<P>This is another one of my How I Did It
Podcasts (or How I Done It if you rather) where my goal is to pass
along the things I learn as a common Linux user administering my home
computers and network, and engaging in the types of software
tinkering that appeals to our sort of enthusiast.</P>
<P><BR>
</P>
<P>I'd been thinking for a while about
replacing the small computer on my dinner table. I had been using an
old HP TC1000, one of the original active stylus Windows tablets, of
course now upgraded to Linux. With the snap in keyboard, it had a
form factor similar to a netbook, with the advantage that all the
vulnerable components were behind the LCD, up off the table and away
from spills. It had served my purpose of staying connected to IRC
during mealtimes, and occasional streaming of live casts, but I
wanted more. I wanted to be able to join into Mumble while preparing
meals, I wanted to be able to load any website I wanted without
lockups, and I wanted to stream video content and watch DVDs.</P>
<P><BR>
</P>
<P>I was concerned that putting a laptop
on the table was an invitation to have any spilled beverage sucked
right into the air intakes, and I never even considered a desktop
system in the dining room until I saw a refurbished Dell Inspiron 745
on GearXS.com (I wouldn't normally plug a specific vendor, but now
GearXS is putting Ubuntu on all it's used corporate castoff systems).
This Dell had the form factor that is ubiquitous in point-of-sale, a
vertical skeleton frame with a micro system case on one side and a
17” LCD on the other, placing all the electronics several inches
above the surface on which it is placed. I even found a turntable
intended for small TVs that lets me smoothly rotate the monitor to
either at my place on the table or back towards the kitchen where I
am cooking. I already had a sealed membrane keyboard with an
integrated pointer and wireless-N USB dongle to complete the package.
Shipped, my “new” dual core 2.8Ghz Pentium D system with 80Gb
hard drive and Intel graphics was under $150. [The turntable was $20
and an upgrade from 1Gb to 4Gb of used DDR2 was $30, but both were
worth it.] Since the box shipped with Ubuntu, I thought installing
the distro of my choice would be of no consequence, and that is where
my tale begins.</P>
<P><BR>
</P>
<P>I'm going to start my story towards the
end, as it is the most important part. After the installation of four
Linux distros in as many days (counting the Ubuntu 10.04 LTS the box
shipped with, a partial installation of SolusOS 2r5, Fuduntu and
finally Lubuntu 12.04), I discovered I couldn't boot due to Grub
corruption (machine POSTed, but where I should have seen Grub, I got
a blank screen with a cursor in the upper left corner). 
</P>
<P><BR>
</P>
<P>A. I thought I would do a total disk
wipe and start over, but DBAN from the UBCD for Windows said it
wasn't able to write to the drive (never seen that before) 
</P>
<P>B. Started downloading the latest
RescaTux ISO. Meanwhile, I found an article that told me I could
repair Grub with a Ubuntu CD
https://ubuntunigeria.wordpress.com/2010/09/02/how-to-restore-grub2-using-an-ubuntu-live-cd-or-thumb-drive/
, so I tried booting from the Lubuntu 12.04 CD (using the boot device
selector built into the hardware). Same black screen, preceded by a
message that the boot device I had selected was not present. Same
thing with the Fuduntu DVD that had worked the day before. With the
exception of UBCD, I couldn't get a live CD to boot. 
</P>
<P>C. Now having downloaded the RescaTux
ISO, and suspecting a problem with the optical drive, I used
Unetbootin to make a RescaTux bootable thumb drive. RescaTux 
</P>
<P>(
https://download2.berlios.de/rescatux/rescatux_cdrom_usb_hybrid_i386_486-amd64_0.30b7_sg2d.iso
) has a pre-boot menu that let's you choose between 32 and 64 bit
images, but that was as far as I got, nothing happened when I made my
selection. 
</P>
<P>D. At this point, I am suspecting a
hardware failure that just happened to coincide with my last install.
This is a Ultra Small Form Factor Dell, the kind you see as point of
sale or hospital systems, so there weren't many components I could
swap out. I didn't have any DDR2 laying around, but I did test each
of the two sticks the system came with separately with the same
results. I then reasoned a Grub error should go away if disabled the
hard drive, so I physically disconnected the drive and disabled the
SATA connector in the BIOS. I still couldn't boot to a live CD.
Deciding there was a reason his machine was on the secondary market,
I hooked everything back up and reset the BIOS settings to the
defaults, still no luck. 
</P>
<P>E. As a Hail Mary the next day, I
burned the RescaTux ISO to a CD and hooked up and external USB
optical drive. This time, I booted to the Live CD, did the two step
grub repair, and when I unplugged the external drive, I was able to
boot right into my Lubuntu install. Now booting to Live CDs from the
original optical drive and from the thumb drive worked. RescaTux FTW.
</P>
<P><BR>
</P>
<P>Now a little bit on how I got in this
mess. As I said, the Dell shipped with 10.04, but I wanted something
less pedestrian than Ubuntu (ironic I wound up there anyway). I tried
Hybride, but once again, like my trial on the P4 I mentioned on
LinuxBasix, the Live CD booted, but the icons never appeared on the
desktop (I think it's a memory thing, the Dell only shipped with a
gig, shared with the integrated video). After Hybride, I really
wanted to be one of the cool kids and run SolusOS, but the install
hung twice transferring boot/initrd.img-3.3.6-solusos. I casted
around for a 64bit ISO I had on hand, and remembered I'd really
wanted to give Fuduntu a try. Fuduntu is a rolling release fork of
Fedora, with a Gnome 2 desktop, except that the bottom bar is
replaced with a Mac style dock, replete with bouncy icons (cute at
first,but I could tell right away they would get on my nerves).
However, I found I liked the distro, despite the fact I found the
default software choices a little light for a 900Mb download (Google
Office, Chromium, no Firefox, no Gimp). Worst of all, no Mumble in
the repos at all (really Fuduntu guys? While trying to install
Mumble, do you know how many reviews I found that can be summed up as
&quot;Fuduntu is great, but why is there no Mumble?&quot;).
Unfortunately, I put Mumble on the back burner while I installed and
configured my default set of comfort apps from the repos (Firefox,
XChat, Gimp, VLC, LibreOffice, etc). [BTW, with the anticipated
arrival of a 2.4ghz headset, I hope to be able to use the new machine
to join the LUG/podcast while preparing and dare I say eating
dinner.] 
</P>
<P><BR>
</P>
<P>I visited the Mumble installation page
on SourceForge, and found they no longer linked to .deb files and
fedora .rpms, as they assume you can install from your repositories.
Thinking someone must have found an easy solution, I hit Google. The
best answer I found was a page on the Fuduntu forums
(https://www.fuduntu.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=21&amp;t=2237 ), that
suggested downloading the Mumble and a dozen prerequisite library
.rpm's from a third party site called rpm.pbone.net. I visited
pbone.net, and found when I looked up each library, I got a dozen
different links to versions of the file. Then I saw a link that
seemed to offer the promise of simplifying my task, if I subscribed
to pbone.net, I could add their whole catalog as a repo. While
researching the legitimacy of pbone.net, I found them mentioned in
the same sentence as RPMFusion as an alternate repository for Fedora.
I decided to install the RPMFusion repos as well, thinking I might
find some of the needed libraries in there. I registered with pbone,
and discovered I would only have access to their repository for 14
days free, after which it would cost $3 a month (after all, hosting
such a service must cost money). I figured the free trial would at
least get Mumble installed, and went through the set up. Among the
questions I had to answer were which Fedora version I was running (I
picked 17, since Fuduntu is rolling) and 32 or 64 bit. pbone.net
generated a custom .repo file to place in my /etc/yum.repos.d
directory. At this time, I'd already set up RPMFusion. 
</P>
<P><BR>
</P>
<P>The fun started when I ran 'yum
update'. I got &quot;Error: Cannot find a valid baseurl for repo:
rpmfusion-free&quot;. It turns out (
https://optics.csufresno.edu/~kriehn/fedora/fedora_files/f10/howto/repositories.html
) the location of the RPMFusion servers are usually commented out in
the .repo files, Fedora must know where they are, but I guess Fuduntu
does not. I uncommented each of the baseurl statements (there are
three) in each of the RPMFusion .repo files (there are four files,
free, non-free, free-testing, and non-free testing). I then re-ran
'yum update', this time I was told the paths for the RPMFusion
baseurl's didn't exist. I opened up the path in a browser and
confirmed it was indeed wrong. I pruned sub directories from the path
one by one until I found a truncated url that actually existed on the
RPMFusion FTP server. I looked at the .repo files again and figured
out the paths referenced included global environment variables the
were inconstant between Fedora and Fuduntu. For instance, $release in
Fedora would return a value like 15, 16, or 17, where in Fuduntu it
resolves to 2012. I figured if I took the time, I could walk up and
down the FTP server and come up with literal paths to put in the
RPMFusion .repo files, but instead I just moved the involved .repo
files into another folder to be dealt with another day. 
</P>
<P><BR>
</P>
<P>I again launched 'yum update'. This
time had no errors, but I was getting an excessive amount of new
files from my new pbone.net repo ('yum update' updates your sources
and downloads changed files all in one operation). It's possible the
rolling Fuduntu is closer Fedora 16, so when I told pbone.net I was
running 17, all the files in the alternate repo were newer than what
i had. In any case, I had no wish to be dependent of a repo I had to
rent at $3 a month, so I canceled the operation, admitted defeat, and
started downloading the 64bit version of Lubuntu. I know I said I
would rather have a more challenging distro, but because of it's
location, this needs to be a just works PC, not a hack on it for half
a day box. I would have like to have given Mageia, Rosa, or PCLinuxOS
a shot, but too many packages from outside the repos (case in point,
Hulu Desktop) are only available in Debian and Fedora flavors. You
know the rest, I installed Lubuntu, borked my Grub, loop back to the
top of the page.</P>
