Thread: Do I really need to recompile ORBit2?

  1. #16
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    Well, completing this thread won't do much good right now so I've bookmarked it. When I come back, if I have problems should I respond to this thread or make a new one?

    Thanks!!!

  2. #17
    spurious conceit MK27's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Jesdisciple View Post
    Well, completing this thread won't do much good right now so I've bookmarked it. When I come back, if I have problems should I respond to this thread or make a new one?
    It probably doesn't matter, new posts go to the top of the list anyway.

    Thanks!!!
    Hey, if I could save someone the hours I spent (etc) then great. Must be your name, hahaha....also I am easily distracted from my current thriller, "Essential Linux Device Drivers". All C, ya know -- take care

    MK27
    C programming resources:
    GNU C Function and Macro Index -- glibc reference manual
    The C Book -- nice online learner guide
    Current ISO draft standard
    CCAN -- new CPAN like open source library repository
    3 (different) GNU debugger tutorials: #1 -- #2 -- #3
    cpwiki -- our wiki on sourceforge

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    Update: I have the data transfers all planned out; now I just need to go over the partitioning.

    I'm going to use a business computer to download and burn the Live CD, as I don't have a burner. I tried to burn it today but was too late, so I must wait 'til Monday. Then I'll upload my 4.4 GB backup tar to filedropper.com under their 5 GB file-limit trial. If you have any suggestions for this process, I'm all eyes.

    Now for my questions... Can both installations use the same /home partition? Is that a good idea? Also, I think I remember reading that Windows XP must be installed first for dual-booting; do you know whether that's true? Finally, how big should each partition be?

    This is unlikely, but I might as well ask... Could I also use the same (or even a third) /home partition for XP? Is there any filesystem which is compatible with both OSes? Would XP even operate on 2 partitions simultaneously?

    Thanks.

  4. #19
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    (bump)

  5. #20
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    Uploading 4.4GB? How fast is your internet connection? (upload)

    That will take quite a while.... and a good 8GB flash drive costs about $20 now if you look hard enough.

    They can use the same /home, but I don't think it's a good idea and don't recommend it. Programs also store their settings to /home, and if you have different versions of programs on your two installations for example... things can go bad. Also, that means you can screw up one installation from the other easily (as far as the user is concerned).

    Installing Windows before Linux is recommended but not necessary. It just makes your life easier. The problem with installing Windows after Linux is that it will overwrite your GRUB (boot manager), making your Linux unbootable. That can be easily fixed by the Ubuntu Live-CD however. The Linux installer will add Windows as an option to GRUB if it detects an existing Windows installation.

    Windows only knows FAT and NTFS. Both are supported by Linux (NTFS by the NTFS-3G driver), but I don't recommend using them for your /home partition, since they don't support more advanced UNIX filesystem features Linux programs may expect (UNIX ACL, symbolic links, etc). Using NTFS for a shared data partition should be fine.

    As for the size of partitions, a clean XP installation takes 1.4GB on a fresh install, and if you try hard enough, you can get it down to about 700MB. And presumably you will need some space for your programs, too.

    Ubuntu 9.04's default installation takes 2.1GB, but it can grow quickly if, like me, you enjoy apt-getting like there's no tomorrow... (I do have a 750GB harddrive, though).

    Windows can operate on... 26 partitions I am assuming (Anyone know what will happen if it runs out of letters?). Windows won't recognize your ext3/ext4/reiserfs/XFS/JFS/... partitions, however (they just won't show up in explorer).

    There is also a ext3 driver for Windows, but I don't think it's nearly as mature as NTFS-3G. That said, ext4 is amazing... my new Ubuntu 9.04 with ext4 takes less than 20 seconds to boot to login screen on my laptop. I don't think there's a ext4 driver for Windows, though. And if you enabled the goodies in ext4 (extents), it won't be backward compatible to ext3. Even Linux only got ext4 support (non-experimental) recently.

  6. #21
    spurious conceit MK27's Avatar
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    I'd concur with everything cyberfish just said.

    Do you really need to back up 4.4 gigs?? Of what -- is that your entire drive? That's a bad way to backup info, because it probably means you actually don't bother to do it at all most of the time.

    You don't need to back up anything that is part of the distribution. All you need to back up is the stuff in your home directory, and possibly configuration files from (eg) /etc if you've done some work there (keep track of files that you think fall into this category!). I have a 500G drive, and not counting about 30G of mp3's, all my "essentials" can fit on a cdrom (10 times).
    C programming resources:
    GNU C Function and Macro Index -- glibc reference manual
    The C Book -- nice online learner guide
    Current ISO draft standard
    CCAN -- new CPAN like open source library repository
    3 (different) GNU debugger tutorials: #1 -- #2 -- #3
    cpwiki -- our wiki on sourceforge

  7. #22
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    No, the 4.4 gigs is just the home directory, with my profile and a 'sandbox' profile... that I didn't use much and which takes about 0.8 gigs. I can only find one connection speed, which is 100 Mb. So the upload should take a little over 10 minutes, if that's the upload speed.

    And no, I don't have a habit of backing anything up... As I don't have a burner, it would have to be online, so do you have any site recommendations?

    Here's how I've tentatively divided the memory... Any further suggestions?

    80 GB hard drive
    swap (ext4?): 0.25 GB
    Ubuntu 1 (ext4): 26.5777 GB
    Ubuntu 2 (ext4): 26.5777 GB
    Windows XP (NTFS): 25.8776 GB
    shared data (NTFS): 0.717 GB

    Thanks!

  8. #23
    spurious conceit MK27's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Jesdisciple View Post
    And no, I don't have a habit of backing anything up... As I don't have a burner, it would have to be online, so do you have any site recommendations?
    Sure, but you have a usb port, and I would bet 99% of people here use usb keys. Two blocks away at a small hardware and department store they are like $15 for 4 gigs. Backing up to a key is as easy as it gets.

    As for websites -- use gmail or something and send it to yourself (the storage limit at gmail is 5G).

    re: formatting your harddrive -- i stopped using a swap space with linux a while ago; with a couple of megs of RAM or more it NEVER gets used anyway. Just to let you know, it's not essential, and will probably just end up as a wasted partition entry.

    ps. IMPORTANT -- do a little timed upload of say 10 megs to check your upload rate, you are probably in for an unpleasant surprise.
    Last edited by MK27; 04-20-2009 at 08:00 AM.
    C programming resources:
    GNU C Function and Macro Index -- glibc reference manual
    The C Book -- nice online learner guide
    Current ISO draft standard
    CCAN -- new CPAN like open source library repository
    3 (different) GNU debugger tutorials: #1 -- #2 -- #3
    cpwiki -- our wiki on sourceforge

  9. #24
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    I guess I'll extend the CD burning trip to look for a key at Wally World, maybe Radio Shack. (My town doesn't have much tech industry.) I don't usually think of keys as permanent storage, though...

    I just remembered that I'm supposed to have 2 home partitions. I guess 10 GB would be a good size for those?

    Should the upload benchmark be run against the stopwatch on my wrist, or do you recommend a program? (I hope it doesn't depend on one of my decaying modules.)

    80 GB hard drive
    home 1 (ext4): 10 GB
    home 2 (ext4): 10 GB
    Ubuntu 1 (ext4): 20.1 GB
    Ubuntu 2 (ext4): 20.1 GB
    Windows XP (NTFS): 19.4 GB
    shared data (NTFS): 0.4 GB

  10. #25
    spurious conceit MK27's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Jesdisciple View Post
    I just remembered that I'm supposed to have 2 home partitions. I guess 10 GB would be a good size for those?

    Should the upload benchmark be run against the stopwatch on my wrist, or do you recommend a program? (I hope it doesn't depend on one of my decaying modules.)
    1) the /home directory does not need to be a separate partition and should not be unless you have a specific reason for it -- that's just a hassle and will probably mean more wasted space.

    2) Use the arc of the sun Just thought it worth mentioning; I have 10mb/sec (ie, pretty much everything is instantaneous), but the upload is usually more like 1mb/minute.
    C programming resources:
    GNU C Function and Macro Index -- glibc reference manual
    The C Book -- nice online learner guide
    Current ISO draft standard
    CCAN -- new CPAN like open source library repository
    3 (different) GNU debugger tutorials: #1 -- #2 -- #3
    cpwiki -- our wiki on sourceforge

  11. #26
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    I have about 500kb/s down and ~50kb/s up. 1:10 is about the usual ratio.

    I can only find one connection speed, which is 100 Mb.
    That is the speed of your LAN. Your uplink is probably WAY less than that. Even if it's 100 Mb/s, the b here is bits, not bytes. To get it in the usual MBytes/s, you'll have to divide it by 8.

    Unless you are paying a few hundred dollars / month for your connection... your uplink should be more like 50kbytes/s.

  12. #27
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    Quote Originally Posted by cyberfish View Post
    That is the speed of your LAN.
    ...? What exactly does that measure, then? This is the only computer in the network, and I would think "Connection Information" on the connection icon which indicates Internet connectedness would be for the Internet.

    Quote Originally Posted by cyberfish View Post
    Even if it's 100 Mb/s, the b here is bits, not bytes. To get it in the usual MBytes/s, you'll have to divide it by 8.
    And I did so, after looking it up on Wikipedia.

    Quote Originally Posted by MK27 View Post
    1) the /home directory does not need to be a separate partition and should not be unless you have a specific reason for it -- that's just a hassle and will probably mean more wasted space.
    From what I've read at the Ubuntu Forums, that's the conventional Ubuntu solution for not backing the entire /home directory up every time an upgrade/reinstall is required.

    Quote Originally Posted by MK27 View Post
    2) Use the arc of the sun
    I asked just because the stopwatch requires me to watch the upload, while a program which both performs and times it would be more accurate.

    Well, the burning didn't work today. The computer at the first business I tried didn't see my CD-RW in the drive; the next one was restarted before the download completed. I wish I had known about the trouble with RWs before buying them...

    As for the benchmark, I tried to find a 10MB directory and failed. The closest I found was 10.9, which compressed to 6.4. I uploaded the archive for 2m 54s.

    2:54 = 174s
    (6.4 * 8) / 174 = 0.294252874
    So the uplink is about 0.3 Mb/s.

  13. #28
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    ...? What exactly does that measure, then? This is the only computer in the network, and I would think "Connection Information" on the connection icon which indicates Internet connectedness would be for the Internet.
    That's the speed of your ethernet. It's 100 Mbit/s everywhere (newer ones are 1000Mbit/s). It's how much your ethernet card can handle. Your computer doesn't know anything about your internet connection.

    From what I've read at the Ubuntu Forums, that's the conventional Ubuntu solution for not backing the entire /home directory up every time an upgrade/reinstall is required.
    Yes, but that's for people who have slightly larger harddrives .


    As for the benchmark, I tried to find a 10MB directory and failed. The closest I found was 10.9, which compressed to 6.4. I uploaded the archive for 2m 54s.

    2:54 = 174s
    (6.4 * 8) / 174 = 0.294252874
    So the uplink is about 0.3 Mb/s.
    That sounds about right (37.5kbytes/s). As you can see, it will take quite a while to upload 4GB.

  14. #29
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    Quote Originally Posted by cyberfish View Post
    Yes, but that's for people who have slightly larger harddrives .
    Do you really think I would ever fill this thing, or even 20 GB of it, up? I know I have almost 5 as it is, but I don't install new programs very often and the data I directly generated needs to be cleaned up.

  15. #30
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    Do you really think I would ever fill this thing, or even 20 GB of it, up? I know I have almost 5 as it is, but I don't install new programs very often and the data I directly generated needs to be cleaned up.
    Well I don't know about you, but I have a few GB of music, ~20GB of "other things", including hard-to-find drivers for windows, programs, my projects, websites, homework, etc.

    I also have a folder of ISOs of my CDs and DVDs for faster access and so I won't lose the discs. That easily takes up a few hundred GB.

    My Ubuntu installation takes up ~5GB right now (just programs, excluding my home dir), and I have a few virtual machines set up, that take a few GB each.

    So it's definitely possible to fill it up... just whether that's your usage scenario.

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