Lumière is a system I built a couple of months ago to be a pure Linux-only machine. I haven’t done much with her, but it’s time to change that. As I’ve posted before, I really wanted to run different distros through their paces in order to weigh their pros and cons. However, I also wanted to have a system that I could actually use, so I decided to do a multiboot system with shared /home partitions.

Last night, I decided to start off easy and add Linux Mint (Felicia) on top of Ubuntu (Intrepid Ibex). Now I say that this is easy since Linux Mint is actually a modified version of Ubuntu (which also happens to be a modified version of Debian). Since Linux Mint and Ubuntu share a similar structure, all the user and group IDs would be the same. This means that setting up a shared /home partition would be much simpler.

I also wanted to use Linux Mint since it has been highly recommended to me many times.

I didn’t know how to do this on my own since I’m still so new with running Linux for a desktop, so I used this very helpful guide: Dual boot with two Linux, using the same home directory. This guide uses Debian Etch and Mandriva rather than Ubuntu and Linux Mint, but all the instructions seemed to match any combination of distros that I’d like to use.

In fact, doing the installation was even easier than the instructions as I didn’t have to mess with any syncing of user and group IDs. My process went as follows:

1. I booted from my Linux Mint disk and ran the installation program once the live desktop loaded.
2. I did everything as normal until I reached the “Prepare disk space” step of the installer. Since this step is for setting up the partitions and I wanted to share the /home partition, I need to do some work.
   • I selected the Manual option and clicked Forward.
   • I have two drives: /dev/sda and /dev/sdb. /dev/sdb is the drive I want since that’s where Ubuntu is installed while /dev/sda is merely for storage. I selected the unpartitioned space on /dev/sdb, created a new partition, selected a mount point of /, and selected an ext3 format. I then edited the /dev/sdb5 partition, which is my /home partition, and set it to a mount point of /home. I also have a swap partition, /dev/sdb4, so I edited it and set it to my swap.
   • After making these changes, I clicked Forward.
3. On the “Who are you?” step, I supplied the same username and password as I had used for Ubuntu. I don’t believe that this is necessary as just the IDs have to match, but I did this nonetheless.
4. I continued the rest of the installer as normal until I reached the “Ready to install” step. I clicked “Advanced…” and selected to have the boot loader installed on /dev/sdb7, my newly created / partition, rather than on the /boot partition.
5. I then completed running the installer.
6. Going back to the instructions in the guide, I rebooted the system into Ubuntu.
7. I opened the /boot/grub/menu.lst file and modified it by adding the following at the very bottom:
   title Linux Mint
root (hd1,6)
chainloader +1

   I emboldened some of the text to point out the truly important part to get right. I remember cringing when I first saw this a few years back, and it still doesn’t look friendly.

   Basically, Grub uses different drive and partition identifiers than Linux uses. The first number represents the drive while the second number represents the partition.

   Linux starts naming my drives sda, sdb, sdc, etc, Grub starts naming my drives hd0, hd1, hd2, etc. Notice that the letter is now a number and rather than starting at 1, it starts at 0. Similarly, the partitions also start at 0 rather than 1. So in my system, /dev/sdb7 is actually hd1,6 to Grub. You can find a lengthier description at Grub Terminology.

8. After I saved this change, I rebooted, hit ESC to bring up Ubuntu’s boot menu (you have to do this quickly as it just gives you 3 seconds by default), and selected my new Linux Mint option.

That should be the end of the story, but I ran into a problem. When I got to Linux Mint’s Grub menu and selected a boot option, I received the following error:

GRUB Error 22: No such partition

I was very disheartened when I saw this since problems with boot partition/Grub configuration haunted me during my earliest attempts to run Linux. I decided to power through this problem since I needed to learn how to handle these situations at some point.

I went back to the menu selection screen for Linux Mint, edited the default option (pressed ‘e’ while that option was highlighted), and looked at the information. I knew that I had the correct partition, and I double-checked to ensure that I did the count starting at 0 rather than count starting at 1. Everything checked out. I don’t have any reasoning to explain what I did, but I had a hunch and took a stab at it. I had the following configuration:

I then changed it to the following:

Amazing! It’s booting up. That’s when I hit the next major snag. Linux Mint itself failed to load and complained about a missing partition. “What in the world?” I thought. I rebooted and edited the boot option again. That’s when I saw it. The partition was also referenced in the kernel option. So, I made one more change:

Note: I removed splash from the end of the kernel option in order to make the data fit nicely on the page.

I booted from this newly-modified set of options, and after a couple of minutes, I was greeted with a friendly login screen. When I logged in, I was very surprised. In the midst of fixing all those boot errors, I forgot what the point of all this was. When the desktop loaded, I was looking at nearly the exact same desktop as I had on Ubuntu. The shared /home partition worked beautifully.

So, what was the problem that I had and why did my fix work? Ubuntu and its Grub loader saw my OS drive as the second drive in the system, so that drive was treated as /dev/sdb (or hd1). However, Linux Mint and its Grub loader saw the same drive as the first drive and named it /dev/sda (or hd0). My hunch was that they somehow saw the drives differently and changed hd1,6 to hd0,6 and /dev/sdb7 to /dev/sda7. I still don’t know why this is, but I’m going to keep digging. When I have an answer, I’ll post it here.

As for Linux Mint, I’m going to test it out over the next couple of days. Expect to see some posts about it soon.

I’ve poked around with some distros over the last few days. They’ve all been Live Distros running in VMWare. Some of the Distros ran very well like this (Fedora, Mandriva, openSUSE, and Ubuntu), but others failed miserably in one way or another (Linux Mint, Sabayon). Unfortunately, CentOS cannot be installed from a Live CD, so I was unable to test out its installer in VMWare.

Starting Over

I realized that running all these Distros in a Live environment and in VMWare may be unfair. So I’m going to start from scratch, and do all the processes by directly running each Live Distro on the machine directly. This time, I’ve created a list of tasks to do in each Distro. I’ll make notes as I try to do each step for each Distro.

Test Basics

I will run each Distro through as much of the list as I can (some Distros may not be able to do certain tests). For each item, I will record how easy it is for me to complete (five-point scale), how well errors or potential problems are reported (five-point scale), and make general notes about the process.

Live Distro Test

The idea for this test is to get a good idea of how much functionality each Distro can provide without having to be installed. I’ll be looking for the best out of box experience. Unless the Distro provides a clear way to allow the task to work, I won’t make any changes to the installation. Since this is a live run of the Distro, making a bunch of changes each time just to do a task would be very unproductive.

• Boot to GUI desktop. This will test how easily the Distro deals with a dynamic mix of hardware and how well it auto-configures itself.
• Test keyboard buttons. I’ll press the non-standard, Microsoft-specific and media keys) on my keyboard and see how many of them are recognized by the Distro.
• Run Firefox and load Google.  This will test for automatic discovery and connection to the network. The internet connection will be handled by the router, so connection to the network should be sufficient.
• While Firefox is still open, I’ll test to see if my additional mouse buttons are recognized and mapped to the back and forward functions of the browser.
• Mount the existing NTFS drives.
  • Copy files back and forth.
  • Test loading media from an NTFS drive.
• Play an audio CD. This will test the ability to auto-load an audio disk. It will also test whether or not the sound card was correctly identified and appropriate drivers were loaded for it.
• Play a DVD movie. Similar to the audio CD test, this test will test whether the Distro can automatically load a movie when popped in, how well the audio works, and how smoothly it renders the video. I expect at least a couple Distros to fail this test due to the DVD decoders being proprietary.
• I’d like to find out how well the automatic mounting of USB drives works, so I’ll connect a USB flash drive and a USB hard drive. I’ll then move and copy files around to get a good feel for the performance.
• Play audio files. I’ll test the playback ability for mp3 and wma. I might also test Vorbis and FLAC. This will be yet another test of the sound playback and will test codec decoder ability.
• Play video files. I’ll assemble a collection of video files with different encoding schemes and test them out. This will test the sound playback, smoothness of video rendering, and decoder ability.
• Load Firefox and visit some sites.
  • First I’ll visit homestarrunner.com and watch the intro video. This will be a good test to check for Flash support.
  • Next I’ll go to the Red vs. Blue site and check out their latest video. These videos are much more intense than the Home Star Runner ones and will be a better test of the performance of the Flash video.
  • For the final stop on the Flash tour, I’ll load up Newgrounds.com and play a game. This will be another good Flash performance check.
  • I’ll then log into my Gmail account, and check my messages, send a message, and do some basic browsing around. This should work smoothly, but I’d like to check just to make sure.
  • Gametrailers.com has content in Flash, QuickTime, and Windows Media formats, so I’ll stop there next and check out a game trailer in the different formats. I don’t expect any of the Distros to render QuickTime or Windows Media videos, but I’d love to know if any of them can.
  • A final test is to go to Apple’s Movie Trailers site and try to watch a movie preview in high quality. Once again, I don’t expect any Distro to do this without any tweaking, but I’d love to know if any can.
• SSH into another box. I don’t expect any Distro to have a problem with this, but I’d love to know if any do.
• Load up OpenOffice Writer, add some text, and try to send the file as an email attachment. I’d love to know the different approaches each Distro has to sending an email without a configured Email client.
• Run the Unigine demo as a benchmark for 3D rendering.

Installation Test

After testing out how well the Live Distro works, it’s time to get to business and install to the disk. This process will be done through each Distro’s live installer (except CentOS which will be installed from the DVD due to not having a live installer). This test doesn’t have any steps and each installation will be done with most of the options left as default.

Using the Installed Distro

Unlike my process for the Live Distro, if the task fails, I’ll try my best to make changes that will result in successfully running the task.

• Update all packages.
• Run through all the Live Distro steps again. This will check for any enhancements that came from package upgrades or potential differences between the live and installed versions.
• Connect my USB printer. I’d like to see if any Distro will automatically configure the printer.
  • Install the printer, if necessary.
  • Print out a document with images.
• Connect my camera via USB.
• Install and test Ventrilo.
• Install Wine.
  • Install and test Steam.
  • Install and test Team Fortress 2.
  • Install and test Crimson Editor.
• Get the fancy Compiz/Beryl desktop stuff working. I’m not sure if I will actually use such a desktop, but I would like to see what it takes to get each Distro to do it.

Distros to be Tested

I’ve made a couple of additions to my list. The list of Distros I want to test are as follows:

• CentOS 5.2
• Fedora 9
• Linux Mint
• Mandriva
• openSUSE
• Sabayon
• Ubuntu

Final Thoughts

In the end, I’d like to get a good feeling for what some of the major Linux Distros are capable of and how easy they are to work with. From the results of my tests, I plan to select my favorite and start using it as my primary desktop for a while.

I’ll post my reviews as I progress through the tests.

As I talked about in my Time to Switch to Linux post, I’m ready to finally migrate away from Windows and into Linux. The biggest question for me is which Distro do I want to start with. Me being a lover of lists, I have a few criteria that I want the Distro that I select to meet:

Desired Functionality

• Be relatively easy to install. I don’t need something so easy that my Grandmother could do it, but I also don’t want to be over-burdened with dozens of packages to install just to get the initial installation working properly.
• Have a clean and easy GUI. I think Beryl/Compiz is really slick, but I really don’t think I need to be messing with all that stuff when I just want to start off with something that is functional.
• Be compatible with my current hardware. I know that hardware support in the major Distros has seen vast improvements in recent years. I just want to know that I can still make full use of my Microsoft Natural Ergonomic 4000 keyboard and my Logitech MX 518 mouse. For example, I want to use all of the buttons on my mouse (buttons 4 and 5 should already function for or be easily mapable to forward and back in the browser) and be able to easily map the Windows-specific keys on my keyboard to functions in the UI or key combinations. Just having this functionality alone will do a lot to help me ease my transition.
• Easy hotkey assignments. I love having quick access to programs by hitting some key+key combination. I use AutoHotkey on my Windows systems to hotkey all the programs I use frequently, I’d love to be able to easily mirror the functionality on Linux.
• Have an active and thriving community for support/troubleshooting reasons.
• Be able to support some of my Windows programs if possible. In particular, Team Fortress 2 and Ventrilo as I’m a member of the EGO gaming clan and don’t want to give that up for an operating system. I’m sure I can have some of the Linux-running members help me with getting this set up.

After browsing around DistroWatch for a while, I have found a few Distros have grabbed my attention more than the others.

Ubuntu

I have been an Ubuntu fan for a long time now. I ordered one of the original release disks that they offered years ago and was instantly impressed. My understanding is that they’ve come a long way since then. My only reservation is the lack of support for non-open-source software, such as proprietary nVidia drivers or proprietary codecs. This probably isn’t a big deal as plenty of people have guides about adding such things.

Sabayon

Another one of the Distros I checked out a while back when I first started playing with the idea of running Linux at home, Sabayon is looking good to be my final choice. While I’m not too familiar with Gentoo, the Distro which Sabayon is built off of, Sabayon does have some interesting stuff going for it. I’m most interested in how they try to ease installation and use of many cutting edge features, such as enhanced proprietary driver support, and their unique packaging system Entropy.

openSUSE

I don’t personally have much experience with openSUSE, but I have read many good reviews and recommendations about it. My biggest reservation is I don’t like what I’ve read about Novell and Microsoft and how it relates to openSUSE.

Fedora

Most of my experience with Linux comes from Red Hat EL. Fedora is a Distro that is spun off of the main releases of RHEL, so it will have much in common. Maybe it would be best if I stick with a platform that has a similar foundation which could ease my changeover.

CentOS

My personal webserver runs CentOS, and I really like it, sometimes even more than Red Hat EL. I really like using yum as it makes updates extremely easy. Hopefully the desktop version will be able to hold up to the results I’ve experienced from the server version.

Conclusion

So those are the options that I’m currently looking at. Fortunately, all the distros I’ve decided to explore more have Live Distros available. This will make it easy for me to “try before I buy”. In other words, I can try out a basic version of the Distro without having commit to an installation of it first.

Updates will be coming with my impression of each distro and my final selection.