The Linux Thread

As I've found it helps to set myself up with little projects rather than just dork around randomly, I'm setting up a PPTP client on my Debian box since I need to update my work's PPTP-howto for Linux anyway. Okay, "sudo apt-get install pptp-linux" prompts for a password, but rejects my user-account password with "you've been reported" and is failing at my root password after three attempts.

*sigh*

I know I'm learning more when even the simple things need to be figured out, though. :lol: First thing is to make sure my root password is actually correct...


Edit: Went into "root terminal", it accepted my root password, and doing the apt-get above (minus the sudo) it replied that I already had the latest version of pptp-linux.
 
Well, got the PPTP working, and got RDP working, so that I was able to remote into my work PC from Linux box at home. :woohoo:

Next step(s):
- Get remote desktop and CLI access into the Linux box (i.e. going in the opposite direction) so that I don't need KVM plugged into it locally, then drag it into the office and stick it in the server closet for further familiarization/testing.
- I just bought a refurb laptop and I'll be adding a non-Debian distro to it when it comes in. As the laptop is the same model as my wife is currently using for her work purposes, the major side benefit is having spare parts for hers, so using it as a distro trial box works perfectly.
 
IglooDude said:
- Get remote desktop and CLI access into the Linux box (i.e. going in the opposite direction) so that I don't need KVM plugged into it locally, then drag it into the office and stick it in the server closet for further familiarization/testing.
- I just bought a refurb laptop and I'll be adding a non-Debian distro to it when it comes in. As the laptop is the same model as my wife is currently using for her work purposes, the major side benefit is having spare parts for hers, so using it as a distro trial box works perfectly.
Click to expand...

If you're acessing it from another linux, openssh should be all you need, but you may like having nxserver also.
 
innonimatu said:
If you're acessing it from another linux, openssh should be all you need, but you may like having nxserver also.
Click to expand...

I'm starting with telnetd (it's an internal server, pure testing) but will be getting openssh next. What is nxserver?
 
IglooDude said:
I'm starting with telnetd (it's an internal server, pure testing) but will be getting openssh next. What is nxserver?
Click to expand...

Ouch, no! Please, there's nothing to learn from telnetd, it's totally superseded by ssh, let it die. You won't learn anything useful. Setting up openssh is just a matter of "apt-get ssh" (in most distributions you can even select it during system install). You can then tweak the configuration in /etc/ssh/sshd_config, but you don't really need to change anything there.

nxserver is a package for linux which kind of corresponds to RDP on Windows. The technology is different, but it's the most similar thing: it'll present your full linux desktop on another system if you run a client to connect to it. The only downside is that the package only allows for two used desktops to be shared (similar to RDP on windows server): it's developed by a company which then has a commercial version without that limitation. Of course, there are free forks (this program itself is an evolution of another GPL'd project) without that limitation, but they are probably not as polished.
Get the free version from their site. Installation of the packages (all three on the server, just nxclient on the client) on Debian is trivial, three commands just like they document. It depends on ssh, so install that first.

An historical note: unix people never worried very much on getting something like RDP going, because the X11 server always allowed graphic applications to send its output to another system, it's part of the design. Why open a remote desktop session if you could just telnet to a remote system and start an application redirecting its rendering to your local X server, so that it seems like it is running on your workstation? Of course, there was a good reason to do an RDP-like think: this X redirecting involved setting up several things on both systems - not quite trivial, especially when people started adding firewalls in the middle.
On modern linux and unix systems that is considerably simpler: it evolved into just ssh'ing from a linux/unix system to another with the "X Forwarding" option enabled (ssh -X [user@]hostname) and then starting a graphical application on the remote system - it should automatically render its user interface on your system, no more configuration necessary. (but don't expect it to simply work with the real bastard children of unix like Mac OS X)
 
innonimatu said:
Ouch, no! Please, there's nothing to learn from telnetd, it's totally superseded by ssh, let it die. You won't learn anything useful. Setting up openssh is just a matter of "apt-get ssh" (in most distributions you can even select it during system install). You can then tweak the configuration in /etc/ssh/sshd_config, but you don't really need to change anything there.

nxserver is a package for linux which kind of corresponds to RDP on Windows. The technology is different, but it's the most similar thing: it'll present your full linux desktop on another system if you run a client to connect to it. The only downside is that the package only allows for two used desktops to be shared (similar to RDP on windows server): it's developed by a company which then has a commercial version without that limitation. Of course, there are free forks (this program itself is an evolution of another GPL'd project) without that limitation, but they are probably not as polished.
Get the free version from their site. Installation of the packages (all three on the server, just nxclient on the client) on Debian is trivial, three commands just like they document. It depends on ssh, so install that first.

An historical note: unix people never worried very much on getting something like RDP going, because the X11 server always allowed graphic applications to send its output to another system, it's part of the design. Why open a remote desktop session if you could just telnet to a remote system and start an application redirecting its rendering to your local X server, so that it seems like it is running on your workstation? Of course, there was a good reason to do an RDP-like think: this X redirecting involved setting up several things on both systems - not quite trivial, especially when people started adding firewalls in the middle.
On modern linux and unix systems that is considerably simpler: it evolved into just ssh'ing from a linux/unix system to another with the "X Forwarding" option enabled (ssh -X [user@]hostname) and then starting a graphical application on the remote system - it should automatically render its user interface on your system, no more configuration necessary. (but don't expect it to simply work with the real bastard children of unix like Mac OS X)
Click to expand...

Sorry, I didn't mean I was installing telnetd to learn about it, I just needed remote access quickly (so I could bring the machine to work and stick it in a closet with just ethernet and power connections) and telnetd was the first thing I discovered when searching for the solution. But in your honor I will get ssh access to that machine up and running next. :)

And thanks very much for the explanation and background on nxserver. I'm hoping to get away from the GUI as far as server administration is concerned, but would like to have it available as a fallback or as training wheels as I learn (configuring something with the GUI tools, then rolling back and doing it via CLI).
 
Run into my first problems with Ubuntu when I switched from an NVIDIA to an AMD graphics card, and then got a black screen on boot up. Had to use my Samsung netbook to track down some arcane commands to type in, to fix the problem. Seems the problem may have been due to not uninstalling the NVIDIA drivers first, as reinstalling after that worked - but on Windows, having multiple drivers installed is fine (and often useful, if say you want to fall back to motherboard graphics, which in my case are also NVIDIA).

I'm still a bit confused as to whether to run the AMD non-free drivers, or the open source ones. The former work well, but as a developer I can't use debuild with any program that uses OpenGL (because ooh, it's nasty non-free, and so the Debian developers refuse to fix the issue). But the latter leaves me stuck with a software renderer...

(It's a pain because I use Launchpad to build my Linux binaries, so I wouldn't be infecting other computers with nasty non-free stuff - but it would be useful to be able to run debuild on my system to test it works first. The idea that what graphics drivers I personally have installed, affects whether I can build something, is very odd, especially when it's just down to politics - haven't come across this in the Windows world.)
 
IglooDude said:
Sorry, I didn't mean I was installing telnetd to learn about it, I just needed remote access quickly (so I could bring the machine to work and stick it in a closet with just ethernet and power connections) and telnetd was the first thing I discovered when searching for the solution. But in your honor I will get ssh access to that machine up and running next. :)
Click to expand...

Well, I might as well add: the reason telnetd was abandoned was that nasty feature of passing passwords (and everything else) in clear text. So you really do not want to use it.

And a mistake on my previous post, I meant "apt-get install ssh". :blush:

Graphics drivers on linux can still be a mess, especially with new chips. Sometimes you just have to experiment until you find some which work ok. The year of the linux desktop never seems to arrive. :(
But it's not a problem with servres, we don't really need X there. ;)
 
innonimatu said:
Well, I might as well add: the reason telnetd was abandoned was that nasty feature of passing passwords (and everything else) in clear text. So you really do not want to use it.
Click to expand...

Yep, already aware of that as it is an issue with any OS, and for that matter network hardware as well - I'm not so much worried about it with an internal server that's not going to be doing anything useful/productionish, but (for example) our main internet-facing firewalls very definitely have telnet access disabled for that reason.

innonimatu said:
And a mistake on my previous post, I meant "apt-get install ssh". :blush:
Click to expand...

No worries, that wouldn't have taken me more than a few seconds to figure out.

innonimatu said:
Graphics drivers on linux can still be a mess, especially with new chips. Sometimes you just have to experiment until you find some which work ok. The year of the linux desktop never seems to arrive. :(
But it's not a problem with servres, we don't really need X there. ;)
Click to expand...

:thumbsup:
 
innonimatu said:
The year of the linux desktop never seems to arrive. :(
Click to expand...

It's probably never gonna arrive. There's the hardware manufactures, who probably would get on board eventually (it would take a while as Linux market share grows slowly on the desktop side). But long-term it's never gonna happen as long as software patents exist. In many ways Linux is one front in Richard Stallman's war on intellectual property.
 
Despite my comments, I think Linux on the desktop is here, and has been for at least a couple of years. I'm annoyed at my experience of sticking a new graphics card, but all desktop operating systems have horror stories of things happening that cause them to fail to boot, Windows and OS X included.

What's preventing Ubuntu as a desktop OS? There's plenty we might criticise about it, but that doesn't mean it isn't a viable desktop OS.
 
I installed Linux Mint Xfce/"Debian Edition" this weekend on a spare PC, and will be seeing how readily it can replace my WinXP PC for home use - which actually doesn't involve games aside from online java ones, just email/browsing/occasional-productivity and such, so I have high hopes. Mint is a derivative of Ubuntu, for anyone that doesn't know (I didn't, two weeks ago). And Ubuntu is supposed to be the Win7 killer/equivalent, Linux for regular users.
 
*dig*

does anyone have a recommendation for a distribution overview site, or something like that?
My problem is that i'm searching a NON live distro for a damn old PC (400 mhz, 128 MB RAM), and i just can't find anything right. Downloaded 2 already (Slax, Damn Small Linux), and haven't been aware before that these are live distributions, not intented to be installed really anywhere. I've looked further around, but either i can't find real descripitions (e.g. SliTaz, no idea if that's live), or the download itself already seems to be too big (Lubuntu, i think the need of 2.7 GB on the HDD is too much for that PC).
So, can anyone recommend my anything (either overview or directly a distro) :)?
 
Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, dual boot, I still use windows 7 more because I cant get my internet to work on ubuntu.
 
The_J said:
*dig*

does anyone have a recommendation for a distribution overview site, or something like that?
My problem is that i'm searching a NON live distro for a damn old PC (400 mhz, 128 MB RAM), and i just can't find anything right. Downloaded 2 already (Slax, Damn Small Linux), and haven't been aware before that these are live distributions, not intented to be installed really anywhere. I've looked further around, but either i can't find real descripitions (e.g. SliTaz, no idea if that's live), or the download itself already seems to be too big (Lubuntu, i think the need of 2.7 GB on the HDD is too much for that PC).
So, can anyone recommend my anything (either overview or directly a distro) :)?
Click to expand...

No distribution with current mainstream software will work decently on that PC. Your problem will be the memory, not the CPU: for example one of the most essential type of programs today, web browsers, are huge memory hogs. To make things worse, in linux the two main "desktops", Gnome and KDE, are also very fat in their recent versions, and even an old Gnome2 will probably be unusable. Even the supposedly "lightweight" window managers have become bloated. You'd need at lest some 400MB of memory.

I don't know what is your goal with that old PC, but you might want to consider simply using an old version of Linux (try an old OpenSuse install CD, something like 10.2). But not if it's meant to be a permanently networked computer (bugs/security holes).
 
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