Firefox and Forensics

[Southtown]

Nope. I almost know the first one. Just started reading a section on the shell in an old RH7.2 reference, and it uses the cat command to play with piping, but I haven't really read any complete definitions of commands or operators.

 

My guess is that code #1 takes a picture of what the cpu is doing and pipes it to less, whatever that is... log maybe? Code #2 just hurts my head. LOL

 

You're right, though. I'm just using Ubuntu, while I read about the shell and stuff. So can other distros can expose me to some of this while also being fairly useable by a n00b?

[Southtown]

/proc/cpu: no such file or directory

 

Also, Ubuntu never asks for a root password during installation, and su doesn't accept my user password. HAHA! Does this mean I can't administrate? I guess I'm not as free to tweak as I thought. If I try Gentoo, does it walk me through the installation, or should I have hwspecs and linux references in hand?

[alexander]

sry, its a typo, dunno how it happened, its cpuinfo

[alexander]

Also, Ubuntu never asks for a root password during installation, and su doesn't accept my user password.

that is because ubunu uses sudo and make it optional for you to change your password and your root password is most likely randomized, you can however change it, if you call up an admin terminal it prompts you for a pass, put in your user password and use "passwd root" to set you root password if you wanted to. You can also open up a regular terminal and use "sudo passwd root" to set it too.

Does this mean I can't administrate? I guess I'm not as free to tweak as I thought.

lol jumping to conclusions too quickly, man... there is no such thing as a nonadministrable linux distro....

Does this mean I can't administrate? I guess I'm not as free to tweak as I thought.

this one i had a really good laugh about, dont get me wrong, i understand that you are new to this and all, gentoo is a hand installed distro, means that you boot into a live cd with no X server, and start by partitioning your drive, making filesystems, mounting filesystems, extracting a basic system onto the newly mounted drive, extracting portage (package management system), setting up make flags for gcc as well as specifying packages you want to compile others against if it is a choice, you also setup your rsync host and whatnot, then you sync, and completely recompile your entire system, then you emerge world which are packages that are not necessary for your system to run, also a good time to install udev, a logger and a cron manager, then you choose and emerge your sources and (if you choose not to use genkernel, which you should not) compile your kernel. Install a bootloader (nothing beats Grub), set it up on your drive, edit the grub.conf, copy over the kernel to boot and reboot. and that is just a basic system, all the rest, like X, a window manager, text editors, outside drivers and all the other packages you compile(install) afterwards for your system.

 

And there is a guide on how to do all this on Gentoo's home website (http://www.gentoo.org) there is extensive support on gentoo forums, and you really get to install an OS, not click through it all...

[Southtown]

That's very cool. They work together, no? Consider me intrigued. :eek2:

 

I knew I was wise to migrate. Now... what to read, what to read?

[alexander]

could you please elaborate on what you are so intrigued about? i mean i think i understand, but i'd like to know for sure before.... well, do you want me to explain to you what those commands do? and do you want me to point you to good bash tutorials? or is that about gentoo install about which i could tell you more as i've installed it over a dozen and a half times?

[Southtown]

I'm impressed by the power and flexibility of Linux's command line, and intrigued as to what all can be done with it. I'm kinda trying to learn programming too. The bash tuts would be great. I'm scouring all I can find.

[Southtown]

Currently reading the Gentoo handbook (through kernel build so far) and I'm guessing this distro will kick, if I can get it installed, because it's so customized. Just taking notes, though, right now. And also reading the shell section in rh7.2 "complete reference".

 

I think I've changed my mind about easy distros. The harder distros seem better to learn on, because you don't have to wade through a bunch of nonsense. Trying to configure ubuntu and install/upgrade packages/drivers has been a nightmare *cough* nvidia.

[alexander]

I'm sure that there are a gazillion wikis on how to propperly setup nvidia 3d accell on ubuntu, dunno why you are having so much trouble with it...

RH2 complete reference, dunno if it is the best material for learning the linux command line...

 

has a list of decent tuts for newbies

http://www.tuxfiles.org/linuxhelp/cli.html

 

beginner's bash tutorial

http://linux.org.mt/article/terminal

 

but yeah that handbook provides quite a lot of basics for you, and if you decide to switch and need help installing gentoo, well, you can email me and i can always ssh into the live cd to help you with anything you need help with... P.S. use reiser 3 for your partitions, its faster...

[Southtown]

thx for the tips :cup:

 

I got NVidia installed in three ways. The latest driver installed by .run file from their site (took me awhile to figure that out, and yeah I was on the ubuntu forums for most the time), and then I tried Adept but I don't know the driver version. First I tried Automatix, but I think that was just an automated apt-get like Adept was. No matter the method, once nvidia was installed, my OpenGL screensavers were still choppy as hell.

 

But the main issue is shutdown and startup bugs. After the latest driver, some modules failed to init, and then it would hang after printing the line "checking battery level..." or something (I'm on a desktop). Also, shutdown/reboot would hang at the same "battery level" message, but only after a couple of crash errors in KDE.

 

Sometimes NVidia would install with no side effects except one, the shutdown messages would be scrambled. :shrug: I figured to hell with it. Luckily, a reinstall was merely an hour, and didn't take any know-how. The whole ordeal, plus reading about Gentoo, left me wondering how much "user-friendly" garbage I was dealing with needlessly.

 

Now I think just jumping into a manual install would actually be the easiest way to learn. That's the opinion of Arch-Linux developers, anyway. Got a copy of that, too.

[alexander]

hmm, so you havent tried searching for nvidia in apt?

Apt-get has both the nvidia-kernel and nvidia-glx packages which are necessary to get 3d accel working... its weird though they are all listed as not-free, whatever that means, but from there its not difficult to get it working, theoretically all you need to do is edit xorg.conf to use the nvidia module....

[Southtown]

I just tried apt-get install and they were all up to date. I know about the xorg.conf from the ubuntu forums. I could get it installed, but I didn't see an improvement in OGL rendering, and the shutdown messages were scrambled, so it's not worth it. I still boot ntfs for games, anyway. I probably have some special conditions or problems or something. I can be searching FAQs and forums, but until then I'm just too ignorant to troubleshoot it. LOL

[alexander]

which card do you have?

[Southtown]

GeForce FX 5700 Ultra AGP8x

[alexander]

dude there should be less then 0 problems with it, my friend runs, well what i sold him, but he never paid for it, gforce fx 5700 ultra limited edition agp 8x... no problems, even when he tried ubuntu if i am not mistaken, if you want i'll ask him what he did... but its nothing out of the ordinary... really, that card works.

[Southtown]

cool, ask him if he runs driver 8178 or what.

[Southtown]

By the way, do you know why I would get a "bad superblock" error when booting a reiserfs? I tried pulling one of these installs and it took days, but I thought it was going well.