Linux - Mandrake 9.0 Install

http://www.mandriva.com/

Start Date: 2003/01/15

Last Update: 2004/07/13

<Publishing this incomplete document as time will not be available to complete it anytime soon. This is being written in OpenOffice as a .html document. Although it is saying all the formating won't be saved. No modifications to the .html code generated by OpenOffice are being made. OpenOffice apparently doesn't install very well, the spell checker is missing some component and won't run.>

An experiment in converting a Dell Inspiron 7500 Celeron 433 Win98 Notebook to Mandrake 9.0. The "goal" is to have a functioning business client machine. The initial install went very well and was probably as easy as any WinXX install that I've done. To the point that all attached hardware was found and appropriate drivers were automatically installed. And while there were some issues with later elements, on the whole, I would like to give this OS two thumbs up. Mandrake makes a very nice product, and for certain other uses it is highly convenient, but it doesn't satisfy my desired goal.

(Okay, this document is for the complete novice, somewhat like me, and is specifically related to the Dell Inspiron Notebook I used. If you are a "Pro" at *ix, then you might find something humorous here, but probably not anything actually useful. While I've dabbled in various Unix systems over the last 10 years, the most 'production' worthy task I've had was making a proposal to Dell management to 'mirror' all of their TANDEM data on an x86 Dell/Oracle box(es). It might have worked, but the political clout wasn't there to actual achieve anything. Oh yeah, politics blow. Have I mentioned I now run a consulting company for Independent Consultants? (http://www.ic-alliance.com/) And one last thing before I get back to the real document, this document is being created because there is just a dearth of usable “beginner” level documentation in the *ix world. Hopefully you find something useful here.)

Details of the Complete Process

Step One: Download and Burn the ISO CDs (see Requirements).

If you don't know the lingo, which I didn't, you want the 3 ISO images of the CDs. The link to the list of mirrors is found here:

[They've moved servers so the link is no longer valid.]

(Mandrake needs money, well they just filed for bankruptcy protection, so send them some cash if you can. For me this is a testbed to see if I can jettison MS entirely for my business use. If I can, I'll have ICA join at a business level. If not, I'll still probably send them something, or at least join their "Club.")

Obviously start with something close to you, but remember not all mirrors are the same. I'm on a relatively fast connection (~150KB/sec) and the closest mirror to me topped out at about 40KB, while one about 4 states away averaged 75KB.

Once you have them on your hard drive, read the [README.txt?] for tips on selected CD burner software. I was using "B's Recorder GOLD", and the only mention of how to write a CD from an image file was at the bottom of the "How to create an image file." And, yes, I now have 3 'extra' CDs with a single file of each of the ISO images on them. Did I mention I followed the CD burners "Wizard's" advice?

Step Two: Boot from Something.

Once you have actually CDs, put CD 1 into your machine, boot the machine and change the BIOS so that the CD ROM is the first boot device. Possibly being redundant this is for a Dell Inspiron, but I think I said that at the top, when the machine is booting hit F2, select [boot?], arrow down to [CD], and then hit F6 until it is at the top. Then hit [F10] to save and exit, which will reboot the machine and the CD should start up.

(Okay, if that doesn't work, there are a slew of different Floppy disk images to boot from, if the CD itself won't boot. You should be able to find them under the [image] directory of whatever mirror you use. I was impressed that there was even a Floppy to boot if your CD is on a USB.)

When you are finished with the install, go back into the BIOS and change your boot order to what every you find appropriate.

Step Three: Install.

This may be the easiest part. My install didn't really require me to do much of anything. It picked up my keyboard, mouse, and network card without any thoughts on my part. The printer was one model off ([1600] instead of [1608]). It also called my notebook display a "Flat Panel," but I couldn't find what Dell called it and the display works correctly so I'm guessing every thing is golden on that. (Well the machine hasn't gone up in smoke over the last 40 hours of use. . .)

If you are bothering to read this before you start the install ;), check what your usual network settings should be (i.e. IP addr, Gateway, DNS) as you do need these items if the machine is hooked up to a network.)

I probably ended up doing 6 different installs in the attempt to encrypt the entire hard drive. According to what is published on various websites and newsgroups, it is technically doable to have both / (root), swap, and /home encrypted, but. . . Encrypting swap and /home was fairly easy as during the install you can dig (i.e. go into expert mode) into the hard drive setup and click the correct button to make them encrypted, but it tells you that root can't be encrypted. From the standpoint of this notebook, having everything encrypted only makes sense in case of theft, loss, etc. Yes you can move things like the mySQL databases, cgi directories, and http directories to their own subdirs under /home, but it just takes time and effort and you are still not completely sure you've moved every sensitive file.

As one suggestion, if you don't know either Linux or *IX inside and out, never ever pick “advanced/expert” when starting the install. Many of the features of the standard install will let you go into expert mode if you need to.

My Setup:

I used KDE for the desktop, probably because it looked most like Win98.

Requirements:

CD Burner

3 Blank CDs

~2 GB of HD space

Cool stuff:

- The battery seems to last about 20% longer.

- The battery indicator lists approximate time left, Win98 doesn't.

- There are a ton of Games, and if you are a CIV fan FreeCiv will definitely use up some of your time.

- There seems no limit (Okay, I'm sure there is.) to the number of applications and various tools you can have open at the same time. I'm currently running 4 Shells (2 with open man pages), Opera (with 12 windows open), 1 KWord document, 6 Kwrite (Notepad), 3 Konqueror (File Manager) sessions, and 2 OpenOffice documents. This isn't lagging my typing, which it most likely would when this machine was running Win98.

General Thoughts:

Network Cards:

Network settings beyond the initial network card found during Mandrake instalation are somewhat of a pain.

Moving a Network Card from slot A to B.

If you don't have to, don't. I did inadvertently, and then had to manually re-setup the network settings. Mandrake Control Center -> Network & Internet -> Connection -> Wizard -> Expert then add settings as appropriate.

Wireless Network Card

Don't expect a wireless card to work at all, until you manually get the dhcpcd patch. Which was in afterthought funny as hell, as Mandrake couldn't understand dhcp until it had the patch(rpm), yet it couldn't get the patch until it could connect. Definite chicken and an egg problem there

Annoyances:

Many of these annoyances are based on “productivity” complaints. Please don't force someone to make four mouse clicks or keystrokes when one would do.

General:

- Most Applications don't seems to have an “X” to close an open document. Having to use “File -> Close” seems to be the only option.

- Put a mechanism to stop the automatic pop-up things on EVERY thing that pops-up. Whatever the thing that pops-up most every time you get near a URL in any document is highly annoying as most of the time it starts up some mail package as it captures keystrokes intended for the application I am currently writing in. It doesn't have an option on it to shut it off nor does it display a name so I could at least go find out how to turn it off. (Update: I think I found that annoying bugger. Near the clock on the task bar is something called “Klipper – Clipboard Tool,” it looks like a tiny clipboard with a “k” in it. Left click it and unselect “Enable Actions.” Oh, yeah, I finally found it by clicking everything in the general region of the pop-up until something remotely similar looking showed up.)

Adding new software:

Adding new software takes a lot of effort and is not intuitive at all. I'm currently trying to add Bluefish. I've managed to download the latest stable Bluefish 0.9 RPM (and several other packages prior) to a directory, managed to add this directory to the Mandrake Control Center's “Software Sources Manager,” but this seems to have no effect on whether or not the “Install Software” can find theses packages. It found version 0.7 from CD2, but doesn't show the 0.9 version. If there is a documented method for how to add other software should be accomplished I can't find it.

Currently to add new software I'm clicking on the package in Konqueror which brings up the non-intuitive “kpackage.” For Opera I just clicked “Install” and everything went fairly well. (Okay, I did have to make my own Icon on the desktop, which wasn't that bad as the process is similar to Windows, although finding the program path was fun ['/usr/bin/opera']). For Bluefish it didn't go at all. “kpackage” throws up two windows, one of which is “always on top,” and of course all the text information you might want to read is in the other window. The top window doesn't resize well, so just grab it and move the whole thing off the screen to read the package information. Bluefish 0.9 tells me I have “unsatisfied dependencies” (gtk2 >= 2.0.6 , libc.so.6(GLIBC_2.3)), and selecting the “Test (do not install)” verifies that yes, I don't have whatever these two things are. Being a touch above a novice, I believe I recognize “libc” as a C Library (which are used by a slew of other components), and I have no wish to destroy the box by attempting an upgrade/install of that.

Bluefish: (suppose to be a "WYSIWYG" html editor)

Maybe I'm just doing something wrong, but it is not "WYSIWYG." I put my CD drive back into the notebook, installed version 0.7, saved this page, and then opened it in Bluefish. Just a bunch of .html code shown. Very pretty and nice color coding of the various html elements, but it's advertised as a "WYSIWYG" editor. Spending about 15 minutes playing around with various options never did get it into "WYSIWYG" editor mode. I did see where you could “preview” the page in an external browser, but that's not the same thing. Back to writing this in OpenOffice.

KWord: - What I used to write the first part of this.

- It doesn't do the squiggly underline for misspelled words. You have to actually hit the "ABC spell check" button.

- When you use "CTRL-DEL" is doesn't remove the extra space.

- Doesn't move well? Grabbing the title bar or trying to stretch it bigger doesn't always work.

- Can't seem to be able to get it out of "Page" view mode. I generally write in the display mode where you are shown a continuous document. (No headers, footers or page breaks just the text you are writing.)

OpenOffice: - I moved to writing in this about half way through.

General

• The default install did not install the help file.

• Nor is the spell checker working.

• Doesn't have a "import" for KWord. (humorous that it doesn't do a fellow Linux App.)

• The automatic “-” ends up looking like this within .html

Spell checker and Help

Go into Mandrake Control Center (have your CD plugged in) -> Software Management -> Install Software and type in “openoffice,” select “in descriptions,” and hit search. Select all the items in your language (for me, us and en, about 20 megs.) then click install. Why they aren't installed by default is just weird.

The Wordprocessor

- Selecting different formating is odd (Heading, Header2, . .) Until you specifically tell it to use a format, it doesn't list it in the format drop-down box. (Use “Format -> Styles -> Catalog” to find different formating styles.)

- Turing on “Auto-Save” seems to disable “File -> Save”. In reality it doesn't, but the actual behavior is just as annoying. Any save removes the “Save” element off the File menu, and it just beeps at you when you try to use “File -> Save” and leaves the “File” menu open.

- When editing a .html document, the Hyperlink Dialog needs an “Ok” button. Having to hit “Apply” before “Close” is a waste of mouse clicks. It probably needs a “Cancel” button too.

- If the document you are going to write is going to be a webpage, start by saving it with a .html extension before you write anything. This should eliminate some of the screwy formating conversion issues.

- CTRL-BACKSPACE doesn't delete the prior word.

The Spreadsheet

- The function of either opening or coping a comma separated list and being able to have it automatically parsed into separate columns seems to be missing. I can't even get it to do it manually.

- The function that returns the number of characters in a cell seems to be missing.

MySQL:

I haven't tried this, but I did have a problem with MySQL not being usable after boot-up. In a less than scientific manner, I kept clicking boxes and flipping switches in the configuration (startup) screens and then rebooting until it sorted itself out.

Later I found this on MythTV, which may work (well at least it's documented :).

There have been reports that MySQL isn't starting at boot. If this is happening to you, try running the following commands.

$ su
# chkconfig --level 35 mysql on
# /etc/rc.d/init.d/mysql start
# exit

Checking for Non-Needed Services:

I got a touch carried away during the install on selecting groups, so eventually I ended up going into

Mandrake Control Center -> System -> Services

and stopping (and unselecting "On boot"):

atd, ftp, netfs, nfslock, [samba], postfix, proftpd, and rwhod.

(I un-installed samba, before I found the Services page. Possibly that is safer from a security standpoint?)

Bugs Found:

- The clipboard does not seem to always capture the entire selection when using CTRL-C. A specific example of this is in the OpenOffice spreadsheet. Selecting a single column of 200 rows, hitting CTRL-C, and then pasting into Kwrite does not always copy everything. In one particular case it took 8 iterations of copy and paste to get the entire selection to appear in Kwrite. (After identifying the potential delay issue below, I even put a full two second pause between each copy and paste, which did not help.)

- Not consistently replicatable. I can't figure out if this is a timing issue on disk writes or there is something else wrong. Occasionally, saving a Perl program in Kwrite doesn't seem to “stick” or just seems to take a while to make it to the disk. In the pattern of, save the program, ALT-TAB to a shell, execute “perl someprogram.pl” the program does not always work the same if you run it twice in a row. (While I can hit, “ALT-F, S, ALT-TAB, UP-ARROW, Enter” pretty fast, I don't think the print statement I just commented out should actually print something to the screen.)

- Power Management:

Is bizarre. The bios has power management completely disabled. Yet, everytime the Lid gets closed the machine goes into hibernation. This wouldn't be too bad, but it also unmounts the encrypted /home directory, thereby not allowing you to log back on.

Recomendations/Conclusion:

Do NOT use this for anything mission critical. The copy and paste bug alone kills any reliability for someone doing any serious word processingtask (Writing, Programming, Documentation, . . .). The not always saving in a timely manner is annoying if you are a casual user (myself), but I can only guess that a serious programmer would have a kiniption.

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