Whilst I’m all for diversity in Linux distros I would prefer if people actually had something to show, or at least had a semi-original idea, before submitting their distro on Digg and trying to build hype. I mean, really, why on Earth would anyone want to use PyroLinux? To save themselves the 5 minutes it would take to install AWN?

I must admit I was unprepared for just how huge the graphics card actually was – the card is longer than the motherboard! Not to mention the huge heatsink and fan on top of it. Thankfully the card fit in without any problems; there’s a tight fit in the case now but nothing too drastic, although I would advise people install the graphics card last if you’re going to get one of these.

I am so far unimpressed by the card reader. I haven’t actually used it functionally yet but from my play around inserting my camera’s SD card, it doesn’t seem to be as nice as, say, the card reader on my laptop. The card doesn’t actually slide all the way in and so sticks out, which is a bit of a pain as my case door must stay open.

The main problem I’m having right now is that I’d forgotten just how mind-numbingly awful the Windows XP installation is. I can’t believe I have to sit here and babysit the damn thing for the sole reason that it asks questions every 10 minutes. Why oh why did no-one on the installer team realise that all that information could have been gathered at the very start and then the process could run uninterrupted.

Don’t even get me started on the “Installation will complete in 39 minutes” thing.

Sigh. Oh well, this will most likely be the last time I need to install Windows XP on a computer so I guess I should look at it with … something less than the sheer loathing it deserves. To cleanse myself I might get around to installing the 64-bit version of Ubuntu 7.04 later.

Let’s hope that day never comes!

I did get the chance to install Ubuntu again as a simple desktop system. I used the alternate install CD again since I like the X setup in that … and I was trying to recover some geek points. I now have to write up the scripts to do the regular backups. I’m currently trying to work out what a decent interval between syncs is. I think every hour might be too often and a day’s interval seems like too long. Anyone have any suggestions?

My next step will be, having convinced the owner of the system to try out a proper hardware RAID card, to see if a hardware RAID1 will overcome these problems. I’ll have to look into it some more first of course and I’ll see if I can work out what is going wrong with the software implementation.

I also promise that not every post in the future will be about RAID!

UPDATE: A new plan has been formulated! I’m going to attempt separating out the /boot partition from mdadm’s clutches and then using rsync to make sure that both /boot partitions on each disk are kept in sync. Let’s see if that works.

It turns out that installing a software RAID with the alternate discs is a lot easier than I would have guessed. I did have this guide to follow, which made it easier as well. I just had to partition the disks, set them to use “physical volume for RAID” instead of the normal file system and then ask the partitioner to start setting up RAID. It then goes through setting up each multi-disk device (md) and the options are well explained and fairly self-explanatory anyway. Someone that I liked is that, with software RAID, you can set up one pair of partitions to be RAID1, another RAID0, etc. Very flexible.

So, overall, this install method seemed to have worked for me. At the very least it’s a lot easier than I feared.

The rest of the install went smoothly. The ncurses-based installer is pretty similar to the graphical (GTK+?) installer in terms of what options it has and the questions it asks. Interesting to note is that the alternate install actually gives you the option to set up available X resolutions … and the list includes widescreen resolutions! I’d still want to change the xorg.conf file to set the correct vertical and horizontal refresh rates for the monitor I’m using but it’s nice to start off with the correct resolution. It does make you wonder why the graphical installer couldn’t do something similar or just damn well support widescreen monitors. Something for the next version of Ubuntu perhaps.

Having completed the install, I rebooted to find … nothing. The system refused to boot and dropped me into an busybox prompt which didn’t do anything. I rebooted again and the system booted, although it took ages and told me that there were no device set up in the mdadm config file. Strange. Once I’d gotten to the desktop (in glorious 1680×1050) the system was reporting that the md devices were being used so I guess everything worked fine. Very strange. If I had to guess I’d say that the relevant partitions and RAID devices (especially the partition with /boot) just had to be initialised and loaded properly with data. Or something. Checking the /proc/mdstat file showed that the /home partition was in the process of being resynced so this reinforces my guess.

Another reboot and I was being left with a non-booting system again. It’s still saying that there are no devices found in the mdadm config file but also that the md0 devices is busy. Another reboot didn’t fix the issue. Feeling frustrated I left the computer for a while and started looking up information on the problem on the Ubuntu forums. Turns out it’s not that uncommon an issue and seems to stem from a race condition between udev and mdadm, along with a problem where mdadm doesn’t properly shut down, or something like that. I didn’t find any compelling information that would fix my problem so I booted again and things went alright. The computer booted but it still took ages to even get to GRUB.

Sigh. The system seems to work now (I rebooted a few times to check) and I’m going to hope for the best. My next task will be to simulate a non-functioning disk and check that the RAID1 I’ve spent all this effort to get to work actually does its job! Otherwise I may be going to look up how to get the chipset’s RAID drivers installed.

Let’s see if this saga concludes soon! I hope to get some concrete results out of all this that I can pass on to others.

So, following that I looked into LVM, the Logical Volume Manager, as from my shallow understanding of it I believed that it would do what I wanted. Turns out I am slightly wrong in that respect. What LVM really does is allow for partitions to be spread across multiple physical disks and for those physical disks to change without affecting the virtual disk images that all your data is stored on. (For example, you could add more disks to semi-dynamically increase the size of your /home partition.) LVM is also a pain to set up from what I’ve seen and cannot be used as a boot partition. So it doesn’t handle RAID-like functions in the way I’d thought.

I did discover that there are softwares available to handle a “software RAID” on Linux, similar to what the “fake raid” drivers would achieve, without a lot of the hassle. The one I found, mdadm, actually creates “RAID” functionality by combining multiple partitions into a single virtual partition. This increase the flexibility slightly as you don’t need to have a set of identical physical disks. (Also of interest with mdadm is that it seems to have been written by someone from the University of New South Wales – go Aussies!)

I’m going to see how this new method goes tomorrow!

The background here is that I’m installing this new Dell for an employer who wants to use it as a new work machine. I convinced him to use Linux due to it’s greater stability (sort of) and security (definitely). He’s been using Firefox and Thunderbird on Windows XP for some time so there shouldn’t be too many problems switching over. I plan to install VirtualBox to run XP inside a virtual machine as well to help ease the transition. Being as this is a work machine, data security is a big issue. My proposed solution is to have two hard disks in a RAID1 setup so all data is mirrored and to do regular backups to an external hard drive.

The computer I intended to install Ubuntu on is a Dell Dimension E520 with 2 x 250GB hard drives, 2GB of RAM, an Intel Core 2 Duo (E6420?), an nVidia 7300LE video card, a Viewsonic VX2235wm 22″ LCD monitor (connected with a DVI cable), and an assortment of other hardware, like a card reader, DVD+/-RW, DVD-ROM, and so on. I used Ubuntu 7.04 “Feisty Fawn”, the latest Ubuntu version, burned onto a CD.

To start off I did a check of the Ubuntu CD with the CDs “check the disc for errors” menu item. After about 10 minutes it reported back that everything was fine. I proceeded with the installation and everything went swimmingly. Accepting the defaults for the install process (only having to type in user details and select “Melbourne” as my location) got me through in a couple of minutes. Then the installation itself took around 10-15 minutes to complete. Overall, very quick, especially for a full featured desktop operating system.

I then restarted the computer to view my handiwork. This is where I ran into the first problem. It seems that the kernels that comes with Feisty doesn’t know how to handle the Dell’s BIOS properly – it was unable to shut down or restart the system. I didn’t consider this a big deal as I just did a hard shutdown and started it back up. The OS booted up normally.

The second problem, and this appears to be an issue with Ubuntu in general, is that the widescreen monitor settings were not detected at all. The only resolutions available to me from the screen resolution dialog were “1024×768″, “800×600″ and “640×480″. Definitely not suitable for a monitor whose native resolution is 1680×1050! Thankfully I’m no stranger to manually adjusting X.org configuration settings (coming from a Gentoo and Slackware background where these things are the norm) so I was able to add in the native resolution. It should be noted that Ubuntu (or X) did not allow me to use that resolution until I adjusted the vertical and horizontal refresh rates, which required a visit to Viewsonic’s website.

Being a new installation there were plenty of updates waiting to be installed. One of these was a kernel update from 2.6.20.15 to 2.6.20.16. It turns out that updating the kernel fixed the issue with shutting down the computer. What is odd is that when I rebooted it told me that the primary partition hadn’t been checked for errors in ~49,000 days and proceeded to run fsck over it. Right, well at least you know that your newly formatted partition is error free!

After rebooting the computer (without a hard reboot!), I noticed that I hadn’t set up the hard drives to be in a RAID1 (mirrored) configuration. This was fairly easy through the Dell RAID configuration menu. It did tell me that putting the drives into a RAID setup would wipe all the data on them though. This seemed kind of odd to me but I accepted it since I wanted to use a hardware RAID if at all possible to try and avoid any OS issues. After setting up RAID1 I rebooted and started the Ubuntu install process again.

This installation didn’t go so well. Instead of using the “guided partitioning” of the entire disk (and there were still two disks being reported on the system, which again seemed odd to me) I used the manual partitioning to set up a separate /home partition. Well, I don’t what the problem with the manual partitioner is but it refused to let me set up the partitions how I liked. I kept getting errors of “beginning must be before the end!” no matter what combination of options for each partition I used. Very frustrating. I ended up forgetting about manual partitioning and just went with the automatic option again.

When I tried to reboot this time (using a hard shutdown again) the OS wouldn’t boot. Well, that is to say that grub, the bootloader, wouldn’t … load. I’m guessing this has to do with a problem relating to the new RAID1 hard drive configuration. I couldn’t find any way of getting it to boot so I undid the RAID and everything worked normally. To check if RAID really was the problem I tried to set up RAID1 after I had installed everything but the disks were wiped clean as the setup tool warned.

On to installation 3! By this time I was getting pretty pissed off, as you can imagine. I found GParted (GNOME Partition Editor) in the Live CD administration menu and partitioned the disk how I liked. Amazingly it worked. Using this I could do a manual partition in the Ubuntu installer by simply setting what I wanted the existing partitions to be mounted as (“/” and “/home” in this case) and formatting them. To my surprise this worked fine but a dialog did pop up warning me about the root partition being “too small” or something. It’s 15GB so I have no idea what the hell that meant.

So, the rest of the installation went fine. Rebooting (hard) into the new installation went off without a hitch and I went about updating the system again and setting X to the correct resolution for the monitor. Hopefully this is the last time I’ll need to install Ubuntu on this computer! During the update process I noticed something odd: when the computer has been idle for some time (no keyboard/mouse actions) the screen fades to black. This takes a few seconds and I interrupted the process after it had just started. Apparently this is not on as it screwed up the colours on a bunch of controls on the screen (progress bar, windows titles, etc), which stayed in their “semi-faded” state and didn’t return to normal. Another cycle of fading out and restoring returned these to normal.

Now the only thing to do is use LVM to set up a software RAID on the hard drives and pray that that works as it should.

So, I guess the moral of the story is that the RAID controller on the Dell doesn’t play nice with Ubuntu so don’t bother even trying to use a hardware RAID! Oh, and the Ubuntu partitioner needs a serious look over in terms of usability.