Viva Emptiness - Matt’s Blog

For a number of years I have run a Linux Laptop (Fedora core as it happens), and until recently my main PC has been windows. During that time I’ve wanted to share the files in my home directory on said laptop with my Windows system and have configured it as a Samba server. It’s worked like a dream and I have no complaints.

As you may have read, I recently converted my PC to Ubuntu and still wanted access to the folders on my laptop. So.. like an idiot I installed the samba client and ‘connected to the remote computer’ using SMB.

Like an idiot!

To recap, I have a Linux PC AND a Linux Laptop and I am using a WINDOWS file sharing protocol to connect the two! It dawned on me yesterday what a fool I was!

The answer was simple: NFS

D’oh!

So, time to loose the Windows protocol and do it the unix way…

First, setting up the laptop as a file server.
All I wanted was my home directory available to my main PC.
To configure NFS firstly I had to edit the /etc/exports on the server so I added the following (as root):

/home/matt 192.168.1.2(rw,sync,all_squash,anonuid=500)
/home/matt is the local directory I want to export
192.168.1.2 is the IP address of the computer allowed to connect (in this case my main PC)
rw means it’s read/write
sync means the server is not going to respond until its written to disk (safer, but marginally slower)
all_squash maps connecting users to anonymous
anonuid=500 sets the anonymous user uid as 500 (in this case my ID)

Saved the file and started the nfs service.

On the client, as root, I ran:

mount -o soft malachi:/home/matt /home/matt/malachi

soft means it’s a soft connection and my PC isn’t going to hang up if the laptop is turned off.
malachi:/home/matt is the name of my laptop and the folder it’s sharing.
/home/matt/malachi is the local folder on my PC that I want the directory on my laptop mounted on.

A quick ls -l /home/matt/malachi shows all my laptop files! Easy!

As I want it to mount on boot I added the following, as root, to the /etc/fstab (all on one line):

malachi:/home/matt /home/matt/malachi nfs rsize=8192,wsize=8192,timeo=14,intr,soft

Done!

I can now remove Samba and rely on good old NFS.

I did it.

After over 10 years of playing with Linux but never feeling that it quite had the maturity, I’ve made the switch on my main PC. Why didn’t I move before? Because in the past I would spend 5 times as long configuring my system to print, or for USB, or for Office apps, or for… well you get the idea..

As much as I love playing with PCs, when it comes to my ‘main’ OS I really want things to just work. No messing. I want tinker under my own terms, not because I have to. There’s also the subject of applications and games that don’t run on Linux, and the fact that my family still want to use Windows. In any event I will have to dual boot for their sake.
But! I made the decision after looking at the current distros; seeing how clean and easy they were to configure and control, and so, with my new 500GB hard drive installed, the move began..

First decision, which Linux distro? I decided on on Ubuntu 7.04, very popular and it default to the Gnome desktop (I’ve never really liked KDE).

My PC has 3 physical drives:
120GB (NTFS C:)
80GB (spare)
500GB (NTFS F:)
I’m not going to go into great detail on the install, as it went like a dream. I installed Linux on my 70GB drive, using 2GB for swap, and the rest for the / partition (I really couldn’t be arsed with slicing it up, and I intend to store all my data on the 500GB drive anyway. LILO handles the dualboot with Windows fine.
After the install I followed the excellent guide on configuring the perfect desktop on www.howtoforge.com (which, I should add, needs to be in your list of favourites if you use Linux!). Thanks to Falko Timme for your guidance! This install also includes the NTFS configuration tools and I can read/write see my NTFS drives
Once I had everything working (and yes, it all does!) I then decided to make my desktop 3D by installing Beryl and and configuring it to use my Nvida 6600 GT gfx card. After enabling the Desktop Effects and downloading the nvidia driver, I used the excellent Synaptic Package Manager to install Beryl, and suddenly my desktop looked really cool, complete with a 3D cube that I can use to rotate to my 4 workspaces!

Next I migrated all my Thunderbird emails, literally just a case of copying the profiles folder to the correct folder in Linux and updating the profiles.ini file. Firefox bookmarks were equally simple.

To overcome the problems with Windows programs, I again referred to howtoforge.com and used vmware server and convertion program to give me an image of my existing Windows system to run inside Linux! Works like a dream.

There is only one snag. There is a bug in the Nvidia drivers which causes a black windows in Beryl when it runs about of graphics memory. I’m still looking around for a fix for this, but it’s not a big deal.

So…I’m done! My desktop is officially Linux. Bye bye Microsoft (or at least as much as I can get rid of!)

There’s more to do, but at the moment it’s looking good! And the 3D desktop is sooo damned cool, even my non-geeky friends are impressed!

Why don’t PC upgrades go easily? huh? huh?

Actually I have had worse experiences, but anyway..

I decided I needed a new hard drive for a number of reasons

1. I’m almost out of space
2. I AM going to intall Linux on my desktop (finally) and make that my primary OS.

Looking around I decided on the Western Digital WD5000AAKS 500GB SATA II without actually finding out if I could run it! I already had 2 HDs and figured I would have to swap on out. As it happens that wasn’t necessary as I had not used any of the SATA channels on my Abit KV8 Pro motherboard, or the SATA power connections on my PSU. On top of that I even had the space in my case for it!

All was looking good.

Attached everything, fired up the PC, entered the BIOS. Nothing. It didn’t see the drive. TBH I had no idea what to expect - would it see it on an IDE channel? I already had 2 HDs and 2 DVD ROM/RAM drives installed so…erm…

Ignoring that I booted Windows XP. Nothing. Hmmm..

OK. Time for the Ubuntu live CD. Booted. Nothing. Double Hmmm..

Time for a trip to both the Abit and the Western Digital sites as well as a flick through my motherboard manual (which was no help!)
It didn’t take me long to find out that:

1. Windows XP does not natively support SATA drives (downloaded a VIA SATA driver off the Abit site)
2. My SATA interface has a problem with SATA II drives and the BIOS will not see them as there is a problem auto-negotiating the transfer speed. There is a quick fix for this - install a jumper on pins 5-6 to set the speed at 150 MB/s. This is documented at the Western Digital site.

So I jumpered the pins and it still was not seen in my BIOS, however the SATA RAID utility appeared on Boot! Excellent! Booted Windows - still nothing. ARGH! I delved into device manager and Windows XP had not started the damned SATA driver I had installed! So I started it and up comes the drive. Of course Ubuntu was seeing it fine…

Two hours of formatting later and I have a new Hard drive installed.

Finally! I now had 500GB more space and am going to use it all for data, this will free up my second IDE drive for Linux.

Next. The installation