Schinckel.net

I’d hardly call myself inexperienced in the ways of computers (I’ve installed several flavours of operating systems on several architectures of computers, from AmigaOS and Mac OS on 68k; through BeOS, Mac OS and OS X on PPC; a sideways movement to various Linuxes on ARM; to BeOS, Windows, OS X and more recently Fedora on x86). So how come I’m having so many issues getting what I want out of a Linux box? Perhaps, to put things in perspective, I’ll discuss exactly what it is that I want. I have a Dell mini tower machine, with nearly a terabyte of hard disk drives, 1.5Gb of memory and some other various hardware that I want to set up as a fileserver, fax and print server and scanner server for my local network, and possibly an outside accessible web server. I also want to run a virtualisation of WindowsXP, accessible via a remote desktop setup, so that Jaq can run her CAD software (Windows only) from her PPC iMac. This should have been easy. It started with hassles even getting the 3.2Gb Fedora DVD image. I would up having to get it at work, as my wget client decided to do strange shit with sizes, and kept saying there were a negative number of bytes remaining. Granted, this is not the fault of Fedora, but it set the tone. Next up was my installation woes. Now, I’ve installed a text-only Linux onto my NSLU2, and administered it for ages. I’ve read several books in the past about X-windowing (and even had a working Xwindows setup on BeOS/PPC, which was not a bad triumph). But I wasn’t ready for the almost never-ending hassle I had to get my Dell machine to actually boot into Fedora. But finally it did. I’d downloaded vmware and Parallels, since I still haven’t chosen between them in the Desktop realm, so most definitely haven’t decided on this untested platform. And neither of them would work. Apparently I don’t have a kernel they like, and I can’t build the vmmon for my kernel, since I get all sorts of weird errors when I try to compile or link. Now, let me suffix that by saying when I was deeply into hacking BeOS/PPC, they had already moved to Intel CPUs, and most software I had to build from source, and generally fiddle with stacks to get it to compile and link. So, I’m not totally clueless there either. So I spent a while trying to get the in-built virtualisation system to work. It starts installing, but for some reason I get bizarre errors on the installation of Windows - that it can’t find a file, and I can’t get it to access the CD drive again. It’s fairly crap, in other words. Especially after playing with vmware Fusion and Parallels Desktop for Mac. Both of which install Windows XP without a hitch. Giving up on trying to survive on this Fedora, I’m currently downloading an older version of Linux - Ubuntu 6.0.6 this time. This is supported under VMWare, but not under Parallels. The only versions of Linux that are supported by both virtualisation systems are RedHat and SuSe, which don’t seem to be freely downloadable. Or maybe I just didn’t look hard enough. But this is not the end of my story. Tracking back a couple of steps, I have been fiddling lots with Fedora. It seems okay, but it is really hard to do the things I want to do. For instance, it would be nice to VNC into the box and do stuff, but I can’t seem to make Chicken of the VNC connect. Nor the little java VncViewer I found provided superior performance. I’d also like to be able to use other types of file sharing setup - perhaps AFP or NFS rather than just SMB. I can get an SMB connection to Fedora, but nothing else. NFS appears to just keep trying, and eventually time out. AFP connections are just rejected. And the frustrating thing is there is no easily discoverable way to turn this stuff on. I’ve even fiddled with files I know are used for this type of thing (that’s how I got Samba going, before I discovered the place to do this). Even SWAT, which the system told me I have installed, doesn’t seem to respond on port 901, where it lives. I know that Linux is different to OS X, and to Windows, but right now I’m not liking it a whole lot. I’d be fairly tempted to just reinstall Windows, but the two 250G hard drives that are in there are already formatted ext3fs, and mostly full of data, since they were in use, in addition to a 160GB drive that still stores my music, connected to the NSLU2. Which, I might add, was much easier to administer than Fedora. I know I’m trying to do more on Fedora, but I’m currently achieving less. Perhaps I just need to sleep.