Several Linux Questions

[MindoverMaster]

To ye few but faithful,

OK, several questions for you.

You see my server below in my sig. Nexus. I plan, in the next few months, to update it to AM3.
Thread: http://www.techist.com/forums/f75/little-upgrading-247472/

I am looking for more options, as the latest version of Ubuntu, 11.0.4, is giving me problems. See other threads in this section. So I looked at, in VMWare, Xubuntu, Lubuntu, Slackware, DSl, #Cruchbang, Gentoo, Arch, etc; and was not happy with any of them. For the longest time, I hated Kubuntu, or KDE in general. As the computers I had were crappy ones, and KDE bogged it up. As I have a little more powerful computer, why not KDE?

I hate being without a GUI. So something like Ubuntu Server would drive me mad. I think Kubuntu has come a long way.

Questions:

1. Being a server, would a SSD help? I have a OCZ Vertex 30GB sitting around, collecting dust. Not enough for Windows 7, but Linux should be fine with it.

2. I am looking to fold again. Which way do you recommend to install in Ubuntu-like systems? I see many

3. What really is the difference between Kubuntu and Mint? As far as in system usage, they are the same. Is it just the looks?

4. I'll add more as I think of them. Don't answer this one.

 

[Jayce]

Linux Mint KDE, from what I understand, is built on top if Ubuntu with their own customizations and packaging. In short, there would be very little differences between Mint KDE and Kubuntu.

Linux Mint also has a variant based on Debian, which is very interesting to me, though I haven't really used it all that much.

I agree with you that Kubuntu has come a long way. I personally don't prefer KDE based systems, but my reasoning is entirely preference related and not function related. Gnome just kind of fit the bill for me better.

I have to wonder in regard to your 11.04 issues, did you by chance check the CD and compare the MD5's of the ISO? I just had two back to back issues recently with problematic 11.04 installs. On one, the CD was defective. When I burned another, also defective. So hey, let's burn a third. Defective. Checked the MD5 of the ISO and sure enough, it was bad. Lesson learned. Did you by chance run into that? Or was your MD5 and CD in perfect shape?

Using an SSD for Linux would be pretty awesome. Windows still has a pretty fat footprint, so I can see your point with not utilizing it for a Windows based system. My Ubuntu file server is actually running off of a 4gb flash drive, with a pair of 500gb drives in a software raid mirror. Pretty sick nasty setup.

 

[MindoverMaster]

My checksum matches. Guess just a hiccup, idk.

I currently have Ubuntu on a 8GB flash drive. I dunno, but it seems a bit slow, could be the RAM or the space on it that is the bottleneck. *shrug*

 

[Jayce]

Do you have swap enabled? I was told NOT to put swap on a flash drive install of Linux since it would eat up the read/write life cycle of the flash drive. So I just have a single partition for root, and then my raid array mounts to /media/storage.

It seems wicked fast to me. It's a dual core box with 2gb of RAM. Nothing special, but far from not powerful enough for Linux.

What hardware are you running? Graphics card? Do you have the restricted drivers installed for your video card?

 

[carnageX]

My checksum matches. Guess just a hiccup, idk.

I currently have Ubuntu on a 8GB flash drive. I dunno, but it seems a bit slow, could be the RAM or the space on it that is the bottleneck. *shrug*

Different flash drives have different read/write speeds. Run a benchmark on it and see what the R/W speeds are of it.

 

[kmote]

1. Being a server, would a SSD help? I have a OCZ Vertex 30GB sitting around, collecting dust. Not enough for Windows 7, but Linux should be fine with it.

2. I am looking to fold again. Which way do you recommend to install in Ubuntu-like systems? I see many

3. What really is the difference between Kubuntu and Mint? As far as in system usage, they are the same. Is it just the looks?

4. I'll add more as I think of them. Don't answer this one.

1. Yeah, that would be excellent, 30GB is loads for the OS (with any GUI) and every tool and application you could ever reasonably need.
2. Great. I create a user called folding, then log in to the new account, create directories for the cpu and any gpus, download and unpack the program in each of the directories, run with the configonly option to configure and then add a cron entry on @reboot
3. Dunno.
4. OK

 

[MindoverMaster]

Oh, Kmote, I just remembered something. When I was trying out slackware, and it came to that "Boot:" prompt, I press Enter, and it just hangs. This was in VMWare. So I didn't actually get to "try" it. Any idea?

 

[kmote]

Not sure. Just as a test, I'm installing 13.1 on a new VirtualBox guest right now and it seems to be fine for me.

EDIT: confirmed it's installed fine

 

[MindoverMaster]

Hmm... I'll try it again.

Edit:

OK, this is as far as I get:

Pressing Enter after boot:

 

[kmote]

That stage should only take a few seconds, but your configuration is quite different from mine in that I'm using 32 bit on VirtualBox...