did it last night, yay me :P ) I got mozilla plugins, I got midi, I got temp monitoring. I got heaps of eye candy. And a great big info/fixes doc folder. But here I sit...frozen practically in time in linux terms. I am running kanotix bughunter 4 and therefore not contributing to the community because bughunter 5 is out but I sit back with the earlier release. Because it is working. Until I try to upgrade something I shouldn't.

I could probably get over this phobia if I could find something along the lines of a disk imager for linux (that I could figure out :roll: how to use). I have always been happy with NTI backup for windows partition imaging although very unhappy with how long it takes to restore a couple of gigs of windows and entourage :cry:

It takes a lot for someone as experienced as me to screw up windows bad enough that I have to do a restore. Actually, every restore was the result of something third party, spyware that wouldn't budge, windows update, etc.

But with linux it seem all it takes is one wee little update, one little apt-get install blah blah and POOF you are screwed, your stability (yeah, I know silly when you consider almost all of us are running "unstable"). Worse there are the occasional things that can damage the hardware or firmware, like the old mandrake problem with certain CD drives and lm-sensors & Thinkpads, etc.

So how do you get past the fear? Is Linux only for the fearless? I mean, if I am going to become a "static" linux user why am I running unstable Debian and why is my main distro a "bughunter". If I am not going to venture forth and try things and report bugs and work on fixes, shouldn't I just go out and buy Suse? Or even Lindows and CNR?

end whine with a promise I will never post something this long and rambling again :oops: so please don't kick me out, I like it here 8)

[OErjan]

if you have a disk that can take your install and have room over why not do.

tar -cl --preserve / /mnt/backupdisk/backup.tar
to put back, using knoppix and / mounted at /mnt/rootdir.
partition, format, mount... as before

tar -xvvf /mnt/backupdisk/backup.tar /mnt/rootdir/
man tar for more.

my favourite would be dd.

to save

dd if=/dev/hda of=/mnt/backupdir/2004-05-01.img

that would bring with it filesystem, permisions, partitions... everyting.
would require an as large OR larger argetdisk though, as the image will be as large as the disk...
to put back.

dd if=/mnt/backupdir/2004-05-01.img of=/dev/hda

hope it helps.
OE

[nishtya]

Actually it lost me a bit :? Okay, a lot. :lol: beyond my present level of linuxness. :( I understand enough to know that (1) is making a great big tar ball out of your system, right? And (2) is some sort of disk image. Which is what I am looking for. I do not have a spare harddrive in this box or a controller for a third one anyway. Would a partition large enough to hold this whole shebang on say my windows disk be good enough? And could either be stored on a fat32 partition? I have had mixes of partition types on the same disk, but don't like to play that way and now keep my windows disk all fat32.

I really wish you could by hard drive storage by the gig. Have an ancient 5 yo maxtor that's ata 33 (I said it was old) and probably half a dozen little oldies in the 600mb to 1.6 gig range. The 5 gig maxtor I did toy with the idea of getting an enclosure & interface for and making it a usb removable. Again, would either of the methods work on removable like that?

To be honest, much easier at my level to just do a fresh install. But it hurts like hell to lose all the settings, customizations, etc. Not to mention the rounds of downloading, oh the humanity of downloading on a dialup :cry:

[eco2geek]

Would a partition large enough to hold this whole shebang on say my windows disk be good enough? And could either be stored on a fat32 partition? I have had mixes of partition types on the same disk, but don't like to play that way and now keep my windows disk all fat32.

That is an excellent idea (especially the "dd" one), and yes, you can store it on a FAT32 partition. You don't even have to make another one if you mount your existing one read-write in Knoppix/Kanotix/whatever and you've got the space.

(Did you know you can make WinImage 6-compatible exact duplicates of floppies using dd? For example, dd if=/dev/fd0 of=/tmp/filename.img -- good way to back up all those old floppies you've got sitting around. Maybe "dd" stands for "duplicate disk" or similar; "if" stands for "input file"; and "of" stands for "output file".)

More to the point of your original post: think of how you use Windows. Sure, you install software on it, but how often do you actually upgrade the OS? Rarely. There isn't anything like "apt-get" on Windows, and even if there was, there would be nothing to "get" with it, since Windows' release cycle is hardly as quick as the one for Linux. Plus, you'd probably have to pay if there was.

Obviously, using "apt-get" can be dangerous, especially when it wants to upgrade the underlying OS. Like I said in another post, maybe the safest way to install stuff would be to look closely at the version numbers of what you have installed already, go to the Debian site, search for a *.deb package that matches your current version of its dependencies, download it, and use "dpkg" to install it.

[nishtya]

dd for imaging floppies sounds nice. I do have a persistent problem with floppies (windows ones) in linux, though, as almost all lock up linux if I try to mount them. There is a lot of googling to do on that one. I know some of my floppies are going south but I know they all aren't. The ones written back on windows 3.1 will often even lockup 98 and that is a known issue, but I am sure I am doing something wrong when I try to mount a floppy with say some txt files that was written on 98 and linux has a seizure.

Anyhow, was thinking I could possibly use the 20 gig partition of my windows disk for this little experiment. Right now I use it mostly as pkg backup storage for all my little debs and not-so-little debs :) Like with all backup methods I would need to restore once to see if it works :?

Linux is so very dynamic. Scarily so. And obviously that is where the danger lies. I just keep asking myself, why the heck am I running unstable when all I want is a comfortable rut? I did the usual googling and lurking before deciding on a distro that was based on debian unstable and a spattering of testing. I thought I could handle it. Still undecided. I have become very fond knoppix and its kissing cousins. Would like to keep my kanotix bughunter just where it is for a very long time. And try out knoppix 3.4 as soon as it gets here, of course 8)

[Durand Hicks]

Nish,

You could always downgrade to testing, which is pretty stable, but not as new as unstable. To do that you would enter the following command:
apt-get -s install -t testing upgrade That would simulate a testing upgrade/downgrade first and if there are no errors showing in the output, run the command again without the -s. That's what I've been doing before upgrading or dist-upgrading my system. It won't do me any good to download knoppix 3.4 if i'm already current thru apt-get and compiling my own kernels to the most recent version. I know you don't like to compile any more kernels so I won't suggest you do the same. You could always keep your packages upgraded indefinitely, but as for your kernel, your choices are;
(1)compile a new kernel as it comes out or
(2)wait for debian to compile a kernel image and apt-get the kernel image for your system.

If you go the second route, keep in mind the kernel may not be properly optimized for your unique system. It's optimized to satisfy 80% of the systems out there and the other 20% will have to create their own, because something will be missing that they need. At least you won't have to reset your settings, etc, going this route, but as for downloading and reinstalling knoppix 3.4, you know you'll have to reset everything, including the fruit of your hard work in getting lm sensors working. As always, the choice is yours. :)

[garyng]

For anyone who is not using linux as some kind of server(read performance), I would strongly suggest the use of loopback block device for the file system.

In this way, just allocate a large FAT32 partition that can hold several big file(depending on what size you want, usually 2G each is a lot).

The benefit of it is that you don't have to play around with the partition tables and you can backup your whole thing with a simple file copy.

Then within linux, use rsync to update your backup once you thought your update is stable. If you screw anything in between, just change the boot loader to use your backup rootfs.

In this way, you can easily have serveral rootfs(or linux) on the same machine and you won't worry about messing around anymore.

The added advantage is that you can easily move your linux from one machine to another(of course, the kernel may need some changes for different hardware but all your thing would be there).

[nishtya]

that sound's good, too, Gary. I am currently using rsync to backup my data over to the windows drive and am familiar with it but not a loopback device (virtual?) Googling on it I am finding info about it as encrypted file system and a system for mounting an image but nothing at a newbie level for starters.

Durand, my hard won victory with lm sensors was really no victory, discretion was the better part of valor and simply switched distros to one that provided a script that got and installed the kernel source so the lm sensors installed with barely a hiccup :oops: I would like to see how it goes with new knoppix. My guess is pretty much as it did on knoppix 3.3 :lol:

[garyng]

using loopback is very easy.

mount /dev/hda1 /mnt/my_FAT32 (assuming /dev/hda1 is the FAT32 part)
dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/my_FAT32/backup_rootfs count=1000k bs=1k
mke2fs -j /mnt/my_FAT32/backup_rootfs
mount -o loop /mnt/my_FAT32/backup_rootfs /mnt/backup

To use it as a boot device, you need to change the initrd to first mount the FAT32 partition then losetup the backup_rootfs to /dev/loop0, add a root=/dev/loop0 to the boot parameter and change fstab to use /dev/loop0 as the '/' file system.

I am not sure how the KNOPPIX HD install do this(as I haven't been using KNOPPIX for quite some time) but should be pretty easy.

[nishtya]

:shock: how many years have you been at this, Gary? Don't tell me. Yep, you guys can crank that out in your sleep. Off to goggle some of this before I sleep.

But FWIW, if I just run what you got there changing /dev/hda1 to /dev/hda5 where I want it to go, will I do any harm to files currently on that partition or am turning it into one big virtual something?

[garyng]

no, you won't hurt anything on that FAT32 partition which is the number one reason why I said loopback is good, messing around with partitions(whatever partition tools you use which claims to be safe) can trash the whole HD.

BTW, you don't need the mounting of FAT32(/dev/hda5) if you already have a mount point. just do the dd, make2fs and mount -o loop and you will have a virtualized ext3 file system on that single file under FAT32 which is visible under both windows and almost any flavor of linux. So you can bzip2 it and save to offline media. Of course, make sure you are using the right file on that FAT32 fs as using the wrong filename may trash your existing file of that name, which I assume you know.

I learnt all these because of KNOPPIX. It is an amazing piece of software but once I want it to permanently live on my existing computer(notebook running XP), I am stuck as it has no more free HD space for partitioning thus the hdinstall won't work(true as far as I know for all its derivatives and other distro as well except topolgi). This sad fact is also the case for most of the new PC I encountered, one big FAT32 or NTFS paritition running XP. The poorman's installation works but I can change nothing to it.

Because of this frustration(and my desire to populate linux on any machine I touch), I venture into ways to run linux without partitioning and have minimum interference with the existing setup.

[eco2geek]

Another consideration: FAT32 partitions can only hold files up to 4090M in size, so depending on how much stuff you've got installed, you might hit a wall storing an image. Although some of these Linux wizards can probably tell you how to slice 'n' dice files. (IIRC, NTFS partitions supposedly can store files up to 3 terabytes in size.)

P.S. Kanotix 05/2004 is great! Only issue so far is that I have to run alsaconf every time for some reason.

[garyng]

For the rootfs, 4G is much more than enough. I only give 1G to it. Then I make some more files each for /usr/src, /var, swap etc.

Of course, one can also use NTFS but that needs the new linux driver if there is a need for such a large single piece of storage space. Or the LVM thing, but that is something a bit more complex.

However, as my caveat, we are not talking about server so I wonder how likely one needs that many space :-)

[nishtya]

Gary, I will give it a shot tomorrow maybe but keeping in my mind Eco's caveat about the file size. Root is not quite 2 gig. My whole installation is just around 4.

Eco, aint kanotix, nice? As for alsa, I had that problem with the first kanotix install. What I did on the second install to make it "stick", I am not completely sure though I think I have a method down that works for me, anyway. Is the problem related to the volume for user not saving and being muted on every restart?

[eco2geek]

Yes, that's it. Duh, if you put alsactl restore at the end of /etc/init.d/bootmisc.sh that does it. Thanks.

Do you see several messages to the effect that the USB module is already loaded when you boot?

[nishtya]

nope, OK here. I don't know whether I ran kano's script for usb, I think I tried but it failed whatever it was it was going to do -perhaps because I didn't need it. Anyway, maybe will work for your situation? http://kanotix.com/files/fix-usb.sh

[eco2geek]

It looks like some daemon is trying to load the USB module again (where are messages after the kernel's loaded, but before you get to a boot prompt, stored? Can't find it in /var/log). And throwing up error messages.

Kano's "fix USB" script didn't help. But no biggie. It doesn't hang and I don't have any USB devices attached to my computer anyway. Not terribly motivated to look for a fix.

[nishtya]

Sorry it didn't help, Eco. Could be something different in BH5 as opposed to my BH4 or a hardware difference. Have you checked on hotplug? There is an updated pkg for me anyway, perhaps it is already in BH5 and is buggy.

PS - check out my nojoy in the munjoy thread

[eco2geek]

Uh oh, you're supposed to see (in the same 1024x768 screen resolution as it starts in) a text-based blue screen with a dialog box asking you what hard disk partition you want to install Munjoy on. :)

[Cuddles]

Nishtya,

My Sister-In-Noob,

I really "felt" what you were saying (in your original post), I am in complete agreement, and feel exactly the same.

I kind of liken it to a "false sense of security". You come to Knoppix, with a vast knowledge of other Operating Systems, and yet, hit a wall, in essence, when you run Knoppix. I am finding errors, that, appear to be, so cryptic, and so "what the heck is wrong?" stuff.

I just hit another of these, stumbling blocks. This time in an area, I have never seen an error, or have a clue what to do about it. This error came up during booting, and from something that only runs every 40 boots, or mounts, fsck. Worse than that, it just blurts out "I have had a problem", and then stops booting, and states "You fix it!" - in my own words -=- Fix it? How? Whats wrong? What do I do? How bad is it, fsck? No answers, just a blank root prompt, and no operating system to back me up for help? No man pages, no nothing.

Fear of flying? Naaaaaaa, more likely, jumping out of a "safe" plane, and "hoping" the "guy" who packed your parachute did it "right". And, when you need it the most, you pull the rip-cord, and PRAY, it opens. Hopefully, before you hit the ground with complete velocity.

So, you get into the plane, with your parachute packed (apt-get update), you prepare for your plummetting jump (watch all the updates scroll by the screen), you get the signal to jump (type in the apt-get upgrade), and begin your jump (hit enter)... You enjoy the freefall, and watch as the ground gets closer and closer, at an almost alarming rate, and at a increasing speed (you view the contents of what is going to be upgraded, what won't, and what maybe being removed), you reach for the rip-cord, hoping you can find it in time (you hover your finger over the enter key, after pressing the Y), you begin to pull the rip-cord, again, hoping that the cord doesn't break from the strain (press enter). Pulling the cord harder, knowing this is the only thing that is going to stop you, it finally gives way to a limp piece of cord (you watch, praying your upgraded files download ok), the starter chute comes out of the back of your chute pack (your downloads complete). This being the last chance, the last hope of your survival, the last concern of this experiance, you look up to see if your "real" parachute gets pulled out, and opens correctly (downloading completed, you watch to see what breaks, what doesn't unpack, what pipes break, and if apt-get just blows up)...

The final experiance:
*** Your parachute opens perfectly, and you glide, ever so gently to a ground that comes up to you in a far safer speed than you were going previously (apt-get completes, no yelling, no problems, no issues)

*** Your parachute refuses to open, it just flaps violently in the wind, the ground comes up faster and faster, as you look at the end coming, the ground becomes clearer and cleaer, you can see more and more detail, first large rocks, then smaller rocks, then fine details of the dirt, and then, P O W ! ! (apt-get blows up, leaves you in a state of "who knows what", and you are left to, not only figure out what went wrong, but what you need to do to fix it, and worse, what did it all do to your complete system. Can it survive? Can we rebuild it? Or is it just a pile of flattened goo on the ground? If the later, a reinstall is necessary, all of the others, definately require a posting of another topic on the "General Support" forum)

I have seen way too many HORROR movies, with less scareyness than this. Jason, Mike Myers, Freddie Krugger, Chucky, mere "childs" toys to the horror that Linux can cause. I have never had more fear then to see my working computer burp up a fatal error on booting, running something like fsck. Or, having apt-get install throw out a few messages about broken pipes, and then die on me. Having a apt-get upgrade go through convulsions while trying to remove a package, when it was going to add a new one right after that, and now, lay comatose at a root prompt, with screens and screens of messages that not only would a cryptographer not be able to decypher, but has left me to the dirty work of understanding. But the biggest horror is, by far, thinking that "something" you are trying to add is "but a little thing", like adding a shortcut, or a macro, or even a filter for viewing WMF images, which, I might add, is like the cute, young, teenage girl in a horror movie, just thinking that "openning this door" isn't going to unleash all hell. In which case, it does.

I have read many, and seen many, names for phobias, and the words to describe a phobic reaction, and yet, I have not heard a single word about Linux, why? It appears to me, that there should be, one seriously frightening word, one that would instil screaming, a need to run away, or a reaction that caused ones face to go blank, and stay that way for the next ten years. Knoppiphobia, thats it, or Mandraphobia, SuSEaphobia. Me, though, I don't think its the OS that is causing my heart to race, or my legs to go into spasms, but the apt-get. That, that, is the one that truely causes my fear, my instincts to reach for a cross, and shield myself from the horror that befalls me. Apt-get, the mere sound of the word causes me to shake, my fingers to twitch, my mind to go into the whole "Flight or Fight" rehashing. The speaking of these words cause an involuntary action to raise my hands off the keyboard, and go to a safer place.

Only one thing, this can't be a horror movie, because in a horror movie, you can't have two evils. Apt-get is one of the evils, but its twin brother is dpkg. In a new twist, we have a "Freddie vs. Jason" horror movie here. With the horrors of apt-get, only dpkg can do as well. Where dpkg sounds like some cryptic acronym that when said backwords makes an incantation that raises all evil from the depths of the Earth. Hell hath no fury than apt-get and dpkg, alone, in a room, and free to roam as a command line interface program on your working system !

These two commands look innocent enough, like a cute child, playing with a toy, only when entered on a command line, only Marlin Brando could say "The horror, the horror, the horror", better. The child changes instantly into the Hell Spawn, Freddie with knife-hands weilded, or Jason with anything. You watch as your system is turned from a working, perfectly behaved child, into HELL FROZEN OVER. You expect GOD, or St. Peter, to be standing right next to your computer, going over the "book of its life", to determine if it is going into Heaven, or down into Hell. You would not be surprised to have a pastor show up at your front door, and want to perform "last rights" to your dead system.

With these two evils, apt-get and dpkg, I am seriously going to place a cross on my monitor, and possibly some garlic, and keep a few silver bullets in my desk drawer. Not to mention, I will not sleep, in fear that either these two commands will visit me in my sleep, or take over my body while I am sleeping, and then, kill my system. I will not allow anyoine who does any Voo-Doo near my system, in fear that they would put a spell of dissaster on my OS. I will go to church on a regular basis, praying that, these two commands do not find my system, and Holy water will be kept, in case of emergencies.

What, I think, is even more amazing than the "evilness" of these two commands, is the lack of intelligence, by my part, to continually keep getting myself into these situations. Like the cute girl in the horror movie, she keeps opening those doors, one after the other, each one having more and more fear behind them. Why? You would think, she would have more sense, knowing that, this door had evil behind it, the next door had evil behind it, maybe this door will have evil behind it, so I won't open it.... NAAAAAAAAAA, she opens it, and yes, again, evil is behind it. Someone who has bad luck with parachuting, probably, stops parachuting, but, do I? Nope. I continue to jump out of that plane, knowing, probably, that the parachute won't open, and after the fall, what do I do? I get right back into the plane to do it all over again. Smart.

I have heard, the best way to get over something, is to keep doing it, to get "desensitized" from it. You would think I would have become NUMB of apt-get, or its evil co-conspiritor dpkg, but I haven't, they only cause me more fear, now. Now, I really know them, how evil they really are, how evil there ways of destroying a computer, to cause a system to not only jump out of the plane, but to either make it forget its parachute, or to even pull the rip-cord. PURE EVIL. The kind of evil that will always exist, that will never grow weak, that can only get stronger with time, and nothing can either avoid, or kill it. Forever....

Now that I have enlightened you all of this evil, of this powerful evil, you may never look at these two CLI's the same, ever again. Why? Because "they" known "you" know now! So, be ever vigilant, ever on the gaurd, for they will attack when you least expect it...

Cuddles

[nishtya]

well, Cuddles, I wrote with you in mind. I was always too darn cautious, but having switched (so to speak) to a distro using alsa I am well aware of your probs (don't let anything mess with it once you have gotten it to work!). My main squeeze at the moment (and although typing this on live CD knoppix 3.4 2.6 btw) is kanotix BH4 (yes, 4, I am behind). I have it tuned to a perfect pitch- I got that nasty alsa working with arts no less and nothing gonna mess with my baby. I hated the instability of KDE 3.2.1 and said why not, I upgraded KDE. I found 3.2.2 more stable but the bugger had 3 bugs, 2 of them published on KDE's site and geez I am seeing so many asking in forums/usenet - don't they look these things up? Anyhow, got over my fear of the dreaded apt-get upgrade.......BUT I did a dry run...I put all the pkgs that had "alsa" or "arts" on hold. :wink: I got past the bugs that got past the developers in KDE 3.2.2 so am happy but I am not going to mess with fate where the sound is concerned.

So, basically I have upgraded major stuff (KDE) but not the kernel on this though I have stuff on hold that I am scared witless to let go. I really love my system just where it is. I installed BH5 to my spare machine. The alsa probs on there are major league. No way-no how it is going on my main machine. But how long can I keep holding? Like, I am tempted to upgrade those nasties with arts and alsa in the name - I guess I will have to eventually? :oops:

I don't fear apt, I actually embrace the bugger in a warped, codependent kind of way. Like with lm sensors I had to get the latest from them directly, you know the deb doesn't work even on kanotix. So now ksensors won't install with apt because it doesn't know I HAVE lm sensors working (fine with gkrellm anyway) it wants to install old lm sensors. I like apt because I can undo what I/apt have done. But if the sensors hadn't gone nicely outside of the apt system...I haven't a clue how to get them out (did a stab at uninstall command, nopers). Anyhow, frozen in time am I. :lol:

Oh Gary, I found the power mgmt in kanotix BH4 (2.4.25 I believe) to be quite nice. My only complaint or question, how the heck is it pulling this hat trick off:

Local APIC disabled by BIOS -- reenabling.
Found and enabled local APIC!

I installed this with acpi support (could someone please give us noobs a nice definition/differences on apic and acpi? They are related I know but not the same thing)

Nish
(out of kernel compiling business, rilly I am :) )