I have an ASUS EeePC 701 (with 2GB of RAM and an 8 GB card), on which I've installed CentOS on the hard-drive-plus-card. But it can't even use my eth0.
Some one on a local LUG, where I had mentioned that other OSs did fine with all the same exact hardware, suggested that CentOS, being designed for stability rather than the bleeding edge, likely lacks drivers; so I need to get some.
Anybody know what drivers (for wireless as well as ethernet cable) I need, and how/where to get ones to fit CentOS??
Beartooth wrote:
I have an ASUS EeePC 701 (with 2GB of RAM and an 8 GB card), on which I've installed CentOS on the hard-drive-plus-card. But it can't even use my eth0.
Some one on a local LUG, where I had mentioned that other OSs did fine with all the same exact hardware, suggested that CentOS, being designed for stability rather than the bleeding edge, likely lacks drivers; so I need to get some.
Anybody know what drivers (for wireless as well as ethernet cable) I need, and how/where to get ones to fit CentOS??
Why do you want CentOS on an EeePC ? It's not really intended for that purpose, if your having to ask where to get the drivers for it your probably not suited for running CentOS on the EeePC. Your better off with Fedora, or Ubuntu or something that has broader hardware support.
I installed Ubuntu 9.04 netbook remix on my EeePC 2G surf yesterday(onto a 4G SD card), it was pretty painless although the general UI has too much eye candy, so it is choppy. The wiki says future kernel updates should address some of the sluggishness.
nate
On Mon, 27 Apr 2009 12:24:57 -0700, nate wrote:
Beartooth wrote:
I have an ASUS EeePC 701 (with 2GB of RAM and an 8 GB card), on which I've installed CentOS on the hard-drive-plus-card. But it can't even use my eth0.
Some one on a local LUG, where I had mentioned that other OSs did fine with all the same exact hardware, suggested that CentOS, being designed for stability rather than the bleeding edge, likely lacks drivers; so I need to get some.
Anybody know what drivers (for wireless as well as ethernet cable) I need, and how/where to get ones to fit CentOS??
Why do you want CentOS on an EeePC ? It's not really intended for that purpose, if your having to ask where to get the drivers for it your probably not suited for running CentOS on the EeePC. Your better off with Fedora, or Ubuntu or something that has broader hardware support.
I have a strong if perhaps irrational preference for the .rpm family; I have indeed installed and run F8, F9, F10, and Eeedora on this machine. Unfortunately, until I can afford to replace it with a somewhat larger netbook, what's left of my eyeballs and fingers limits me to using it in waiting rooms, and not much of anywhere else.
Given that limitation, speed of boot becomes a major criterion. F10 (and also, believe it or not, Pupeee) took *over* ten minutes -- yes, real sixty-second minutes; it's not a typo -- just to boot. And then had to find wifi.
I installed Ubuntu 9.04 netbook remix on my EeePC 2G surf yesterday(onto a 4G SD card), it was pretty painless although the general UI has too much eye candy, so it is choppy. The wiki says future kernel updates should address some of the sluggishness.
I've also been trying plain Ubuntu, Eeebuntu, Crunchbang, DreamLinux, and a couple more.
I'll run an OS of that ilk if I have to.
But for fifty-odd years, the Baby Boomers have trodden my heels, doing all I do a few years later. Some of them, even more than I, will be wanting a mature RedHat-type OS, well back from the bleeding edge, to enable them to check their email, etc., rather than thumb antediluvian magazines in waiting rooms.
What's more, CentOS will be able to oblige them, once it gets up to something like present Fedora kernels. Why not a little sooner?
And just in case, do please tell me where to get this ultra- exemplary netbook remix, which I have somehow failed to encounter. (I think all my Ubuntoid OSs so far are 8-based.)
On Mon, Apr 27, 2009 at 3:15 PM, Beartooth Beartooth@comcast.net wrote:
On Mon, 27 Apr 2009 12:24:57 -0700, nate wrote:
Beartooth wrote:
I have an ASUS EeePC 701 (with 2GB of RAM and an 8 GB card), onwhich I've installed CentOS on the hard-drive-plus-card. But it can't even use my eth0.
Some one on a local LUG, where I had mentioned that other OSs did fine with all the same exact hardware, suggested that CentOS, being designed for stability rather than the bleeding edge, likely lacks drivers; so I need to get some.
Anybody know what drivers (for wireless as well as ethernet cable) I need, and how/where to get ones to fit CentOS??
Why do you want CentOS on an EeePC ? It's not really intended for that purpose, if your having to ask where to get the drivers for it your probably not suited for running CentOS on the EeePC. Your better off with Fedora, or Ubuntu or something that has broader hardware support.
I have a strong if perhaps irrational preference for the .rpmfamily; I have indeed installed and run F8, F9, F10, and Eeedora on this machine. Unfortunately, until I can afford to replace it with a somewhat larger netbook, what's left of my eyeballs and fingers limits me to using it in waiting rooms, and not much of anywhere else.
Given that limitation, speed of boot becomes a major criterion.F10 (and also, believe it or not, Pupeee) took *over* ten minutes -- yes, real sixty-second minutes; it's not a typo -- just to boot. And then had to find wifi.
I installed Ubuntu 9.04 netbook remix on my EeePC 2G surf yesterday(onto a 4G SD card), it was pretty painless although the general UI has too much eye candy, so it is choppy. The wiki says future kernel updates should address some of the sluggishness.
I've also been trying plain Ubuntu, Eeebuntu, Crunchbang,DreamLinux, and a couple more.
I'll run an OS of that ilk if I have to. But for fifty-odd years, the Baby Boomers have trodden my heels,doing all I do a few years later. Some of them, even more than I, will be wanting a mature RedHat-type OS, well back from the bleeding edge, to enable them to check their email, etc., rather than thumb antediluvian magazines in waiting rooms.
What's more, CentOS will be able to oblige them, once it gets upto something like present Fedora kernels. Why not a little sooner?
And just in case, do please tell me where to get this ultra-exemplary netbook remix, which I have somehow failed to encounter. (I think all my Ubuntoid OSs so far are 8-based.)
I like CentOS better than Debian also but, apparently, the new Ubuntu 9.04 works really well on netbooks.
It's here: http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/download-netbook
If Puppy linux is taking a long time to boot, I'm not sure how you think CentOS is going to fare better. What sort of drive does this thing have? You may need to look into replacing that if you want faster bootup speeds and not the OS.
On Mon, 27 Apr 2009 15:20:30 -0500, Ron Blizzard wrote: [...]
I like CentOS better than Debian also but, apparently, the new Ubuntu 9.04 works really well on netbooks.
For the record, I went there, got that, burned it to a medium, and started an install. It came up with some startlingly strong caveat, to the effect that "This will wipe your drive."
I took that to be so much more ubuntoid protecting me from myself, and went ahead, taking for granted that the installer would give me at least one choice which would preserve CentOS.
Ba-aa-aadd move. It meant what it said : never gave me any other choice of anything, but went ahead and, sure enough, completely trashed my CentOS install. After that, the machine ran UNR and only UNR, even with thumbsticks in it. I finally ended up running DBAN against it -- and am still looking for other, *NON*-ubuntoid distros ...
On Sun, 3 May 2009 19:02:26 +0000 (UTC) Beartooth wrote:
For the record, I went there, got that, burned it to a medium, and started an install. It came up with some startlingly strong caveat, to the effect that "This will wipe your drive."
I just checked the URL and it looks like that's a version of the Live ubuntu CD. It's install option doesn't always play nice with existing info on hard drives; you need the 'alternate' CD instead (and it's not clear that that exists for the netbook config).
on 5-3-2009 12:02 PM Beartooth spake the following:
On Mon, 27 Apr 2009 15:20:30 -0500, Ron Blizzard wrote: [...]
I like CentOS better than Debian also but, apparently, the new Ubuntu 9.04 works really well on netbooks.
For the record, I went there, got that, burned it to a medium, and started an install. It came up with some startlingly strong caveat, to the effect that "This will wipe your drive."
So it did warn you...
I took that to be so much more ubuntoid protecting me from myself, and went ahead, taking for granted that the installer would give me at least one choice which would preserve CentOS.
But it did warn you...
Ba-aa-aadd move. It meant what it said : never gave me any other choice of anything, but went ahead and, sure enough, completely trashed my CentOS install. After that, the machine ran UNR and only UNR, even with thumbsticks in it. I finally ended up running DBAN against it -- and am still looking for other, *NON*-ubuntoid distros ...
So if you walk up to a very large fellow with a t-shirt that says, "Touch me and I will punch you", do you still touch him thinking it is just a possible outcome?
I personally would take "This will wipe your drive" to mean that my drive will be wiped of everything, not just some things. That is enough caution for me if I have something I don't want to lose.
Beartooth wrote:
Given that limitation, speed of boot becomes a major criterion. F10 (and also, believe it or not, Pupeee) took *over* ten minutes -- yes, real sixty-second minutes; it's not a typo -- just to boot. And then had to find wifi.
I think you really want something that does suspend/wakeup right on a netbook - or even a normal laptop.
On Mon, 2009-04-27 at 15:35 -0500, Les Mikesell wrote:
Beartooth wrote:
Given that limitation, speed of boot becomes a major criterion. F10 (and also, believe it or not, Pupeee) took *over* ten minutes -- yes, real sixty-second minutes; it's not a typo -- just to boot. And then had to find wifi.
I think you really want something that does suspend/wakeup right on a netbook - or even a normal laptop.
---- Fedora 10 suspends/wakes properly on my Acer Aspire One
I have done much with that and posted some useful stuff on the FedoraProject wiki page on Aspire One.
I currently have Fedora 11 (testing) installed on it and it rocks.
Craig
On Mon, 27 Apr 2009 13:55:52 -0700, Craig White wrote: [....]
I currently have Fedora 11 (testing) installed on it and it rocks.
I downloaded that, burned a medium, and tried three times to install it, getting bug reports every time. I'm presently doing a fresh download (which looks like taking all night). Lish me wuck.
Les Mikesell wrote:
I think you really want something that does suspend/wakeup right on a netbook - or even a normal laptop.
CentOS does indeed do all that and is a usable platform on the eeepc, with a few edits.
Beartooth wrote:
On Mon, 27 Apr 2009 12:24:57 -0700, nate wrote:
Beartooth wrote:
I have an ASUS EeePC 701 (with 2GB of RAM and an 8 GB card), on which I've installed CentOS on the hard-drive-plus-card. But it can't even use my eth0.
Some one on a local LUG, where I had mentioned that other OSs did fine with all the same exact hardware, suggested that CentOS, being designed for stability rather than the bleeding edge, likely lacks drivers; so I need to get some.
Anybody know what drivers (for wireless as well as ethernet cable) I need, and how/where to get ones to fit CentOS??
Why do you want CentOS on an EeePC ? It's not really intended for that purpose, if your having to ask where to get the drivers for it your probably not suited for running CentOS on the EeePC. Your better off with Fedora, or Ubuntu or something that has broader hardware support.
I have a strong if perhaps irrational preference for the .rpm family; I have indeed installed and run F8, F9, F10, and Eeedora on this machine. Unfortunately, until I can afford to replace it with a somewhat larger netbook, what's left of my eyeballs and fingers limits me to using it in waiting rooms, and not much of anywhere else.
Given that limitation, speed of boot becomes a major criterion. F10 (and also, believe it or not, Pupeee) took *over* ten minutes -- yes, real sixty-second minutes; it's not a typo -- just to boot. And then had to find wifi.
WHAT!!!!!!???????
I just booted mine for the morning, and it was on the login GUI in 50 SECONDS!
Once I entered my password it was connected to the network in under 30 SECONDS (and I use WPA-PSK).
You have install/setup problems. What services are you running? There may be a number of services that are waiting on the network to come up to check something and are waiting for timeouts, missing that the link is down so don't bother to try (ntp does it right, for example).
I installed Ubuntu 9.04 netbook remix on my EeePC 2G surf yesterday(onto a 4G SD card), it was pretty painless although the general UI has too much eye candy, so it is choppy. The wiki says future kernel updates should address some of the sluggishness.
I've also been trying plain Ubuntu, Eeebuntu, Crunchbang, DreamLinux, and a couple more.
I'll run an OS of that ilk if I have to.
But for fifty-odd years, the Baby Boomers have trodden my heels, doing all I do a few years later. Some of them, even more than I, will be wanting a mature RedHat-type OS, well back from the bleeding edge, to enable them to check their email, etc., rather than thumb antediluvian magazines in waiting rooms.
I am 58, approaching 59. Sat down in front of my first TeleType (running at 55 Baud) in '66; BASIC was 2 years old.
I like stablity, but after a number of years on Centos, and the evolving rate of hardware, I have bit the bullet this year and added both FC9 and FC10 to my platform mix. Of course the first driver was to get the 2.6.27 kernel to get IPsec BEET mode.
What's more, CentOS will be able to oblige them, once it gets up to something like present Fedora kernels. Why not a little sooner?
That is Redhat's call when they put it into RHEL, ask them.
And just in case, do please tell me where to get this ultra- exemplary netbook remix, which I have somehow failed to encounter. (I think all my Ubuntoid OSs so far are 8-based.)
Robert Moskowitz wrote:
Given that limitation, speed of boot becomes a major criterion. F10 (and also, believe it or not, Pupeee) took *over* ten minutes -- yes, real sixty-second minutes; it's not a typo -- just to boot. And then had to find wifi.
WHAT!!!!!!???????
I just booted mine for the morning, and it was on the login GUI in 50 SECONDS!
Once I entered my password it was connected to the network in under 30 SECONDS (and I use WPA-PSK).
You have install/setup problems. What services are you running? There may be a number of services that are waiting on the network to come up to check something and are waiting for timeouts, missing that the link is down so don't bother to try (ntp does it right, for example).
Now that you mention it, it does sound like sendmail/samba, etc., waiting for DNS on a disconnected network.
On Tue, 28 Apr 2009 07:32:00 -0500, Les Mikesell wrote:
Robert Moskowitz wrote:
Given that limitation, speed of boot becomes a major criterion. F10 (and also, believe it or not, Pupeee) took *over* ten minutes -- yes, real sixty-second minutes; it's not a typo -- just to boot. And then had to find wifi.
WHAT!!!!!!???????
I just booted mine for the morning, and it was on the login GUI in 50 SECONDS!
Once I entered my password it was connected to the network in under 30 SECONDS (and I use WPA-PSK).
You have install/setup problems. What services are you running? There may be a number of services that are waiting on the network to come up to check something and are waiting for timeouts, missing that the link is down so don't bother to try (ntp does it right, for example).
Now that you mention it, it does sound like sendmail/samba, etc., waiting for DNS on a disconnected network.
Gentlemen, I thank you both -- and wish I had gotten to this point several weeks back. I'll go give F10 (or maybe F11) another try ASAP. Are you running full F10, or the install from the live CD, or what?
Incidentally, it was only about last week that I discovered I could upgrade both the RAM (to the 2 GB it has now) and the SD card (from the 4 GB I had to the 8 GB now). That has of course made everything since seem better.
And, btw, somebody on my local LUG found the drivers I needed. I installed them, and this morning the 701 connects just fine -- under CentOS 5.3.
Beartooth wrote:
On Tue, 28 Apr 2009 07:32:00 -0500, Les Mikesell wrote:
Robert Moskowitz wrote:
Given that limitation, speed of boot becomes a major criterion. F10 (and also, believe it or not, Pupeee) took *over* ten minutes -- yes, real sixty-second minutes; it's not a typo -- just to boot. And then had to find wifi.
WHAT!!!!!!???????
I just booted mine for the morning, and it was on the login GUI in 50 SECONDS!
Once I entered my password it was connected to the network in under 30 SECONDS (and I use WPA-PSK).
You have install/setup problems. What services are you running? There may be a number of services that are waiting on the network to come up to check something and are waiting for timeouts, missing that the link is down so don't bother to try (ntp does it right, for example).
Now that you mention it, it does sound like sendmail/samba, etc., waiting for DNS on a disconnected network.
Gentlemen, I thank you both -- and wish I had gotten to this point several weeks back. I'll go give F10 (or maybe F11) another try ASAP. Are you running full F10, or the install from the live CD, or what?
F10 from install CD then over net where I have the install repo locally. IE full install.
Had to use a USB CD drive and change bios to boot from it. No biggy.
Incidentally, it was only about last week that I discovered I could upgrade both the RAM (to the 2 GB it has now) and the SD card (from the 4 GB I had to the 8 GB now). That has of course made everything since seem better.
Oh, how do you unsoldier the drive? My understanding is this unit has the drive hard wired........
I have /root and /home on the 8Gb SD card and /boot, /var, and a 2Gb swap on the 4Gb SSD.
On Tue, 28 Apr 2009 11:00:24 -0400, Robert Moskowitz wrote: [....]
Oh, how do you unsoldier the drive? My understanding is this unit has the drive hard wired........
You don't. Nobody touched it.
What I know of hardware would go in a gnat's eye. But when the tech unscrewed the two little screws and took the back plate off (NB : voiding the warranty), the memory stick slipped out and the new one in, just like in any other computer.
With a slight push at the exposed corner, the card comes far enough out to pull the rest of the way, and the new one slips in.
No soldering iron need apply.
I have /root and /home on the 8Gb SD card and /boot, /var, and a 2Gb swap on the 4Gb SSD.
I should certainly try something like that, especially while I'm checking out umpteen distros; some of them might be able to use those -- assuming you give each its own partition??
Beartooth wrote:
Why do you want CentOS on an EeePC ?
I have a strong if perhaps irrational preference for the .rpm family
Me, too, and it's rational in my case. I've experienced the whole range of both sets of tools, from the ground up. RPMs are simpler to build than DEBs, and an rpm/yum-based system is easier to maintain than a dpkg/apt-based one, considering just packaging issues. It's true that I have many more years experience with RPM based systems, but I've been using Ubuntu now for about a year and a half, and my opinion isn't shifting much any more.
I think much of the hype about how great the Debian packaging system is came from the days before they adopted yum, so Debian fans could point to apt-get and say "Isn't it great to be able to install packages from the net directly from the command line?" Sure, once upon a time it was, but today, the main distinction I draw between the two sets of tools is that the Debian tools are more complex with no compensating benefit. (There are even some things the simpler Red Hattish tools can do that the Debian ones can't, easily. rpm -qa, for one.)
But, enough of the advocacy rant. Though I use CentOS far more often than I do Ubuntu, there are a few places where Ubuntu simply works better. One of those places is on my Eee 1000. Take it from an RPM fan: it's a poor reason to prefer CentOS for your netbook, unless your goal is to feed patches back to Red Hat for future versions of the OS.
speed of boot becomes a major criterion.
Ubuntu 9.04 greatly improved the boot speed relative to previous versions of the OS.
Separate from that effort, but speeding disk-heavy activities like booting still further, Ubuntu 9.04 also includes ext4 support. You have to partition manually to enable it, but I recommend that for netbooks anyway because that's also the only way to avoid having a swap partition. Swapping to flash is loony.
Between these improvements and a few tweaks to the automatic service startup list, my 1000 goes from the BIOS screen to a desktop in under a minute. I'm running the netbook remix version.
Ubuntu 9.04 supports the Eee's power management features, too, so you can sleep it and wake it back up reasonably quickly.
Warren Young wrote:
Beartooth wrote:
Why do you want CentOS on an EeePC ?
I have a strong if perhaps irrational preference for the .rpm family
Me, too, and it's rational in my case. I've experienced the whole range of both sets of tools, from the ground up. RPMs are simpler to build than DEBs, and an rpm/yum-based system is easier to maintain than a dpkg/apt-based one, considering just packaging issues. It's true that I have many more years experience with RPM based systems, but I've been using Ubuntu now for about a year and a half, and my opinion isn't shifting much any more.
I think much of the hype about how great the Debian packaging system is came from the days before they adopted yum, so Debian fans could point to apt-get and say "Isn't it great to be able to install packages from the net directly from the command line?" Sure, once upon a time it was, but today, the main distinction I draw between the two sets of tools is that the Debian tools are more complex with no compensating benefit. (There are even some things the simpler Red Hattish tools can do that the Debian ones can't, easily. rpm -qa, for one.)
But, enough of the advocacy rant. Though I use CentOS far more often than I do Ubuntu, there are a few places where Ubuntu simply works better. One of those places is on my Eee 1000. Take it from an RPM fan: it's a poor reason to prefer CentOS for your netbook, unless your goal is to feed patches back to Red Hat for future versions of the OS.
speed of boot becomes a major criterion.
Ubuntu 9.04 greatly improved the boot speed relative to previous versions of the OS.
Separate from that effort, but speeding disk-heavy activities like booting still further, Ubuntu 9.04 also includes ext4 support. You have to partition manually to enable it, but I recommend that for netbooks anyway because that's also the only way to avoid having a swap partition. Swapping to flash is loony.
Maybe, maybe not.
First my system is only 1Gb. Kind of on the 'thin' side, but this is a Netbook!
But more importantly is Hibernate to swap. I use this regularly. Suspend eats up your battery.
Between these improvements and a few tweaks to the automatic service startup list, my 1000 goes from the BIOS screen to a desktop in under a minute. I'm running the netbook remix version.
Ubuntu 9.04 supports the Eee's power management features, too, so you can sleep it and wake it back up reasonably quickly. _______________________________________________ CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
Warren Young wrote:
I think much of the hype about how great the Debian packaging system is came from the days before they adopted yum, so Debian fans could point to apt-get and say "Isn't it great to be able to install packages from the net directly from the command line?" Sure, once upon a time it was, but today, the main distinction I draw between the two sets of tools is that the Debian tools are more complex with no compensating benefit. (There are even some things the simpler Red Hattish tools can do that the Debian ones can't, easily. rpm -qa, for one.)
rpm -qa typically just lists all of the packages on the system, the equivalent in debian is dpkg -l.
I think much of the "hype" isn't really hype and mistakenly compares package formats deb vs rpm, and package managers apt-get/aptitude /dselect(shuder) vs yum.
Building from source is pretty easy assuming you have src entries in apt's configuration: apt-get build-dep <package name> <- installs all dependencies required for building apt-get source -b <package name> <- downloads and extracts source code and compiles it
It's more about the repositories themselves, the QA behind them, the integration of packages. A single unified source for patches, security fixes etc.
From Debian 5.0 (lenny):
Total package names: 29647 (1186k) Normal packages: 22400 Pure virtual packages: 319 Single virtual packages: 2154 Mixed virtual packages: 209 Missing: 4565
No need to go to 3rd party repositories, no need to worry about overrides, worrying about a 3rd party repo overwriting another package on the system, very wide selection of well tested packages (and yes I stick to Debian stable, haven't needed to run 'testing' since about 2002).
At least package counts Debian has more than 10x more packages than CentOS 5.2. My desktop at home has nearly 1900 packages installed.
Also the debian package databases are in plain text format, while I'm sure it has happened I have never personally heard of someone suffering from package database corruption on debian(assuming they were running the 'stable' version). Such corruption reports seem somewhat common in the RPM world with the binary databases.
Add to that the well tested ability to upgrade between minor and major version numbers time and time again. I don't have to hold my breath when I go from Debian 4.0 to 5.0, I can do it from remote without ever losing connectivity, I don't even have to reboot at the end I can continue running the older kernel if I want. Perhaps things have changed recently but last I heard there was no supported upgrade path to go from RHEL 4 to 5 (I'm sure it's possible but I don't believe it's supported). There are folks out there that have seamlessly upgraded debian from back in the 2.x days all the way to current, more than a decade of upgrades on one box. I have only gone a couple major revisions before I end up retiring the hardware and starting fresh myself.
Since Ubuntu builds on Debian a similar number of packages are available for it though they don't go through as much QA in the universe and multiverse repositories, but do in many cases inherit the QA done by the Debian team.
I've never really been fond of yum myself, though it is much better than what was there before(nothing, before rhn at least).
I've been using RHEL/CentOS for about 6 years, Debian for about 11 years. I do prefer RHEL/CentOS for my "work" systems since I configure things on a larger scale and that requires quite a bit of customization, and I use Debian for all of my personal systems. These days I'm much more familiar with the internals of RHEL/CentOS than I am Debian anymore.
I currently maintain roughly 100 SRPMS(results in roughly 465 binary RPMs) for my production environment (compile for CentOS 4/5 32,64 and noarch) which are distributed to the systems using cfengine depending on what the systems need.
Don't get me wrong I really do like CentOS it has it's purpose, I just wanted to try to clarify what I view to be a misconception among folks who champion debs over RPM, it's much less due to the format of the packages themselves, or the package manager itself.
If you feel comfortable going down paths that offer less support such as using 3rd party repos, performing non standard steps to do system upgrades etc then that's great. These days I prefer less wildcards in my life so I don't venture beyond the unsupported unless I really need to(folks may be able to determine this by my ratio of questions to (attempted) answers on this list).
happy trails
nate
On Wed, 29 Apr 2009, nate wrote:
It's more about the repositories themselves, the QA behind them, the integration of packages. A single unified source for patches, security fixes etc.
From Debian 5.0 (lenny):
Total package names: 29647 (1186k) Normal packages: 22400 Pure virtual packages: 319 Single virtual packages: 2154 Mixed virtual packages: 209 Missing: 4565
oh please -- move advocacy to a new thread raher than hijacking. Quantity does not imply quality, and AWOL maintainers who move on is a problem in all of FOSS
No need to go to 3rd party repositories, no need to worry about overrides, worrying about a 3rd party repo overwriting another package on the system, very wide selection of well tested packages (and yes I stick to Debian stable, haven't needed to run 'testing' since about 2002).
and so R-2.9.0 is not available to you, and if your users wanted R-xts, to extend zoo [which extends R], the only place for those packages in Debian packaging are r-forge and CRAN (as they are not in any 'official' Debian archive, and only in the independents).
-- Russ herrold
R P Herrold wrote:
oh please -- move advocacy to a new thread raher than hijacking. Quantity does not imply quality, and AWOL maintainers who move on is a problem in all of FOSS
Quality is implied by the hefty QA process debian goes through, and the long release cycles. I thought I had communicated that in the previous message. The last two major releases took almost 2 years of work each. Similar to the QA that Red Hat does, which is why their base packages are solid and well tested. This same level of QA of course doesn't apply to 3rd party repos.
and so R-2.9.0 is not available to you, and if your users wanted R-xts, to extend zoo [which extends R], the only place for those packages in Debian packaging are r-forge and CRAN (as they are not in any 'official' Debian archive, and only in the independents).
The users will have to make do with what there is. The same is true for CentOS/RHEL on my systems. I can't remember the last time I went to CPAN. I did maintain a couple dozen ruby on rails packages at my last company for the systems there, everything built by hand, it wasn't easy, or fun.
nate
On Wed, Apr 29, 2009 at 3:00 PM, nate centos@linuxpowered.net wrote:
R P Herrold wrote:
oh please -- move advocacy to a new thread raher than hijacking. Quantity does not imply quality, and AWOL maintainers who move on is a problem in all of FOSS
Quality is implied by the hefty QA process debian goes through, and the long release cycles. I thought I had communicated that in the previous message. The last two major releases took almost 2 years of work each. Similar to the QA that Red Hat does, which is why their base packages are solid and well tested. This same level of QA of course doesn't apply to 3rd party repos.
and so R-2.9.0 is not available to you, and if your users wanted R-xts, to extend zoo [which extends R], the only place for those packages in Debian packaging are r-forge and CRAN (as they are not in any 'official' Debian archive, and only in the independents).
The users will have to make do with what there is. The same is true for CentOS/RHEL on my systems. I can't remember the last time I went to CPAN. I did maintain a couple dozen ruby on rails packages at my last company for the systems there, everything built by hand, it wasn't easy, or fun.
For what it's worth, I like both CentOS and Debian. (Heck, I even like openSUSE as an OS, but I'm not crazy about Novel's smooching with Microsoft.) I ended up with CentOS on my home computers because 1) I wanted to learn Red Hat (I'm a phone tech who might have to get into VOIP) and CentOS suits me better. (Besides CentOS worked better with my Intel 865 graphics card then did Ubuntu or Debian.) CentOS seems less fluid and more staid and stable. It's more a matter of taste than anything else for me. I just like CentOS better.
That said, if I owned an eeePC (almost bought one but the keyboard was too small) I would run Ubuntu on it -- if the performance really was that much better than with CentOS.
On Wed, 2009-04-29 at 15:45 -0500, Ron Blizzard wrote:
On Wed, Apr 29, 2009 at 3:00 PM, nate centos@linuxpowered.net wrote: R P Herrold wrote:
> oh please -- move advocacy to a new thread raher than > hijacking. Quantity does not imply quality, and AWOL > maintainers who move on is a problem in all of FOSS Quality is implied by the hefty QA process debian goes through, and the long release cycles. I thought I had communicated that in the previous message. The last two major releases took almost 2 years of work each. Similar to the QA that Red Hat does, which is why their base packages are solid and well tested. This same level of QA of course doesn't apply to 3rd party repos. > and so R-2.9.0 is not available to you, and if your users > wanted R-xts, to extend zoo [which extends R], the only place > for those packages in Debian packaging are r-forge and CRAN > (as they are not in any 'official' Debian archive, and only > in the independents). The users will have to make do with what there is. The same is true for CentOS/RHEL on my systems. I can't remember the last time I went to CPAN. I did maintain a couple dozen ruby on rails packages at my last company for the systems there, everything built by hand, it wasn't easy, or fun.For what it's worth, I like both CentOS and Debian. (Heck, I even like openSUSE as an OS, but I'm not crazy about Novel's smooching with Microsoft.)
--- Not crazy about smooching huh? Ever bother to really research the facts? RedHat and MS are parteners! In the Virtualization area and more.
JohnStanley
On Wed, Apr 29, 2009 at 05:26:22PM -0400, JohnS wrote:
On Wed, 2009-04-29 at 15:45 -0500, Ron Blizzard wrote:
On Wed, Apr 29, 2009 at 3:00 PM, nate centos@linuxpowered.net wrote: R P Herrold wrote:
> oh please -- move advocacy to a new thread raher than > hijacking. Quantity does not imply quality, and AWOL > maintainers who move on is a problem in all of FOSS Quality is implied by the hefty QA process debian goes through, and the long release cycles. I thought I had communicated that in the previous message. The last two major releases took almost 2 years of work each. Similar to the QA that Red Hat does, which is why their base packages are solid and well tested. This same level of QA of course doesn't apply to 3rd party repos. > and so R-2.9.0 is not available to you, and if your users > wanted R-xts, to extend zoo [which extends R], the only place > for those packages in Debian packaging are r-forge and CRAN > (as they are not in any 'official' Debian archive, and only > in the independents). The users will have to make do with what there is. The same is true for CentOS/RHEL on my systems. I can't remember the last time I went to CPAN. I did maintain a couple dozen ruby on rails packages at my last company for the systems there, everything built by hand, it wasn't easy, or fun.For what it's worth, I like both CentOS and Debian. (Heck, I even like openSUSE as an OS, but I'm not crazy about Novel's smooching with Microsoft.)
Not crazy about smooching huh? Ever bother to really research the facts? RedHat and MS are parteners! In the Virtualization area and more.
Speaking of researching the facts, I suggest you do the same.
RedHat's "partnership" with MS most specifically does NOT include any kind of patent licensing crap. The contortions MS/Novell had to go thru in their agreement to try to squeeze into a tiny loophole in the GPL2 are the really objectional parts. The "obey the letter but not the spirit" of the GPL nonsense stinks to high heaven.
On Wed, 2009-04-29 at 17:39 -0400, fred smith wrote:
On Wed, Apr 29, 2009 at 05:26:22PM -0400, JohnS wrote:
On Wed, 2009-04-29 at 15:45 -0500, Ron Blizzard wrote:
On Wed, Apr 29, 2009 at 3:00 PM, nate centos@linuxpowered.net wrote: R P Herrold wrote:
> oh please -- move advocacy to a new thread raher than > hijacking. Quantity does not imply quality, and AWOL > maintainers who move on is a problem in all of FOSS Quality is implied by the hefty QA process debian goes through, and the long release cycles. I thought I had communicated that in the previous message. The last two major releases took almost 2 years of work each. Similar to the QA that Red Hat does, which is why their base packages are solid and well tested. This same level of QA of course doesn't apply to 3rd party repos. > and so R-2.9.0 is not available to you, and if your users > wanted R-xts, to extend zoo [which extends R], the only place > for those packages in Debian packaging are r-forge and CRAN > (as they are not in any 'official' Debian archive, and only > in the independents). The users will have to make do with what there is. The same is true for CentOS/RHEL on my systems. I can't remember the last time I went to CPAN. I did maintain a couple dozen ruby on rails packages at my last company for the systems there, everything built by hand, it wasn't easy, or fun.For what it's worth, I like both CentOS and Debian. (Heck, I even like openSUSE as an OS, but I'm not crazy about Novel's smooching with Microsoft.)
Not crazy about smooching huh? Ever bother to really research the facts? RedHat and MS are parteners! In the Virtualization area and more.
Speaking of researching the facts, I suggest you do the same.
RedHat's "partnership" with MS most specifically does NOT include any kind of patent licensing crap.
-- Ohh yes I aware of am that. :-)
On Wed, Apr 29, 2009 at 4:26 PM, JohnS jses27@gmail.com wrote:
Not crazy about smooching huh? Ever bother to really research the facts? RedHat and MS are parteners! In the Virtualization area and more.
I used openSUSE for quite a while -- even after the agreement (11.0 is still on what is now my backup desktop) -- for two reasons. 1) Novell did a lot to fight off SCO's anti-Linux FUD campaign. And 2) The SuSE community is a lot bigger than Novell. So I'm not part of the boycott Novell group, but the deal with M$ still seems kind of smelly.
As for Red Hat's virtualization agreement with Microsoft -- I thought that had more to do with interoperability than with any licensing agreements?
R P Herrold wrote:
oh please -- move advocacy to a new thread raher than hijacking.
It's just a natural evolution of the conversation. IMO, the answer to the original question is "No," so the obvious next direction to the conversation is "okay, what instead, then?"
Nate's answer was polite, factual, and helpful. Hardly the sort of noise you find on "advocacy" forums.
You can't wave the off-topic flag, either. Last month we were talking about network switches here, for Bob's sake.
nate wrote:
(There are even some things the simpler Red Hattish tools can do that the Debian ones can't, easily. rpm -qa, for one.)
rpm -qa typically just lists all of the packages on the system, the equivalent in debian is dpkg -l.
Not really equivalent. The output is only sort of greppable. I frequently say something like "rpm -qa |grep -i mysql-", in that particular case because MySQL, Inc. keeps changing the way they name their RPMs, so I can never remember the exact package name to query on a given system when I'm looking at versions to decide whether to upgrade. If the truncated part of a long package name has what you want to grep, you won't find that package.
And yes, I do remember RTFMing dpkg(1) and found that you can change the output format of dpkg -l to be more like rpm -qa, but I recall that the required command was way too long to type each time. Sure, I can wrap it in a script, but then I'm customizing all my systems to add commands to it that should have been in the base distro.
Of such minor things are distro choices made.
A single unified source for patches, security fixes etc.
Yes, that's one of the things I take into account when deciding whether I want to use Ubuntu for a particular task: whether I need access to its huge repositories, or if I can get by with what CentOS provides, plus maybe a few third-party add-ons. Beyond a certain point, the choice becomes clear.
This is not the case for most of my server-class machines, however. Basics like LAMP and Samba are all I really need in most cases.
Also the debian package databases are in plain text format, while I'm sure it has happened I have never personally heard of someone suffering from package database corruption on debian(assuming they were running the 'stable' version). Such corruption reports seem somewhat common in the RPM world with the binary databases.
It's been many years since I had to run rpm --rebuilddb. It never did fail on me the few times I did have to run it, and the need to run it was *always* due to a kernel panic while manipulating the RPM DB, or proximate in time to it. Kernel panics always were rare on stable Linux distros even way back in the mid 90s, increasingly rare now, and RPM DB updates are rare in their own right. Rare squared.
Add to that the well tested ability to upgrade between minor and major version numbers time and time again. I don't have to hold my breath when I go from Debian 4.0 to 5.0, I can do it from remote without ever losing connectivity, I don't even have to reboot at the end I can continue running the older kernel if I want.
I like that feature in principle, though I can't think I'd actually want it on any of my servers. On a desktop, sure, but never on a production server. I'd rather keep something creaking along on CentOS 3, running the server's tired old hardware into the ground, building a new CentOS 5 box to replace it in a swift cut-over, rather than upgrade that old box in place.
I do like the way Ubuntu LTS works in this regard, though. It stays locked in the LTS jail, mostly as stable as CentOS with regard to updates, as long as you just do apt-get upgrade, but you can break out with a dist-upgrade to get onto the bleeding edge releases if you really want to. I still can't see myself ever doing that on a production server, but I guess it's nice to know I could.
I've never really been fond of yum myself, though it is much better than what was there before(nothing, before rhn at least).
The only thing I don't like about yum is how hard it is to kill an in-progress yum update, while it's still in the package downloading phase. Other than that, I greatly prefer it to the wordy apt-foo commands.
I currently maintain roughly 100 SRPMS
And does your experience line up with mine, which is that the debian/* big-tree-of-assorted-files is a mess, nowhere near as clean as package-name.spec?
nate wrote:
Beartooth wrote:
I have an ASUS EeePC 701 (with 2GB of RAM and an 8 GB card), on which I've installed CentOS on the hard-drive-plus-card. But it can't even use my eth0.
Some one on a local LUG, where I had mentioned that other OSs did fine with all the same exact hardware, suggested that CentOS, being designed for stability rather than the bleeding edge, likely lacks drivers; so I need to get some.
Anybody know what drivers (for wireless as well as ethernet cable) I need, and how/where to get ones to fit CentOS??
Why do you want CentOS on an EeePC ? It's not really intended for that purpose, if your having to ask where to get the drivers for it your probably not suited for running CentOS on the EeePC. Your better off with Fedora, or Ubuntu or something that has broader hardware support.
I don't have an EeePC but I like to run the same distro on everything. So since my remote server, lan server, desktop, and laptop run CentOS - that's what I would want on an EeePC as well.
With respect to the nic, my suspicion is that you may just need either the Fedora kernel or a patch from the Fedora kernel.
With CentOS 5.0 - the onboard gigabit nic on my Asus board worked OOB in Fedora 8 or 9 (forget which) but did not work in CentOS - though CentOS did see it and tried to use forcedepth (I think that was it), which worked in Fedora but not well CentOS. So I just use a PCI card (though I suspect onboard would work now, why change it?)
Can't do that with an EeePC - but you probably could rebuild the Fedora kernel for the EeePC.
I wonder if a working driver for the EeePC nic is something that could be patched into the CentOS plus kernel ??
Michael A. Peters wrote:
nate wrote:
Beartooth wrote:
I have an ASUS EeePC 701 (with 2GB of RAM and an 8 GB card), on which I've installed CentOS on the hard-drive-plus-card. But it can't even use my eth0.
Some one on a local LUG, where I had mentioned that other OSs did fine with all the same exact hardware, suggested that CentOS, being designed for stability rather than the bleeding edge, likely lacks drivers; so I need to get some.
Anybody know what drivers (for wireless as well as ethernet cable) I need, and how/where to get ones to fit CentOS??
Why do you want CentOS on an EeePC ? It's not really intended for that purpose, if your having to ask where to get the drivers for it your probably not suited for running CentOS on the EeePC. Your better off with Fedora, or Ubuntu or something that has broader hardware support.
I don't have an EeePC but I like to run the same distro on everything. So since my remote server, lan server, desktop, and laptop run CentOS - that's what I would want on an EeePC as well.
With respect to the nic, my suspicion is that you may just need either the Fedora kernel or a patch from the Fedora kernel.
With CentOS 5.0 - the onboard gigabit nic on my Asus board worked OOB in Fedora 8 or 9 (forget which) but did not work in CentOS - though CentOS did see it and tried to use forcedepth (I think that was it), which worked in Fedora but not well CentOS. So I just use a PCI card (though I suspect onboard would work now, why change it?)
Can't do that with an EeePC - but you probably could rebuild the Fedora kernel for the EeePC.
Everything I have seen on this list is DON'T replace the kernel in Centos. Add to it, but DON'T replace it. Unless you are one of the Centos developers, I guess.
I wonder if a working driver for the EeePC nic is something that could be patched into the CentOS plus kernel ?? _______________________________________________ CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
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Beartooth wrote:
I have an ASUS EeePC 701 (with 2GB of RAM and an 8 GB card), onwhich I've installed CentOS on the hard-drive-plus-card. But it can't even use my eth0.
Some one on a local LUG, where I had mentioned that other OSs did fine with all the same exact hardware, suggested that CentOS, being designed for stability rather than the bleeding edge, likely lacks drivers; so I need to get some.
Anybody know what drivers (for wireless as well as ethernet cable) I need, and how/where to get ones to fit CentOS??
I'm sure it's possible, but unless you plan not to use X, you won't have that much space left to work with! And CentOS needs a bit of RAM to perform well anyway.
David M Lemcoe Jr. wrote:
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Beartooth wrote:
I have an ASUS EeePC 701 (with 2GB of RAM and an 8 GB card), onwhich I've installed CentOS on the hard-drive-plus-card. But it can't even use my eth0.
Some one on a local LUG, where I had mentioned that other OSs did fine with all the same exact hardware, suggested that CentOS, being designed for stability rather than the bleeding edge, likely lacks drivers; so I need to get some.
Anybody know what drivers (for wireless as well as ethernet cable) I need, and how/where to get ones to fit CentOS??
I'm sure it's possible, but unless you plan not to use X, you won't have that much space left to work with! And CentOS needs a bit of RAM to perform well anyway.
I'm using CentOS 5.3 on an old IBM Thinkpad T20 with 384 MB of RAM and it works just fine. Yes, slower than my desktop, but extremely useable for web browsing and e-mail - which is the EeePC target market.
I probably have a faster disk drive (7200 RPM) but I bet his EeePC has a faster processor and it certainly has more RAM.
The key - Don't use Open Office, use AbiWord and Gnumeric instead. OpenOffice is total bloat.
Install NoScript - FireFox quit crashing on the laptop as soon as I installed NoScript. Turns out a lot of advertisers run cpu/ram heavy flash and js that really bog limited hardware down.
Don't use Evolution - I'm using thunderbird which works well for imap w/o too many messages in a folder.
On Wed, 29 Apr 2009 04:57:26 -0700, Michael A. Peters wrote:
David M Lemcoe Jr. wrote:
[....]
The key - Don't use Open Office, use AbiWord and Gnumeric instead. OpenOffice is total bloat.
Is that still true if you install only OO-writer and its dependencies?
Actually, I'll probably take neither. If I want a word processor (and I almost never do), I'll come home and use one on a desktop.
Install NoScript - FireFox quit crashing on the laptop as soon as I installed NoScript. Turns out a lot of advertisers run cpu/ram heavy flash and js that really bog limited hardware down.
I try never to install Ffx anywhere without NoScript, Adblock, and several more.
Don't use Evolution - I'm using thunderbird which works well for imap w/o too many messages in a folder.
Wouldn't be caught dead with either. Alpine and Pan, or repair the machine -- with a sledgehammer -- if it's mine. YMMV <grin>
Beartooth wrote:
I try never to install Ffx anywhere without NoScript, Adblock, and several more.
I do not use Adblock because I am a member of an online community that specifically forbids blocking of advertisements, their primary revenue source.
An exception is made for noscript - which will block flash advertisements not on white listed servers because they do not expect a user to compromise security measures (it's a geek community) to use the site, and the advertiser has the option of using a standard jpeg or gif banner which won't be blocked by noscript (but will be blocked by adblock).
On Mon, Apr 27, 2009 at 11:55 AM, Beartooth Beartooth@comcast.net wrote:
I have an ASUS EeePC 701 (with 2GB of RAM and an 8 GB card), on which I've installed CentOS on the hard-drive-plus-card. But it can't even use my eth0.
Anybody know what drivers (for wireless as well as ethernet cable) I need, and how/where to get ones to fit CentOS??
Run /sbin/lspci and find the hardware info for your wired / wireless device. Then search the CentOS wiki. For example, if you see "AR5007EG", there is a wiki page for that:
http://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/Laptops/WirelessAR5007EG
If you also see "Atheros", there is a good chance that you can find the latest driver that is available as the kernel module at the ElRepo repository ( http://elrepo.org ). For example, if your device requires the atl2 driver, you can install it by (after installing the repo):
yum --enablerepo=elrepo install kmod-atl2
Hope this helps,
Akemi
Beartooth wrote:
I have an ASUS EeePC 701 (with 2GB of RAM and an 8 GB card), on which I've installed CentOS on the hard-drive-plus-card. But it can't even use my eth0.
Some one on a local LUG, where I had mentioned that other OSs did fine with all the same exact hardware, suggested that CentOS, being designed for stability rather than the bleeding edge, likely lacks drivers; so I need to get some.
Anybody know what drivers (for wireless as well as ethernet cable) I need, and how/where to get ones to fit CentOS??
I have the EXACT same hardware, but am running FC10 on mine. Works just great. And I have both suspend and hibernate working. Ethernet and WiFi work with NetworkManager with no problems, so far.
As nice it is to stay with Centos across the board, I am moving more into using FC for notebooks. However, I am still reluctant to make the move on a notebook that is my 'workhorse'; I need more stablity for something I count on for my job. FC is for tools.
Beartooth wrote:
I have an ASUS EeePC 701 (with 2GB of RAM and an 8 GB card), on which I've installed CentOS on the hard-drive-plus-card. But it can't even use my eth0.
Some one on a local LUG, where I had mentioned that other OSs did fine with all the same exact hardware, suggested that CentOS, being designed for stability rather than the bleeding edge, likely lacks drivers; so I need to get some.
Anybody know what drivers (for wireless as well as ethernet cable) I need, and how/where to get ones to fit CentOS??
I wrote a page on the Wiki regarding CentOS 5.2 on the Eee PC (was a 900 model though) : http://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/Laptops/Asus/Eeepc But i admit also that i've not yet updated the page for 5.3 (and neither created a modified initrd.img to include the atl2 kernel module) .. I've updated my 5.2 Eee PC to 5.3 and everything was still working as expected ... it even removed the (previously needed) uvcvideo kernel module, now included in the base kernel.
On the other hand, I also admit that i was tempted by F10 on the same machine to compare boot performance and we have to admit also that the 2.6.18-*.el5 kernel was surely not designed to be used on netbook : F10 boots faster and of course has by default everything needed (atl2, madwifi for the Atheros wifi card, newer alsa module for the sound card, better acpi support, etc ...)
So running CentOS on the Eee PC is doable and everything is working (wired/wifi/webcam/suspend/hibernate) but real slow in comparison with F10 .. :/
-
Akemi Yagi -
Beartooth -
Chris Zimmerman -
Craig White -
David M Lemcoe Jr. -
Fabian Arrotin -
fred smith -
JohnS -
Julian Thomas -
Karanbir Singh -
Les Mikesell -
Michael A. Peters -
nate -
R P Herrold -
Robert Moskowitz -
Ron Blizzard -
Scott Silva -
Warren Young