Episode: 1106
Title: HPR1106: Of Fuduntu, RescaTux (or the Farmer Buys a Dell)
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1106/hpr1106.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-17 19:03:10

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This is going to be another one of my how I did a podcast, or if you rather how I
done it.
Where my goal is to pass along the things I learn as a common Linux user, administering
my home computers and network, and engaging in the types of software tinkering that appeals
to our sort of enthusiasts.
I've been thinking for a while about replacing the small computer on my dinner table.
I've been using an old HP TC1000, one of the original active stylus Windows tablets,
now running Linux of course.
With the stab-in keyboard and a form factor similar to a network, with the advantage that
all the vulnerable components were behind LCD, up off the table and away from sales.
It served my purpose of staying connected to IRC during mail times, and occasional streaming
of live casts, but I wanted more.
I wanted to be able to join into mumble while pairing meals.
I wanted to be able to load any website I wanted without lockups, and I wanted to stream
video content and watch DVDs.
I was concerned, however, about putting the laptop on the table, that was it be an invitation
to having any spill beverage sucked right into the air intakes.
I never even concerned, considered a desktop system in the dining room until I saw a
purverberished Dell in Suron 745 on GearAccess.com, and I wouldn't normally plug a specific
vendor, but now GearAccess is putting Ubuntu on all its used corporate cast-off systems.
This Dell had the form factor that is ubiquitous in one of the sale, a vertical skeleton frame
with a micro system case on one side and a 17-inch LCD on the other, placing all the electronics
several inches above any surface on which it is placed.
I even found the turntable intended for small TVs that let's me smoothly rotate the monitor
to either my place on the table or back towards the kitchen when I am cooking.
I already had a sealed membrane keyboard with an integrated pointer and a wireless end USB
dongle to click the package.
Shipped, my new dual-core 2.8GHz pinning de-system with 88 hard drive and intel graphics was
under $150.
The turntable was another 20 bucks and upgrade from one gig to four gig of used DDR2 was another
30, but both turned out to be worth it.
Once the box shift with Ubuntu, I thought installing the distro of my choice would be
of no consequence, and this is where my tail begins.
I am going to start my story towards Ann as the most important part.
After installing four Linux distros in as many days, counting the original Ubuntu 10.04LTX
box shift with a partial installation of solosos2 revision 5.
And for Dune 2 and finally the Ubuntu 1012.04, I discovered I couldn't boot to due to
grub corruption.
Machine would post, but where I should have seen messages from grub, I got a blank screen
with a cursor in the upper left hand corner.
First, I thought I would do a total disk wipe and read start over, but using D-band from
the ultimate boot CD for Windows said it wasn't able to write to the drive I'd never
seen that before, so I started downloading the latest rescue text.
Meanwhile I found an article told me that I could repair grub with an Ubuntu CD, links
in the show note, so I tried booting from the Ubuntu 12.04 CD using the boot device
selector built into the hardware.
Same black screen proceeded by a message that the boot device I had selected was not present.
Same thing with the Fidu 2 DVD that it worked just the day before.
With the exception of the ultimate boot CD for Windows, I couldn't seem to get a live CD
to boot.
Now I have it in finished downloading rescue text and suspecting it in a problem with
awful drive.
I used Unit boot to make a rescue text bootable thumb drive.
Rescue text has a pre-boot menu that lets you choose between 32 and 64 bit images, but
that was as far as I got, once I made a menu selection nothing else happened.
At this point I was suspecting a hardware failure just happened coincide with my last
Ubuntu install.
This is an ultra small form factor Dell, the kind you see in corner cell or hospital systems,
so there weren't really many components I could swap out.
I didn't have any DDR2 laying around, but I did test each of the two sticks the system
came with independently and coming up with the same results as before.
I then reasoned that a grub corruption error should go away entirely if I disabled a hard
drive, so I physically disconnected the drive and disabled a safety connector in the system
BIOS.
I still couldn't boot to a live CD or bootable USB stick.
Deciding there was a reason this machine had wound up on the secondary market, I hooked
everything back up and reset the BIOS settings to the default.
Still no luck.
As a hail married the next day, I burned the rescue text ISO to a CD and hooked up an external
USB optical drive.
This time I booted right into the live CD, did a two-step grub repair, and when I unplugged
the external drive I was able to boot right back in to the Ubuntu install that I made
the two days before.
Now booting to live CDs from the original Opel drive and from the thumb drive works,
rescue talks for the wind, and again the link to their websites in the show notes.
Now a little bit on how I got into this mess.
Start story back to the beginning.
As I said the Dell shipped with 10.04, but I wanted something a little less pedestrian
than the Ubuntu.
I wronged that I wound up back there on anyway.
I tried hybrid, but once again, like the trial on the Pentium 4 that I mentioned on Linux
Basics, while live CD booted the icons never appeared on the desktop.
I think it must be a memory thing since that Dell only shipped with a gig of RAM, and
if that was shared with the integrated video.
After hybrid, I really wanted to be one of the cool kids and run soul so s.
At the install hung twice transferring the file boot slash initrd.img-3.3.6-solo.sos
and I left that running one hole after him just to be sure.
So failing is so-so s I casted around for 64 bit ISO that already had on hand because
it remembered it takes me about the better part of the day to download a DVD sized ISO.
And when I looked around it occurred to me that I wanted to give Ubuntu a try anyway.
Ubuntu is a rolling release ford of Fedora, with a known two desktop, except at the bottom
bar is placed with a max style dock complete without the icons.
Which were really cute at first, but I could tell right away eventually that would get
all my nerves.
However, I found I liked the distro, despite the fact that I found the default software
choices were a little light for a 900 meg download.
At Google Office, Chromium, but no Firefox, no GIMP, worst of all, no mumble and a repose
at all.
It's really for Ubuntu devs when I first started to search Google for an easy way to install
mumble and ford to.
You should see how many reviews I came up with it to be summed up is, but Ubuntu is great.
Why is there no mumble?
Unfortunately, thinking the mumble problem would be an easy solution.
I put it on the back burner while I installed and configured all my default set of comfort
apps from the repose, Firefox, Xchat, GIMP, VLC, LibreOffice, etc.
When I was also anticipating the arrival that week of a 2.4GHz headset, wireless, which
I'd help to be able to use on the new machine to join that Friday in the Linux Basics
log and podcast.
I visited the mumble installation page on SourceForge and found out they no longer linked
to .dev files or if it were .style.rpm as they assume you can install these from your
own repositories.
Thanking someone must have found an easy solution I hit Google.
The best answer I found was a page on the Ubuntu forums, again, link in the show notes.
That suggested downloading mumble and a dozen prerequisite library.rpm from third-party
site called rpm.pbong.net.
I visited pbong.net and found when I looked up each library, it seemed I got a dozen different
lakes to different versions of the file.
Then I saw a link that seemed to offer the promise of simplifying my task.
If I subscribed to pbong.net, I could add their entire catalog as a repo while researching
LoginistMe at Loginimacy of pbong.net.
I found them mentioned in the same sentence as rpm fusion as an alternate repository for
a photographer.
That gave me the idea to also install the rpm fusion repos at the same time, thanking
I might find some of the needed libraries in there.
I registered with pbong and discovered I would only have access to their repository for
a 14-day free trial after which access for cost me $3 a month.
And understandably, hosting such a service must cost some money.
I figured the free trial would at least get mumble installed with through the setup.
Among the questions I had to answer were, which Fedor I was using, and I picked 17 since
Fedor's rolling and shrekening edge, I assumed, and 32 or 64 bit, pbong.net generated custom.repo
file to place in my slash Etsy slash yum.repo's.de directory.
At this time, I'd already put in the repos for rpm fusion.
The fun started when I ran yum update.
I got error cannot find a valid base URL for repo rpm fusion dash free.
It turns out that the location of the rpm fusion servers are usually commented out in the
.repo files.
I'm guessing Fedor must already know where they are, but Fedor does not.
So I uncommented each of the based URL statements in there are three, and each of the rpm fusion.repo
files.
There are four of those files, free, non-free, free testing, and non-free testing.
I then ran yum update, and this time I was told to pass for the rpm fusion base URL
to non-exist.
I opened the path in a browser and confirmed it was indeed incorrect.
I pruned sub-directors for the path one by one until I found the truncated URL that
actually existed on the rpm fusion fTP server.
I looked at the .repo files again, and figured out the path's reference included global
environment variables that were inconsistent between Fedor and Fedor 2.
For instance, the variable dollar sign release in Fedora should return a value like 15, 16,
or 17, where in Fedor 2 it resolves to 2012.
I figured if I took the time I could walk up and down the fTP server and come up with
equivalent literal paths to put the rpm fusion .in the rpm fusion .repo files, but instead
I just moved those repo files to another folder to deal with them another day.
I again launched yum update.
This time I had no errors, but I was getting excessive amount of new files from my new p-bone.net
repo.
Yum update both updates your sources and downloads all the chains files all in one operation.
It's possible the ruling Fedor 2 is closer to Fedora 16, so when I told p-bone.net I was
running Fedora 17.
All the files in that new alternate repo were newer than the ones I already had, which
would explain why it seemed to be trying to replace every package on my system.
In any case, I had no wish to be dependent on a repo I had to rent it $3 a month.
So I canceled the operation and admitted to fee and started downloading the 64-bit version
of boom 2.
I know I said I would rather have a more challenging distro, but because of its location, this computer
needs to be it just works PC, not a hack on it for half a day box.
I would like to give him magia, rosa, or PC Linux OS a shot, but too many packages from
outside the repos, case in point Hulu Desktop, are only available in Debian and Fedora
flavors.
And you know the rest.
I installed a boom 2, bought my grub, and flew back to the top of the story to see how
I saw that.
Alright, well, you've been listening to Hacker Public Radio with 5150.
You've contacted me at 5150 at Linuxpacement.com, or leave a comment on my webpage at the
big redswitch.ruplegardons.com.
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And then our party reached the mainland.