Fear of flying...Linux

**nishtya** · 05-01-2004, 07:49 PM

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?

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

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

. 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.

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

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

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

so please don't kick me out, I like it here

**OErjan** · 05-01-2004, 11:16 PM

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

Code:

tar -cl --preserve / /mnt/backupdisk/backup.tar

to put back, using knoppix and / mounted at /mnt/rootdir.
partition, format, mount... as before

Code:

tar -xvvf /mnt/backupdisk/backup.tar /mnt/rootdir/

man tar for more.

my favourite would be dd.

to save

Code:

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.

Code:

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

hope it helps.
OE

**nishtya** · 05-02-2004, 12:06 AM

Actually it lost me a bit

Okay, a lot.

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

**eco2geek** · 05-02-2004, 02:10 AM

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** · 05-02-2004, 03:09 AM

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

**Durand Hicks** · 05-02-2004, 04:08 AM

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:

Code:

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** · 05-02-2004, 04:43 AM

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** · 05-02-2004, 05:15 AM

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

I would like to see how it goes with new knoppix. My guess is pretty much as it did on knoppix 3.3

**garyng** · 05-02-2004, 05:33 AM

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** · 05-02-2004, 05:55 AM

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?