I Got a questions about going debian and tinycore.

[ShadowVVL]

Decided I am going to give debian and maybe tiny core a try tonight
So I'm wondering debian is a good choice for 2-3 year long term 3d workstation os and which version should I get? 7.1.0 or older one?

For Tiny core I got an old dell from 2000 with a pentium 3 733mhz and 128mbs of ram and a 20gb ide. So will it run like a race horse or like rowing a boat up river in early spring?
I'm using the dell for no real reason other then fun and tinkering.
I do have one big issues with the dell as it has olnly a 56k modem and i'm not sure how I would get Ethernet to it.

 

[lxskllr]

For Debian, I'd go with Wheezy if you want stability, and don't feel like fooling with stuff. The downside is software will be getting crusty by the time Jessie gets released. Running testing will introduce possible breakage, but the software will be newer. I guess if you're using it as a tool, and not a toy, and if the software is sufficiently new for your uses, Wheezy is the way to go.

TinyCore will maximize any resources you have. It isn't magic. The modern web will suck with only 128mb of ram, but TinyCore will make the most of what you have. 56k may be problem. That held of my GNU/Linux adoption for awhile. You may be able to score a ethernet card from somewhere, either cheap or free.

 

[ShadowVVL]

thanks lxskllr, I downloaded wheezy and will be installing it soon.I think I will skip installing tiny core on the dell for now and I will test it on my current comp and on a small eee laptop.

 

[Cerb]

For Tiny core I got an old dell from 2000 with a pentium 3 733mhz and 128mbs of ram and a 20gb ide. So will it run like a race horse or like rowing a boat up river in early spring?

For various values of running, sure. Tinycore basically needs to be remastered to use as a regular system, and your initial package selection is bare. Slitaz, and the Puppy family offer you a lot more for your time, and will do OK with so little RAM (which is going to be your main problem with the P3).

 

[ShadowVVL]

For various values of running, sure. Tinycore basically needs to be remastered to use as a regular system, and your initial package selection is bare. Slitaz, and the Puppy family offer you a lot more for your time, and will do OK with so little RAM (which is going to be your main problem with the P3).

yeah I installed tiny core and it was not for me.It kept having issues, the manager kept crashing when I made sda1 a bootable partion.
I tried installing on the entire disk without custom part a few times but would not be bootable . In the end after i got it to installed and bootable it was just unpleasant to work with.

I have run ubuntu 8 on the p3 system and it did alright. but yeah ram gets maxed and it starts using swap and the system gets slow.

I will try to install puppy today!

I need some halp with debian though,its having issues.
1. I keep losing mouse and keyboard at login screen and have to reboot a few times.

2. The background during login screen is always either black and white z like stripes or frames from internet and a show I watched on net flix a few days ago in windows.

I tried to take a screen shot of it but I guess print screen don't work in debian.

Not sure what is wrong with it, everything was fine for the first 2 days. I hadn't changed anything or updated anything.
I have checked the md5sum and its the same so I know its not bad
but I had the same keyboard and mouse issues with ubuntu & ubuntu studio 12.04 multiple times.

no problems with kubuntu though.

 

[lxskllr]

Sounds like you might be having Xorg issues. What desktop did you install with Debian?

 

[ShadowVVL]

I installed xfce 4 desktop

 

[lxskllr]

I'm searching around. Two fixes I've seen are BIOS update, and making sure your PS2 input devices are plugged into the correct ports(if applicable). eg mouse in the mouse port, and keyboard in the keyboard port. Sounds stupid, but I remember having trouble with that on Windows. Seems like some boards are more particular than others.

 

[ShadowVVL]

thanks lxskllr.

The mouse is ps2 and the keyboard is usb so there is no way to mix them up.
I have never updated the bios so that could be the issues. Was goin to update them last year but xfx don't support the board anymore and they don't carry the updates.

yeah I have always had issues booting into windows.

I will try look around an see if any places like techpowerup or 3dguru might have them. if not then ill try to contact a rep and see if they might still have them laying around somwhere .

 

[ShadowVVL]

I did a quick search for xfx on one of my storage drives since i was going to update them last year I figured I might have downloaded the bios update last year.
Found a folder with my mobo name on it and unzipped it and what do you know bios update 1.4b1... lol

so now its updated from 1.2 to 1.4b1 and the boot went well with no issues at boot screen but only time will tell.

 

[ShadowVVL]

I guess the bios update didn't fix it. Still getting netflix frames as login background but It hasn't droped keyboard and mouse yet. I get a delay in mouse for a bout 2 second in login screen which is no biggy.I dont know if its xfce or not so I might try kde since I dont get the issues in kubuntu.

 

[lxskllr]

Try editing /etc/lightdm/lightdm-gtk-greeter.conf and adding a background of your choice. I moved a wallpaper I liked to /usr/share/images/, and used that. Dunno if that'll work, but it's something to try.

 

[ShadowVVL]

lol,that made it a bit worst, now I get an extra background for 3 seconds. at login i get the image I set as user/shared/image bg or a random image of what ever I was doing on windows.
Once I login i get a delay then another background from the user/shared/images for 3 seconds then my desktop loads and the background goes back to the one I set.

I think something is going wrong with user/shared /images. I might try to change the bg image location for login to a different folder.

I checked xsession errors and I am getting this but don't know if it could be causing it

WARNING: gnome-keyring:: couldn't connect to: /home/bryan/.cache/keyring-eij6Uh/pkcs11: No such file or directory

 

[lxskllr]

I checked xsession errors and I am getting this but don't know if it could be causing it

WARNING: gnome-keyring:: couldn't connect to: /home/bryan/.cache/keyring-eij6Uh/pkcs11: No such file or directory

That shouldn't have anything to do with it. That handles security, passwords, and such.

That's a strange problem you have. Aside from being irritating, it's a security risk. Maybe not if you're the only user, but on a multi-user system, having screenshots of stuff used from a different session(and O/S!) could reveal stuff you don't want revealed. Maybe take a look at the logs in /var/log/lightdm/ and see if anything interesting shows up there.

Edit:
If it comes to it, you could try installing KDE, and KDM to see if that fixes it, or Gnome and GDM as far as that goes. I don't like switching software for a configuration issue though. If you like Xfce, you should be able to use Xfce. I guess it depends on how bothersome it is, and how much time you want to put in it.

Edit2:
You could also try different display managers. I've only used GDM and Lightdm, but maybe something else would work better. This page gives an overview of some different choices...

http://linuxlibrary.org/linux-login-managers/

SLiM looks interesting.

 

[ShadowVVL]

I tired switching directories for the login background but that just made logging in alot slower.

Yeah the issue isn't big enough to install kde.I'm just not sure if its gnome issue with my motherboard or not.

I didn't know you could install different login managers,I think I will give it a try later and see if that fixes it.

I will check the /var/log/lightdm/tomorrow. Not sure what I am looking for but I will look and post anything I think is unusual..

 

[ShadowVVL]

Thanks lxskllr, I installed and set GDM login and so far no more issues.I can login 4-5 seconds faster now

Only issue in the lightdm log was this
Could not run plymouth --ping: Failed to execute child process "plymouth"

 

[lxskllr]

Plymouth might have been the issue. It makes a pretty page, sometimes with animation before you hit the login screen. You might have been able to fix it, or comment it out from a config file. GDM is fine though. I was using it awhile, and only switched cause I wanted to get rid of Gnome technologies from my system. That hasn't gone so well. They have a few programs I really like, with Evince being the most notable.

 

[ShadowVVL]

It didn't tell me what was wrong just that it had failed.Might have just needed to be reinstalled.
I am now having issue with puppy.I wants me to switch the boot from sda1 to sda0 from a rc file in root, but I cant find it and making one didn't work.


What is the issue with gnome 3 are they trying to lock it down? I read one of your posts in another topic a few weeks ago about gnome3 heading the direction of apple and ms. I looked around the net but didnt find anything about it.

 

[lxskllr]

It didn't tell me what was wrong just that it had failed.Might have just needed to be reinstalled.
I am now having issue with puppy.I wants me to switch the boot from sda1 to sda0 from a rc file in root, but I cant find it and making one didn't work.


What is the issue with gnome 3 are they trying to lock it down? I read one of your posts in another topic a few weeks ago about gnome3 heading the direction of apple and ms. I looked around the net but didnt find anything about it.

Dunno about Puppy. I've never run that for long periods of time. They were always quickies, and usually a live session, but I've done a couple frugal installs for other people.

Gnome has a vision of the desktop they share with almost no one. They remove features from the software, and are hostile to other projects that use some of their technologies. It's their way, or the highway. If you like what they're doing, it would be a fine desktop, but if you want to change much, they make things harder than it should be.

It's worth a try. Some people like it, but I'm not one of them. I have concerns about Xfce switching to GTK3. They have a small team, and Gnome is good for breaking backward compatibility, even on point releases. If I were Xfce, I'd be giving serious thought to switching to Qt, and I'm a long time fan of GTK+

 

[ShadowVVL]

after the 5th install it told me what was wrong.A pop appeared saying grub boot loader needed to be installed and to go to menu>system>grub bootloader and that fixed it. now I will attempt to customize it

yeah I don't like that at all it sounds proprietary.I guess if we don't use gtk3 then maybe in the future gnome developers will think otherwise.

 

[FrankRamiro]

after the 5th install it told me what was wrong.A pop appeared saying grub boot loader needed to be installed and to go to menu>system>grub bootloader and that fixed it. now I will attempt to customize it

yeah I don't like that at all it sounds proprietary.I guess if we don't use gtk3 then maybe in the future gnome developers will think otherwise.

Try Xubuntu You will be Happy i'm sure.

 

[ShadowVVL]

Yeah I was thinking about comparing xubuntu vs puppy.so far I haven't found puppies task manager so I think I am going to use conky-all.

looks like the mouse issue in debian returns only this time I lose mouse control and the cursor just pans across the screen really fast. I am not sure what logs to check for hardware and peripherals.

 

[lxskllr]

I wonder if it's a hardware issue. Do you have another mouse you can check it with?

 

[ShadowVVL]

Thats what I was starting to think but so far it hasnt happend at all today.
I do but sadly its the same kind, but I could could borrow one from a friend and test it.

 

[lxskllr]

I'd try to borrow a usb mouse. That'll take the port, and the device out of the equation. If that works, you can then see if it's the port or the mouse that's the problem.