I spent a very long time arguing, kicking, screaming, yelling and a whole bunch of other things with several Linux installers. My goal: a solid install that allowed me to use a 160GB RAID 1 array without needing to install, copy over crap and setup my RAID array that way…. (I’m not lazy, I’m testing) Very simple, right? HA!
As some background, my wife is in the Army and I have seen my fair share of mishaps while moving. My favorite is when the moving company “accidental” ran through a 5×5x10 crate with a forklift. Several things got ruined on that one. Needless to say, when building my new computer, some sort of RAID was a requirement.
I chose RAID1 because I didn’t think I’d need to upgrade the disks anytime soon. 160GB should last me awhile, even though I’m a digital pack rat. The other issue is, when I move, I don’t want to remove several drives and mail them. So, I got 2 drives and some a removable drive tray and took care of that. Now, when the movers come, I just shut down like normal, pull the drive tray, pack it very nicely and mail it to my parents. When I show up on the other side, even if my computer is completely gone, I have a complete mirror copy of my data to start over with.
The Computer
This is a brand new, custom built, computer. I spent awhile mixing and matching parts to get the setup I wanted. By the end, I’ll have roughly 500+ GB of RAID1 storage. I have a DFI LanParty NF4 Motherboard with (currently) 1gig of memory and a Athlon 64 3800+. This will be upgraded to 4GB of memory and a Athlon 64 X2 4800+ in a few months.
Now, those hard heads will notice right off the bat that my MB supports Soft RAID. This means that the RAID drivers are software controlled. Unfortunately, this is not done by Linux, only Windows… What this means is, even if I setup the RAID array to mirror the two drives, when I fire up whatever installer, it sees both drives anyway. So, what does a poor guy do? Linux Software RAID of course!
What I Tried
Lets see: (All RAID attempts where Linux RAID with / being the RAID1 part)
Ubuntu 5.10 - I got so tired of the installer going in circles for my RAID array it wasn’t even funny. When I finally gave up and attempted to install the system, it failed to boot properly. Live CD worked though - funny…
Fedora Core 4 - The installer was neat, but couldn’t handle what I wanted for some unknown reason. Again, lockups during the install.
SuSE Pro 9.3 - Just like everything else, reinstall, over and over and over and still nothing is installed correctly. I even tried notching it down to 36bit. Something has to be wrong, right?
Details
I felt I’d go into a little detail about each installation and the issues that I had.
Ubuntu - I downloaded the live CD and played with it. Worked without a hitch. I probably would have left it if it hadn’t been so slow because of the CD. Anyway, I downloaded the latest release (5.10) and attempted to install.
The installer for Ubuntu felt like FreeBSD - old, decrepit and nasty looking. It was a DOS style installation with various colors. For the most part, it was trouble free, up until I decided to tell it I wanted a RAID1 Array. If I did something wrong, it would just blink on the partition screen with no message or tell me that I hadn’t created a Multi-Disk environment yet (even though I had). The support Forums where really no help. They consisted of a heck of a lot of newbies that cried about stuff like their MP3 players and such. After giving up on a RAID Array, I decided to just install the OS to see what happened. I got a message about starting up too fast and that was it. The forum community was just as stumped since this happened to the occasional person. We fought it out, it won - I walked away. Approx 50 restarts (honest).
Fedora Core - I had FC from a magazine that had packaged it. I’ve known about it for awhile, but really didn’t care to try it out until today. The package installer was very similar to Red Hat’s (obviously), but the RAID1 installation was a little finicky. I actually grew tired of messing with it (this may have been due to the 2 days dedicated to fighting with Ubuntu) so I moved on. No restarts - just didn’t seem like I really wanted to deal with another Red Hat OS.
SuSE Pro - I’ve heard a lot about SUSE and since it’s backed by NOVEL, I decided to try it out. I was VERY impressed with the GUI installation. After starting it up, I was greeted with some nice graphics and shown a “page” with all the settings and installation recommendations (no Next buttons then radio buttons then next buttons…..). It auto-detected my hardware pretty decently. My Logitech Wireless combo isn’t a MicroSoft combo, but thats alright because what it detected would be installed on it anyway. If I wanted to change something, I simply clicked the main heading and edited whatever I wanted. If GUI installers alone decided things, I would have gone with SUSE first.
The main thing I played with was the RAID setup. It was pretty straight forward and didn’t argue that much. It prompted me when I messed up as well. After the generic setup, it started copying files and died on Installing the Boot Manager: GRUB. I honestly preferred LILO instead, so after it had locked for 30 minutes, I reset it and selected LILO as the boot manager instead. Going through the install again, it got hung up on Updating the Configuration (before even installing LILO). It got stuck on Fonts of all things. I began to think that I was doomed to deal with Windows again…
After this installation crash, I decided to see what happened with the Repair utility the installation has packaged. I let it do an automatic repair and after detecting my 2 swap areas, it picked up speed. It FSCK’d my RAID array and found a problem - great… Repairing didn’t help. I decided that this may have been caused by all the reinstalls or that one of my drives may have been acting goofy to begin with.
So, this is where I started to think it was my machine… I downloaded some Hitachi Drive utilities and found everything was alright (things that make ya go Hmmmm).
So, I went through the install again, but did some memory tests - another nice feature SuSE has. But alas, no errors. So - I went through the install one last time, late Sunday night - by now, I’ve almost given up because I’ve got to be up and at work in exactly 8 hours. I’ve had my brand spank’in new computer for less than 4 days and no OS yet because I’m stubborn dammit!
The last install, I went through it with a micro fined tooth comb. I looked at what it found for hardware and was even more impressed. It knew what my video card was, and all that - I just had to tell it what my monitor was - big deal.
This time, I set it up as the following:
sda: Ext3 /boot 500mb
sda: Swap 500mb
sda: RAID 154gb
sdb: swap 1gb
sdb: RAID 154gb
md0: / (RAID Array)
I changed from KDE to GNOME and edited a few packages to add/remove what I wanted/didn’t want. After reinstalling it rebooted, GRUB picked up and then….about 400 segment violations, the RAID array didn’t mount right and I was dropped into a shell that didn’t have any type of commands available. Yeah…
Hmm
After this, I stopped trying with the RAID array. I decided to pull my drive tray out and just install on one HD (and copy it over, like I didn’t want to, later). Needless to say, Ubuntu fired up, installed and rebooted then dropped me into a Shell prompt with no login information. What the hell?
At this point, I’m honestly thinking about Windows again. I’m going to buy XP for gaming anyway (don’t want Vista right out of the gate). I’m considering FreeBSD as well, but we’ll see about that. I need to research it a little further to make sure it supports my hardware.
So, Is Linux REALLY User Friendly?
Its really odd when the Linux Community as a whole says that Linux is ready for the desktop in all homes when a geek has this many problems. All of my hardware is popular, name brand stuff and, from what I can see, is supported by the Linux Kernal being used during the install. The reason I say this is because my drives are SATA1 (I hadn’t even updated them to SATAII/3GBs yet!)
In fact, I’m so frustrated, my machine is running, all nice and pretty right now, with a Live CD sitting in it. I want to customize the damn thing, but whats the point if I kick it and lose everything on a restart. This is pathetic really - I haven’t been this frustrated with a new computer in a LONG time. In fact, I don’t even want to look in the general direction of my nice, new, computer…
I had planned on building an HTPC with the same case (just the HTPC type) and roughly the same innards, but wow - don’t know if I want to even glance that direction now.
I’ll try Debian and maybe FreeBSD then I’ll bail.
Update: 04.01.06 (No, this is not an April Fools Joke…)
The Hard Drive
After getting very frustrated, I found some documentation online about how it might be the fact that Linux hasn’t kept up with SATA technology… So, believing this, I went down and bought a very expensive 80GB WD IDE drive. I pulled the SATA drive connections and tried Ubuntu - it still failed. It got further than ever before, but nope.
So, I tried SUSE 9.3Pro. After the first install, I got further than before as well - surprised me, but it couldn’t install the MBR and failed on install. I shutdown the computer, updated the Tab on the drive as master and tried to install with ACPI off. It worked! I almost pissed myself I was so happy. After setting everything up and updating the system, I shutdown again and plugged in the SATA drives (I’m stubborn). Tried to start it up and the system failed to start about 10 times in a row. Out of frustration, I removed the IDE drive selection tab and restarted. Getting into the CMOS, I selected the IDE as primary and restarted one last time before giving up. OMG - it worked!
I got to setup my SATA drives as a RAID1 array and now my email, webstuff and a backup of my laptop are on the RAID Array. Wow… I’m impressed already.
