Setting up a Linux system...

L

lordofduct

Established Member
OK, I was digging through my closet and I found an older PC. Rather happy that I did as I wanted to get rid of my XBOX (found a buyer for 370 USD... things modded out hardcore). This will be a nice replacement for watching my DivX and listening to mp3's. BUT, I have one other thing I wanna know.

First off:

The system is if I recall correctly some where between 500 and 700mhz pentium and has I think 128 MB of RAM. I have an extra 64meg stick lieing around I am gonna toss in it along with a GeForceTi4200.

I wanna run VectorLinux on it due to its really slow processor and all that crap and because I just want it to do 3 basic things. Movies, Music and Emulators.

Here is my problem.

What in your guys opinions are the BEST emulators out there for Linux. Genesis/SCD mainly (I find "some" emu's out there but don't find any reviews of em')
 
Well, emulation on Linux isn't really all that great, although advmame is probably the best mame variant out there with the right hardware... it's great at doing wacky resolutions and refresh rates. There are some other decent emulators though - NES and SNES ports are all pretty decent, and also VICE for c64 stuff. As for Genesis/SCD, the best is Gens, but it can't run SCD stuff, and the Windows version is superior. Movies and music (listening to), just get mplayer and xmms and you're set (or rhythmbox if you swing that way).
 
Probably SOL when it comes to movies as well. I was using a 950mhz PC, with 512mb RAM, on several versions of linux, mostly mandrake (9.x and up,) and it just would not run dvd movies worth a crap. It did vcds fine though. Also, using cedega, hardly any of the PC games I tried on it would work, and if they did, most wouldn't run at full speed. I think I got dune 2000 to run full speed, and morrowind ran very slowly. Linux native apps ran pretty good, but any of the newer and popular versions of linux are resource hogs.

I did run mandrake 8.1? gaming edition on the same computer before, and it ran fine, for everything I tried on it atleast, but it's pretty much obsolete.

I have given linux a lot of chances over the years, from mandrake to redhat, and have kept it installed on two of my computers for over a year at a time, using them for every day things (minus games) like ebay, IRC, web surfing, email, reading and making documents, etc. I've even messed with mame a little bit on them. In the end, I've come to the conclusion that linux just can't live up to my expectations.

There are more crashes under X-Windows in linux than Windows. When people talk about how much more stable linux is, they're probably talking about command line mode, because X-Windows and programs in X-Windows just aren't that stable. I've crashed every single web browser in it, as well as the main IRC client hundreds of times.

Maybe a better idea for your PC is to make a network hard drive or samba server or something.
 
There are more crashes under X-Windows in linux than Windows. When people talk about how much more stable linux is, they're probably talking about command line mode, because X-Windows and programs in X-Windows just aren't that stable. I've crashed every single web browser in it, as well as the main IRC client hundreds of times.
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Man, I gotta disagree with you there. I've run firefox and x-chat for weeks on end with no crashes whatsoever, and I usually go for 90 days or more without rebooting (when I do reboot, it's usually just to boot into another OS).
 
What's there to disagree? It probably means that they aren't as stable with certain hardware as with others. On three different computers, two of which are ECS systems, 1 which is a chaintech, the crashes were common. One of those, a K7S5A PRO, was bought after numerous reviews about how it was the "best" motherboard for linux. I'm not sure if I was running firefox, but I was using galleon, konquerer, and netscape, as well as x-chat, and all of those have crashed numerous times with me.

I used to hang out on IRC like 24/7, and probably had two crashes per day on x-chat.

Originally posted by it290@Wed, 2005-07-20 @ 11:44 AM

Man, I gotta disagree with you there. I've run firefox and x-chat for weeks on end with no crashes whatsoever, and I usually go for 90 days or more without rebooting (when I do reboot, it's usually just to boot into another OS).

[post=136960]Quoted post[/post]​
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I go to take my case back from my roommate and give him this ugly case this comp was in. In the process of taking it out a screw was coming ondone and in a fit of anger I slipped with the screw driver and busted a bunch of resistors on the mobo! AHHHHHH, so I gave him the mobo from my computer...

GRRRRRRRR!

Atleast I found a Socket 370 asus with LAN and AGP on it (thank god for the AGP, free up some workload from the main processor) for a mere 10 bucks!
 
Heh, I shorted out a mobo with a screwdriver once. I know it's bad form to work on the innards with the machine on, but hey, what can I say, it's easy to get sloppy with those work machines sometimes. Luckily, no damage was done. I was astonished, because both a big spark and smoke were produced.
 
A little update on this...

Got together this system.

Asus Socket 370 with 600 mhz celeron OC'd to 900 mhz (via Hardware jumper)

196 MB of PC100 SDRAM

Geforce Ti4200

30 GByte HDD (no name, sticker pealed off. looks to be WD)

CD-ROM (couldn't get the DVD/CD-RW recognized with Linux... so what, stupid Atapi drivers)

Vector Linux... really small distro for free that runs pretty good, well fast atleast.

Yeah so I decided to put a very basic system together to put in my bedroom. I only use the system to listen to music and surf the web. This does it very well although XMMS loves to crash every couple days. (mPlayer wouldn't even play for more then 10 seconds without crashing). Some bugs here and there like the DVD drive problem and XMMS... oh and that randomly on bootup it fails to start up my LAN card??? WTF?

As for my other system I had, well that is now in the living room. Im getting a new case for it and a Dolby Sound card (my new roommate has a SWEET sound system... as in he spent TEN THOUSAND CRAZY DOLLARS on it! Wooooo doggy this thing BANGS, I bet the astronauts on the space station can jam with us). So anyways, it is hooked up to a 57" HDTV. It's freakin' amazing.

Anyways one last question for y'all:

The viewing area of my HDTV cuts of a small parts of the sides of my screen. There are no other visual probs except this... basically figure that if you had a webpage filling the entire window you can't see the bar across the top, the navi bar down the left side or the start bar across the bottom along with the same amount of distance along the left side.

I have a feeling this has something to do with the projector in the TV (I know I know, I don't leave it on a still screen for long periods of time and I have the computer set to screensaver in 1 minute and sleep in 15) Anyways, is there away to shrink in the window size thru Windows as my TV doesn't have anything to do that.
 
About getting your DVD-R/CD-R drive to work, try using the ide-scsi driver rather than the regular atapi one. You may have to recompile your kernel. Not sure what could be causing the LAN card thing. Try doing a dmesg | less when that happens and seeing if there's an error message associated with it.

As for the HDTV question, you're talking about Windows in this case? If you're using an ATi card, there's an option to adjust overscan under the displays section of the config. You can use that bring the border down so that it'll fit on the TV, but be aware that movies and games usually look better with a bit of overscan. I can't remember if there's an option like that in the Nvidia drivers, but I know TVTool can do it.
 
I'm writing this from a laptop running ubuntu linux. The specs are PII 450Mhz, 256MB of Ram 20GB HDD,

I can run divx/xvid/dvd movies just fine with mplayer. I think the problem the person above had was that they were trying to run the whole kitchen sink. I've just got a simple XFCE desktop that I sometimes switch over to windowmaker.

If you don't have a beefy machine, never run KDE or Gnome. BTW, 900Mhz and 512MB of RAM is plenty to run dvd's fine. You must have had some other problem.
 
ermmm... first off, its only 196 MBs RAM

Next I only run it in XFCE too.

The DVD problem I have is it's not recognizing the drive... I haven't tried using the SCSI/IDE driver as opposed to the atapi yet as I am lazy. I never said anything about not being able to play movies except that mplayer crashes when loaded up. I can stream video from the internet beautifully with the firefox/mplayer plugin.

Also I am not running everything and the kitchen sink... I run 4 basic things: XMMS, GAIM, Firefox, and xchat. Nothing else is ever really ran. Mplayer also crashes every time no matter if im running it alone or not. I've also come to notice that even though my mobo recognizes the processor to be OC'd (its actually a 600mhz 9X66mhz FSB, I upped the FSB to 100mhz) Linux still says its a 600mhz at boot up. Possibly just because thats what the processor is telling it.

Whatever... I think I might try out "ubuntu". Never heard of it, but vector is really sucking so far. I sure do love the XFCE look though, feels really OSX to me.
 
Originally posted by lordofduct@Thu, 2005-08-18 @ 03:26 AM

ermmm... first off, its only 196 MBs RAM

Next I only run it in XFCE too.

The DVD problem I have is it's not recognizing the drive... I haven't tried using the SCSI/IDE driver as opposed to the atapi yet as I am lazy. I never said anything about not being able to play movies except that mplayer crashes when loaded up. I can stream video from the internet beautifully with the firefox/mplayer plugin.

Also I am not running everything and the kitchen sink... I run 4 basic things: XMMS, GAIM, Firefox, and xchat. Nothing else is ever really ran. Mplayer also crashes every time no matter if im running it alone or not. I've also come to notice that even though my mobo recognizes the processor to be OC'd (its actually a 600mhz 9X66mhz FSB, I upped the FSB to 100mhz) Linux still says its a 600mhz at boot up. Possibly just because thats what the processor is telling it.

Whatever... I think I might try out "ubuntu". Never heard of it, but vector is really sucking so far. I sure do love the XFCE look though, feels really OSX to me.

[post=138403]Quoted post[/post]​
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Hmm... I should have specified that I was referring to Malakai's post.

Anyhow, you should try out ubuntu, but make sure that you do a minimal install.

There are directions here:

http://www.ubuntulinux.org/support/documen...allation-custom

Then apt-get install xfce.

With the minimal install you still have to install firefox, mplayer, whatever by hand.

And this is how you get ubuntu customized the way you want it:

http://ubuntuguide.org/
 
I just want to add that Gentoo is probably one of the most custamisable linux's distros because everything is installed from the ground up.

I've run Gentoo on an old Pentium 3 with Geforce 2 and 128ram with onboard soundblaster sound with kde and fast.

All packages are compiled so it allows you to choose your own optimisations and its very simple to maintain once installed.

However it can be time consuming although it is my distro of choice :D
 
Originally posted by it290+Thu, 2005-08-18 @ 11:36 AM--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(it290 @ Thu, 2005-08-18 @ 11:36 AM)</div><div class='quotemain'>What kind of crashing does mplayer do? Does it just segfault? If so, at what point?

[post=138417]Quoted post[/post]​

[/b]
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After about fifteen seconds of playing a song (haven't tested video except with the firefox plugin which works fine) but again during mp3 play it stops playing after 10 seconds and I can't close mplayer... I have to restart my system to do anything. Everything just stops working.

<!--QuoteBegin-msimplay@Thu, 2005-08-18 @ 03:49 PM

I just want to add that Gentoo is probably one of the most custamisable linux's distros because everything is installed from the ground up.

I've run Gentoo on an old Pentium 3 with Geforce 2 and 128ram with onboard soundblaster sound with kde and fast.

All packages are compiled so it allows you to choose your own optimisations and its very simple to maintain once installed.

However it can be time consuming although it is my distro of choice :D

[post=138424]Quoted post[/post]​

[/quote]

I heard gentoo was for faster systems... but if you said you've ran it on a P3 with that lil' RAM I might possibly be able too. Not sure where I wanna go, I know the gentoo name much better and I've been reading around that ubuntu is from ZA. May sound bias and stereotyping but every professional dealing I've had with ZA (mostly at my job where a lot of our chathosts are located in ZA) they are some shady bastards. Everything is up in the air right now, can't choose. Im gonna wait till I move to decide, it'll probably be gentoo though if you say you can get it running nicely on a P3.
 
Gentoo is a sourced based distro. Which means (if you do it properly), it'll be faster then other options simply because all the code is compiled\optimized for your machine. What's the catch? Waiting for the code to compile...

Once you have everything compiled Gentoo will in all likelyhood be faster. But it might take you 5 days to compile it (not an exaggeration).

I'm seriously considering making a leap to Gentoo, but I'll wait another month for SuSE 10.0 to come out first.
 
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