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Author Topic: Linux Install Notes Part 1  (Read 4724 times)
folderol
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« on: March 06, 2008, 07:45:08 PM »

Here is the start of what I hope will be a useful informal set of notes. Please let me know if you have any problems with what I've written. Have I goofed somewhere? Do you know of better alternatives to my suggestions?

Any feedback I get will be edited into these notes so they are as complete as possible without becoming a sprawling mess.


A brief preamble

First of all, Linux (or GNU Linux to be pedantic) is not one big program. It is a very big collection of little applications - written by as many different people - that all work together to create the whole system. This means there are many different ways to put it all together, as is highlighted by all the different distributions. Inevitably there will be some inconsistencies and work-arounds may take a bit of head scratching!

Choices, choices!

The most well known basic distributions (distros) are:

Red Hat
debian
Mandriva
Slackware

Of these, debian, and its derivatives seem to have the most active audio community. The best known derivative is Ubuntu which has then spawned Ubuntu Studio. 64studio is another debian derivative. Red Hat is more orientated to office and business use, and Mandriva is a general purpose distro. The most difficult of these is Slackware and is realy aimed at experienced (I refuse to say 'power') users. It will give you a very fast and efficient system, but only by passing through a world of pain first!

Fairly early on you need to decide whether to go 64bit. There is a lot that still is not 64bit compatible, especially vst modules and web browser plugins, but this is a moving target and will hopefully improve. On the other hand, you will see significant performance improvements if you are doing heavy audio edtiting etc.

So do you want an audio workstation with some synth capability, or a synthesiser with some audio editing capability? Do you want to handle streaming audio on the 'net?

Hardware

Although you hear frequent exhortations to make sure your hardware is Linux compatible, this is in fact much less often a problem these days with desktop systems. Laptops like the IBM 'thinkpad' series also have few problems, but as you go down the 'scale' on laptops you are more likely to have serious difficulties - but should you even consider such a machine as a DAW?

Try to find several different distros that have a 'live' version and test them all on your new machine, this will let you know pretty quickly whether you'll have problems. In particular, look for the distro that best manages both sound (obviously) and video. For a first installation, video is actually more important. Quite a few monitors don't send 'proper' ID information back and you're not going to get anywhere if you can't see anything!

There are still 'issues' with some wireless kit. USB soundcards can be problematic. Basically it depends on the attitude of the makers to Linux. If in doubt a quick check on their website should tell you all you need to know.

Firewire should be treated with great caution, as it can create a massive security hole (this actually applies to Windows & MacOS too). In brief, it can access memory directly from 'outside' even if the computer is supposedly locked.

Installing

To give the installer the best possible chance, plug in your network/modem, all your peripherals, printers etc. and make sure everything is switched on.

If you currently have a windows system, it makes sense to dual boot to start with, i.e. able to start up either Windows or Linux. However, although Linux disc partitioning tools are very good and you are unlikely to lose data, I find it is much more sensible to get an extra drive for Linux (they're cheap enough these days) so that you make the absolute minimum disturbance to the existing Windows installation.

At install time don't go for automatic partitioning but select manual. Partitioning a new drive seems a bit scary but after you've done it the first time, you wonder what you were worried about. Extra work put in at this point can make life a lot easier for you later on.

As well as partitioning, a fresh install defines 'mount' points. These are simply how the system recognises the partitions. The only one you absolutely must have is named '/'.

If you are dual booting across two drives, they will be identified as hda for the Windows one and hdb/c/d etc. for your new blank one. SATA drives are identified as sda, sdb etc. Windows insists on booting from the first partition of the first disc, but Linux will run off anything bootable - including a USB stick.

Many installers recognise Windows partitions and will offer the correct options for you, otherwise you need to mount it as /windows with vfat or NTFS filesystem (depending on the installed version), but make sure formatting is NOT selected.

Creating new partitions

Assuming, say, a 160G drive for Linux, create the first partition at about 10G, mounted as '/' - where all the system files go. If given the choice of 'physical' or 'logical' select 'physical'. The next partiton, also at 10G should be mounted as '/spare'. Next a 1G swap partition, and the rest of the drive as '/home'.

When you create partitions, as well as the mount point, you are asked which filesystem to set. I always use ext3. It is very mature, very stable and can recover from horrible corruption. Some use ext2 for '/' as it's a bit faster and it's less important if you lose system files than your valuable data.

The reason for '/spare' is so that later you can install either an updated version, or a completely different distro without touching your working one - sneaky eh Smiley

As a matter of interest my music machine has 44% of its system area used, and for my office machine it's 35%. A fast lightweight distro I occasionally use is only 19%!

The normal recommendation is to have a swap of 2x your memory size but once you reach 1G there is virtually nothing to be gained by having a larger swap size.

One of the benefits of having a separate '/home' partition is that you can re-install, update or change the entire distro without putting your valuable data at risk. Also a rogue application can't write across partitions, so if a corrupted driver starts chewing up '/' it's only the system files that will be damaged. Finally, backups are a lot simpler. You just archive the whole of '/home' and plonk it on a CD/DVD.

There are more complicated partitioning schemes you can adopt, and I've tried a few, but always end up back with this. Incidentally there is a hardware limit of only 4 physical partitions per disc, which this scheme fits perfectly. You can have as many logical partitions as you like, but they can be marginally slower to access, and apparently are not quite so well protected from each other. Logical partitions fit inside physical ones.

From here on you just let the install trundle on. At some point you will usually be asked where to install the bootloader. You may also be asked which bootloader you want. I find GRUB (GRand Unified Bootloader) is by far the easiest to use, and later modify if you need to. For the GRUB bootloader you want to select the MBR - Master Boot Record - on (hd0). This is one of the inconsistencies I mentiond at the start. Mostly you use hda, hdb etc. but for just this operation in GRUB you use (hd0), (hd1) etc.

You will eventually be asked to remove the CD and reboot (just once) and this will be the only time you will ever be asked to reboot!

You should now have a working system, although you will almost certainly want to make additions, alterations and convenience changes.

A couple of extra points.

The only way Linux slows down with age is if you add so many extra programs and files that it has to step though a huge bank of them to find anything. There is no registry. I'll say that again, there is no registry, so nothing to get full of half deleted crud. You never have to do a re-install to 'clean the system up'. Similarly, Linux filesystems don't need to be defragged - I suppose you could find a program to do it if you really wanted to, for nostalgic reasons Smiley

I've got into the habit of building up a text file with step-by-step instructions on how I do an install for a particular distro. This contains absolutely everything I have to do, including any later additions or modifications to the system. It means that (as happened recently) if you have something like a fatal disk failure, you can (fairly) quickly rebuild an identical system.
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kara
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« Reply #1 on: March 06, 2008, 08:30:45 PM »

Excelent   Cool
This becomes a sticky

k
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