Sylvain Robitaille wrote:

> You *should* be able to at least get a running
> system that you could interact with. The only thing that might prevent
> that is if the operating system is unable to communicate in any way with
> the keyboard or display. That seems unlikely.

This is what I thought, too, but as I said, I was able to see the boot-up
graphic and progress bar, then nothing but a black screen and blinking
cursor. I could type, but if I was supposed to type some sort of start
command,
I didn't know what it was. On the computer that this USB drive version
worked
on, it goes right into a log-in screen.

I was able to give it a Ctrl-C or Ctrl-X (tried 'em both - that's the
extent of my
Linux command knowledge) and it started the shut-down procedure like a good
Linux system should.

> I'm only guessing here, based on your description, but it seems likely
> that it was trying to get an address via DHCP (and perhaps failing if
> you don't have a DHCP server on your network, or in the wireless case,
> if it was unable to establish a wireless connection to start with).

I have DHCP set up on my network, and plugged the netbook into the same
router port as the desktop that successfully started Linux. I suspect
that it
may not have found a suitable driver for the wireless network adapter since
plugging in an Ethernet cable got me farther along. But perhaps it still
couldn't
talk to that one. And of course without a network connection, it can't
go out
looking for a new driver. And even if I was able to find the correct
driver, I
wouldn't know how to install it on the distribution without it running.
I suspect
that it's more complex than copying a file to a directory on the USB drive.

> For what it's worth, part of me is inclined to try to help. It's in my
> nature, and it's a strong factor behind the philosophy of the open
> source movement. There are some issues that are keeping me from coming
> right out and offering any help (beyond the above guessing), though:

That's OK. I was just curious about this and thought I'd relate my
experience since,
as Ben observed, I seem to always happen to pick stuff that doesn't work
- some
I know about, some I don't.

> - Given the above, unlike Dawhead, I don't already have an idea of
> what the problem you're encountering is, and the exact text of
> the error messages you're seeing would certainly matter a lot.

Not exactly an error message, but the following blinked rapidly, then
settled down. I have this line displayed twice

r8169: eth1: link up

and a blinking cursor below it. My router shows the computer as connected.
This time around, I was unable to coax it into an orderly shutdown. I
can type
whatever I want and I don't get any response other than an echo of what I'm
typing. No error messages at all.

> - You've convinced me that you're not actually interested in seeing
> Linux work, but rather in demonstrating that it doesn't. I don't
> see much reason to help with that.

Sorry if you're misled. It's not that I'm not interested in seeing Linux
work.
That's exactly what I'm interested in seeing. I'm not particularly
interested
in using Ardour or any other Linux application, but I want to know that I
could if I wanted to, and that when I got around to it, I could explore its
capabilities at my leisure without messing around.



--
"Today's production equipment is IT based and cannot be operated without
a passing knowledge of computing, although it seems that it can be
operated without a passing knowledge of audio." - John Watkinson

Mike Rivers wrote:

> This is what I thought, too, but as I said, I was able to see the
> boot-up graphic and progress bar, then nothing but a black screen and
> blinking cursor. ...

It's entirely possible (in fact I think it's likely; someone who
actually knows Fedora would know for sure) that the boot-up graphic and
progress bar you see occur in a VESA (read "standard", supported by
pretty much all graphics hardware) graphics mode prior to X starting;
the black screen and the blinking cursor would be the result of X
starting in a mode that is incompatible with your display (in my
experience, at least; I've not encountered that very frequently).

> I was able to give it a Ctrl-C or Ctrl-X (tried 'em both - that's the
> extent of my Linux command knowledge) and it started the shut-down
> procedure like a good Linux system should.

Ctrl-Alt-Del likely triggers the shutdown (it does on the distribution I
use, at least). Ctrl-C would terminate "the current" process, though
during bootup most of the processes start in the background and won't
see that keystroke. It might have an effect on some, but I wouldn't
expect it to trigger a shutdown. Ctrl-X is nothing that I'm aware of.

> I have DHCP set up on my network, and plugged the netbook into the same
> router port as the desktop that successfully started Linux. ...

Ok.

> I suspect that it may not have found a suitable driver for the
> wireless network adapter since plugging in an Ethernet cable got me
> farther along.

Agreed.

> But perhaps it still couldn't talk to that one. ...

That would strike me as odd, given what else you've written.

> And of course without a network connection, it can't go out looking
> for a new driver.

Right. I don't know enough about Fedora to say for sure, but I would
not expect the system to seek out any new drivers without consulting
first with the nearest human. In fact, I would immediately cease using
any such system, but that's just me.

> That's OK. I was just curious about this and thought I'd relate my
> experience since, as Ben observed, I seem to always happen to pick
> stuff that doesn't work ...

It is looking that way, but is your computer hardware really all that
unusual?

> Not exactly an error message, but the following blinked rapidly, then
> settled down. I have this line displayed twice
>
> r8169: eth1: link up

I'm surprised you see it twice, but it suggests at least that the OS
recognizes the network interface, and that the interface is connected to
something.

> and a blinking cursor below it.

This leads me to believe it's waiting for something to happen at this
point. (ie, a response from the DHCP server, or some network dependant
component to start). Are you able to verify in your DHCP server log
whether an address was assigned to the system? Can you reach that
address from a different system on the network (via "ping" for example)?

> This time around, I was unable to coax it into an orderly shutdown. I
> can type whatever I want and I don't get any response other than an
> echo of what I'm typing. No error messages at all.

Right, which means the system is waiting for something other than
keyboard input. (or it's switched to a graphics mode that your display
isn't able to show ...)

> .... It's not that I'm not interested in seeing Linux work. That's
> exactly what I'm interested in seeing. I'm not particularly interested
> in using Ardour or any other Linux application, but I want to know
> that I could if I wanted to, and that when I got around to it, I could
> explore its capabilities at my leisure without messing around.

See your responses to my suggestion that one should take the time first
to get comfortable and familiar with a Linux distribution, prior to
trying to use it for audio applications. See also your repeated
comments about nails in the coffin.

My $0.02CAD worth of advice, although if you ask 20 Linux advocates
whether it's good advice, you're likely to get 20 entirely different
responses, with varying degrees of agreement and disagreement with it
....

- Install Slackware-13.0 on relatively current hardware. You'll need
to configure it specifically to startup in graphics mode, rather
than plain-text, but that configuration is very simple, and I'll
gladly help with that.

- Don't be thrown off by the fact that Slackware's installation
doesn't take place in a graphical environment. Part of the
philosophy in Slackware's design is that more effort is put into
a solid, stable, and reliable system than in any sort of eye-candy
or short-cuts. You will have a system that will boot into a modern
graphical environment soon enough.

- Expect that you will go through this process more than once, refining
your installation and configuration each time. Be prepared to take
notes, so you can repeat configuration changes. Don't repeat the
changes that have undesirable results.

- If you care about the OS currently installed on the target system,
rather than try to setup a dual-boot system on your first installation,
I would recommend you get another disk instead. Disks are inexpensive
and the extra cost will save you a lot of potential aggravation. You
can add-in your existing disk and set the system to dual-boot later, if
that matters to you.

- Read the prompts and the help screens (and documentation on the CD).
They provide a lot of information that will help you avoid pitfalls.

- You'll need to create at least one partition on the disk before
you start (the Slackware installer includes both a text based
"fdisk" program, and a menu-driven one called "cfdisk").

- Early in the process, the system will create one or more
filesystems on your behalf, according to configuration you've
given it (it will prompt for options). Be sure to use the "ext3"
filesystem type. You don't need to know details about each to
make a decision at this point. Some are still works in progress,
others promise improved performance under various conditions.
Ext3 is the mature, stable filesystem type on Linux, and you can
hardly go wrong with it. I can provide details of how I suggest
you should setup the system disk for this, if you're interested.

- I normally advise against doing a "full" installation (needs around
4GB with Slackware, IIRC, although the way I setup a disk would
allocate nearly 20GB for it, leaving a lot of available space),
but quite honestly for a first-time installation, unless you
already know what all the software components do, it's very likely
the easiest. Accept defaults for what should and should not be
enabled at boot-time. If you can get past this without too much
difficulty, I'll be able to advise certain software packages that
can easily be left out for the purposes of a music workstation
(though I must point out that it will still contain a lot of
software that isn't relevant to music). This gets refined with
subsequent passes.

- A note about Slackware-13.0: the KDE (windowing environment) version
that ships with this version of Slackware has some performance
issues. You will find it horribly sluggish when running in the
graphical environment with this version of KDE. This isn't really
a Slackware-specific problem, except in that this is the version of
KDE included with this version of Slackware. The sluggishness is
caused by a file-indexing feature in KDE (that has reportedly been
improved in newer versions) that you can disable for the benefit
of your sanity. Otherwise, once you get the system booting into
a graphics login screen, you'll be able to select a different
(non-KDE) environment that doesn't suffer from the same problem
(but may not be as "pretty").

- Don't rush through the process. People seem to take for granted
that installing an operating system should be child's play,
and that there shouldn't be any learning curve to it. The fact
is this is no more or less difficult with any other operating
system, except that most people are already familiar with one in
particular, and they already expect certain pitfalls, and know how
to deal with them. These things were not learned in one session,
but rather over years of experience with that one system, a little
bit at a time.

Following up to this is way off-topic for rec.audio.pro, at least until
such time as we start discussing turning the system into a music
workstation. alt.os.linux.slackware is probably a better newsgroup,
with one caveat in particular: some of the folks who frequent that
newsgroup can be difficult to take, even when they're providing useful
information. Oh, and the group has a collection of personalities and
trolls, who provide more entertainment value than help. If you spend
some time reading messages before you pose any questions, you'll quickly
learn who the helpful people are.

I hope I've given you a useful starting point.

--
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Sylvain Robitaille (E-Mail Removed)

Systems analyst / AITS Concordia University
Faculty of Engineering and Computer Science Montreal, Quebec, Canada
----------------------------------------------------------------------

Sylvain Robitaille wrote:

> Ctrl-Alt-Del likely triggers the shutdown (it does on the distribution I
> use, at least). Ctrl-C would terminate "the current" process

Ah, OK, maybe that's what I did to get it to shut down. I was trying to
reboot
and then thought "Oh, wait a minute, this isn't DOS."

> Right. I don't know enough about Fedora to say for sure, but I would
> not expect the system to seek out any new drivers without consulting
> first with the nearest human. In fact, I would immediately cease using
> any such system, but that's just me.

Well, I suppose what it could say depends on what driver it doesn't have. If
it can't display anything on the monitor, I guess we'll never know.

> but is your computer hardware really all that unusual?

I don't know. What's "usual?" As Ben or Paul pointed out, laptops often
use the latest (and cheapest) stuff. It's an Atom processor on what's likely
to be an Intel board. It says "Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 3150"

>> and a blinking cursor below it.
>
> This leads me to believe it's waiting for something to happen at this
> point. (ie, a response from the DHCP server, or some network dependant
> component to start). Are you able to verify in your DHCP server log
> whether an address was assigned to the system?

I didn't look in the DHCP server log (I don't even know where it is or if
I have one) but looking at the router's web interface, it shows an address
in the 192.68.1.40-50 range, which is where it's expected to be. But maybe
that isn't showing me the right thing. Even forcing a re-scan of connected
computers, it shows the computer's name as the name I gave it in Windows.
I wouldn't expect that, particularly since I hadn't brought Linux up to
the point
where I assigned a name. So it could still be waiting for a connection.
I just
have the hardware router than Verizon sent me so I don't have a lot of
network
diagnostic tools here, just a few blinking lights.

>> This time around, I was unable to coax it into an orderly shutdown. I
>> can type whatever I want and I don't get any response other than an
>> echo of what I'm typing. No error messages at all.

Probably because I didn't stumble on Ctrl-Alt-Del since I had "remembered"
that it wasn't a DOS computer.

> See your responses to my suggestion that one should take the time first
> to get comfortable and familiar with a Linux distribution, prior to
> trying to use it for audio applications. See also your repeated
> comments about nails in the coffin.

Well, I didn't have to get comfortable with Windows, or MS-DOS to start
doing things. The fact that Linux is different about this suggests to me
that it can't be ignored by the user who just wants to run applications.

> - Install Slackware-13.0 on relatively current hardware. You'll need
> to configure it specifically to startup in graphics mode, rather
> than plain-text, but that configuration is very simple, and I'll
> gladly help with that.

Is it available in a "live" version that will run off a USB drive? I
don't want
to un-install Windows on this computer not that I've pretty much housebroken
it, and I'm not comfortable with a dual-boot system. I suppose I could put
Slackware on another computer, the one I started playing with Ubunto on
a year ago. That's still around, just a year older. But at that time I was
enthusiastic about trying Ardour. This time around I was just curious, since
I had this Fedora live flash drive, to see what it looked like on the
new netbook.

> Following up to this is way off-topic for rec.audio.pro, at least until
> such time as we start discussing turning the system into a music
> workstation. alt.os.linux.slackware is probably a better newsgroup,

True, but you've already told me enough to lose interest. Sorry you had
to write that much, but maybe it'll be useful to someone else.


--
"Today's production equipment is IT based and cannot be operated without
a passing knowledge of computing, although it seems that it can be
operated without a passing knowledge of audio." - John Watkinson

Mike Rivers wrote:

>> Ctrl-Alt-Del likely triggers the shutdown ...
>
> Ah, OK, maybe that's what I did to get it to shut down. I was trying
> to reboot and then thought "Oh, wait a minute, this isn't DOS."

Indeed, and in fact you could configure the system to do just about
anything you might imagine possible in response to Ctrl-Alt-Delete. It
just happens that the default configuration (at least with those
distributions I've gotten to know even a little) is that it restarts the
computer, presumably because that's what people have come to expect from
that key sequence. I have some systems that simply print a message on
the screen, for example, instead of restarting.

>> but is your computer hardware really all that unusual?
>
> I don't know. What's "usual?"

I've had excellent luck with HP products. I don't work for HP, though,
so I'm neither recommending you try them or avoid them. I'm just
reporting that they've worked very well for me at home and at work, and
they're very serviceable when it comes time to add or replace
components.

> ... It's an Atom processor on what's likely to be an Intel board. It
> says "Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 3150"

Ok, so probably constructed within the last year. A very quick glance
via Google didn't help me find any indication that this is supported yet
in the windowing environment used on Linux ("X.org"). It's entirely
possible that the system otherwise runs fine, but you can't see that
because it doesn't know how to tell the display hardware to put anything
on the screen.

> I didn't look in the DHCP server log ...

Might be worth finding that, or it might be moot, given the below.

> Well, I didn't have to get comfortable with Windows, or MS-DOS to start
> doing things. ...

You just woke up one morning and suddenly could be productive in either
environment? You didn't have to learn how to configure the system for
anything? You never had to make changes in config.sys or autoexec.bat
to accomodate new hardware or new software?

> The fact that Linux is different about this suggests to me that it
> can't be ignored by the user who just wants to run applications.

It ultimately can be, but the familiarity and comfort need to happen
first.

>> - Install Slackware-13.0 on relatively current hardware. ...
>
> Is it available in a "live" version that will run off a USB drive? ...

Not that I'm aware of. That's not to say that it isn't available in
that form, but if it is, it's not from Slackware itself, and I haven't
come across it.

If you've been insisting to try only the distributions that have "live"
USB/CD drive installations, that also could be contributing to the
difficulty you've been having. My own experience is that systems work
much better with an actual installation done, even when I have tried the
"live" CDs (or USB keys). Some work quite well for demonstrating Linux
in general, though (such as Knoppix), even if running off a CD/USB disk
is horribly slow in comparison to an installed system. I've never tried
Knoppix for any audio applications, though.

> I don't want to un-install Windows on this computer not that I've
> pretty much housebroken it, and I'm not comfortable with a dual-boot
> system. ...

Right, which is precisely why I suggested that you obtain a separate
disk. I agree that it would be a bad decision to uninstall Windows
in this case.

However, as noted above, it's certainly possible that the display
adapter is not supported in X, and that although you might get
Slackware installed and working, you would still have trouble with X
(the windowing environment), and therefore the system's usability
for audio applications would be significantly impaired (not zero,
mind you, but certainly not inspiring).

> I suppose I could put Slackware on another computer, the one I started
> playing with Ubunto on a year ago. That's still around, just a year
> older. ...

It's likely much better suited to my suggestion, too.

> ... but you've already told me enough to lose interest. ...

Sorry. I did try.

--
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Sylvain Robitaille (E-Mail Removed)

Systems analyst / AITS Concordia University
Faculty of Engineering and Computer Science Montreal, Quebec, Canada
----------------------------------------------------------------------