migration windows to linux

[Stub Mandrel]

Just tried Stellarium - 'Your openGL subsytem has problems', works but hangs on exit. Completely locks the computer.

That's enough stress for one evening ?

 

[pete_l]

4 hours ago, alacant said:

Hey, you're not gonna believe this:

Taken from here.

It looks like this:

It runs indi, but you'd never nor need to know. You connect your mount and camera(s) using your existing cables and velcro it to your telescope. Switch on and connect to it using your phone, tablet, Linux or dare I say it, Windows computer. Point and click until you understand it.

Indeed. Once you have found that. I would suggest you look on the site's home page : https://stellarmate.com/ The description of the actual function is very well hidden in all the hype, buzz-words and eye-candy.

Edited August 26, 2018 by pete_l

[alacant]

25 minutes ago, Stub Mandrel said:

Yes telling me wifi available!

That must count as part way there, surely. 

[Guest]

4 hours ago, alacant said:

Hey, you're not gonna believe this:

Taken from here.

It looks like this:

It runs indi, but you'd never nor need to know. You connect your mount and camera(s) using your existing cables and velcro it to your telescope. Switch on and connect to it using your phone, tablet, Linux or dare I say it, Windows computer. Point and click until you understand it.

That looks like a Raspberry Pi 3b which is hugely overpriced. 

https://smile.amazon.co.uk/Raspberry-Pi-Model-Quad-Motherboard/dp/B01CD5VC92/ref=smi_www_rco2_go_smi_g9905632998?_encoding=UTF8&*Version*=1&*entries*=0&ie=UTF8

for about £50 then install any software you want usually for free

[Alien 13]

2 hours ago, Stub Mandrel said:

What a load of crap Linux is.

I have quoted you out of context but that sums my experience up. Its painfully slow compared to Win 10 and so difficult to even install.

Alan

[alacant]

7 minutes ago, Sland said:

install any software you want

The point is that it just works; someone has spent 10 minutes installing Linux and indi and then fixed it into a white box. It would takes months for normal users to get anywhere near that.

[Guest]

28 minutes ago, alacant said:

The point is that it just works; someone has spent 10 minutes installing Linux and indi and then fixed it into a white box. It would takes months for normal users to get anywhere near that.

I agree completely but for those with more experience (or less nerves) they could save about £100/$100

[Davey-T]

45 minutes ago, Sland said:

I agree completely but for those with more experience

More patience, more time, more---------

Dave

[The Admiral]

To be fair, I did dabble with Linux Mint a few years ago. It ran, slowly, from cd on an old Vista laptop of my wife's. I also swapped the hard drive and loaded the OS onto the machine. I was surprised that wi-fi worked, and I never had all this trouble that Stub Mandrel is going through. Then again, I didn't try  loading any astro software as my wife wanted access to old files so I had to swap the hard drives back again, and I haven't dabbled since.

Is all this trouble because of the 'flavour' of Linux being installed?

Ian

[Stub Mandrel]

I've looked up sudo and grep but although I now know what they I can't say I grok them, especially grep which seems to be resistant to a simple explanation of its syntax, although I've found some GNU documentation.

Sleeping on it, I am impressed by the relatively prompt returns from hibernation, although startup doesn't seem faster than windows. Window positioning and resizing seems hit and miss and I don't like losing two screen rows to status bars - why can't the be combined as one?

On reflection, the main issue I faced seems to be that Linux likes a restart when something is changed. Windows used to be plagued by multiple restart requests but has got better. Linux seems to 'hope it works now', except it hardly ever seems to and a restart is what is needed.

The chaotic approach to documentation is as I expected, with a lot of online advice being inaccurate at a mostly trivial level - referring to earlier versions of software or being plagued by dead links or changed target pages.  A good example of this is searching for a utility  (in this case terminal,a pretty basic requirement) (a) assuming you know which Joomla interface/style you have (It was pure fluke that I had discovered I have 'Gnome') (b) that where things are depends on the style you are using, not just the version of linux and (c) the utility wasn't even in the place it was supposed to be. Must admit I prefer the multi-use box in windows that emulate a command line but treats any unknown command as a search.

It's clear that Linux is aimed at programmers and the command level interface is much more complex than that in Windows (in many ways just an MSDOS emulation). Windows give highly structured graphical interfaces, Linux does to but these are all 'aftermarket' and depend on the flavour of Linus you are using. My guess is that this effectively tie me into Ubuntu unless I want to do the heavy lifting and look under the hood. The downside seems to be that many basic activities seem to require looking under the hood - I had heard that loading a device driver in Linux was the worst aspect of the system, and my experience last night seems to agree with that! The biggest problem there was that installing the driver required (1) a custom package rather than using a standard installer common to all drivers (2) the driver was in a separate place to the installer (3) the documentation was opaque, but also out of date as changes to the one ahdn't been reflected in the other. Very different from my usual experience which is normally to open device manager and automatically search for a driver, or at worst provide it on CD or download it and point device manager at it. The Linux approach was OK once it became clear the 'package' installer could find the driver automatically, but if I had not been able to jury rig a wired internet connection I don't think I could have found the required files and transferred them - and there was no guidance on how to point the installer at them

There seems to be a whole industry in websites that explain how to do things, but detail explanation is swamped by the same basic information over and again; it's odd that not all opensource is like this, finding Joomla help seems to be easy. It's a bit like searching for advice on making a spectrometer - you want real information, but it's swamped by cereal packet and drain tube designs that use bits of CD.

 

Finally, not really an issue with Linux, but with the way Astronomy Linux has been made. It's clearly a snapshot of someone else's system. Stellarium appears to be preloaded with someone else's equipment and location. What other information is lurking to trip me up - will CdC and EQmod have incorrect equipment pre-loaded - only time will tell, but it is always harder to set up a system that's got wrong settings in it, rather than no settings! This also meant I had to delete the pre-loaded ethernet connection before mine would work. I suspect many users with non-functioning wifi would not figure this out - it was only because it was telling me the connection was last used five months  ago(!) that I realised it wasn't my connection.

I suspect the originator of Astronomy Linux may not realise this and perhaps they need to rebuild a vanilla install.

[Stub Mandrel]

5 minutes ago, The Admiral said:

To be fair, I did dabble with Linux Mint a few years ago. It ran, slowly, from cd on an old Vista laptop of my wife's. I also swapped the hard drive and loaded the OS onto the machine. I was surprised that wi-fi worked, and I never had all this trouble that Stub Mandrel is going through. Then again, I didn't try  loading any astro software as my wife wanted access to old files so I had to swap the hard drives back again, and I haven't dabbled since.

Is all this trouble because of the 'flavour' of Linux being installed?

Ian

I suspect that some of the issues were because it wasn't really a blank install, I suspect what I have done is really uploading a mirror of someone else's system onto my laptop. If I did that with Windows there would be multiple issues (not least with licensing).

[JamesF]

What spec machine are you using for this, Neil?

James

[JamesF]

1 hour ago, Stub Mandrel said:

I've looked up sudo and grep but although I now know what they I can't say I grok them, especially grep which seems to be resistant to a simple explanation of its syntax, although I've found some GNU documentation.

In general, users of UNIX and its derivatives never log in as the system administrator (usually known as "root", or the superuser), but as a different user with more restricted privileges.  To do things only root can do, sudo allows a user to temporarily assume root's identity.  That's really all, though there is a configuration file that controls who is allowed to use sudo, what commands they're allowed to run and under what conditions (and in fact it allows one user to assume some other user's identity if configured to do so, too).  For a machine with a single user, most of that probably just isn't relevant.

You can probably ignore most of what grep can do as well, at least initially, and just use it for simple string searches.  Unless you're coding something to look for patterns in text it's probably not necessary to worry about regular expression syntax.  More than likely all you'll need to know about are the "-i" and "-l" flags (case-insensitive and print matching filenames only, respectively).

James

Edited August 27, 2018 by JamesF

[Stub Mandrel]

1 hour ago, JamesF said:

What spec machine are you using for this, Neil?

James

Dell Inspiron 1520, seems to be AMD Sempron 3600 with 2 gig of ram.

[JamesF]

So not state of the ark, but not exactly modern either?  Maybe about ten years old?  If it's a bit slow when running from the local disk my guess would be that the window manger is a bit lardy for that hardware and something lighter weight such as XFCE might help, but I don't know enough about Astronomy Linux to know what they've actually used.

James

[stash_old]

23 hours ago, kens said:

The RPi is a bit flakey when it is not shut down gracefully. BTW moving the RPi to boot from USB is not one way. Just a small change in one file on the SD card. You still need the SD card but the Boot sector is on the USB stick

Yep you are correct - Never actually tried it as I used Berryboot anyway which still boots initially from SD - but I had read this and sounds like I misread it DOH!!  

https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/hardware/raspberrypi/bootmodes/msd.md

Especially the "On Time Memory" bit.  LOL

On 26/08/2018 at 11:04, Stub Mandrel said:

Out of curiosity, have any of  us Windows users actually set up a windows machine as a result of this thread?

Don't actually understand that remark - Last count I have set up around 50 operating systems from scratch - from loading Holrith card based OS to modern day - its the same principle. Yes there are lots of "flavours" of Linux about but so what most bring something to the table as did the O/S before Microsoft dominated the market.

For "normal end users" Microsoft was a dream - spoon feed everything ,which is good, but trying to be everything to everyone is not easy. 

People use Linux for different reasons , its not geeky just different!

On 26/08/2018 at 12:08, alacant said:

It's unfortunate that this one has gone the linux-experts-only same way. Despite efforts to bring it back to on topic e.g. here , The acronym-laden-Linux-jargon  tecchies have made certain that even those curious few on the edge will now no longer have a go:(

Rant over!

Ok some truth so this will be my last post in this section - sorry for any offence (or take over LOL) - Did ask at the out set that SGL created a section on Linux Astro - which will never happen ?

Clear Skies !

 

On 26/08/2018 at 12:14, hughgilhespie said:

I have never seen any books that could do that with Linux

What are books LOL  - Linux for Dummies (no insult intended)  https://www.dummies.com/store/Computers-Internet/Operating-Systems/Linux.html

 

 

[The Admiral]

20 minutes ago, stash_old said:

Ok some truth so this will be my last post in this section - sorry for any offence (or take over LOL) - Did ask at the out set that SGL created a section on Linux Astro - which will never happen ?

To be fair, alacant's statement was in response to my comment that the thread had gone way over my head, as all other Linux threads end up doing!

Ian

Edited August 27, 2018 by The Admiral

[Stub Mandrel]

1 hour ago, JamesF said:

So not state of the ark, but not exactly modern either?  Maybe about ten years old?  If it's a bit slow when running from the local disk my guess would be that the window manger is a bit lardy for that hardware and something lighter weight such as XFCE might help, but I don't know enough about Astronomy Linux to know what they've actually used.

James

NOOOOOOOO!!!!!

Changing bits of Linux is exactly what I want to avoid!

It's not slow, just no faster than Vista!

[Stub Mandrel]

58 minutes ago, stash_old said:

What are books LOL  - Linux for Dummies (no insult intended)  https://www.dummies.com/store/Computers-Internet/Operating-Systems/Linux.html

Loose leaf format, some pages are A4, some foolscap, some US letter and all in the wrong order with no index... but each one is individually numbered and guaranteed to be different to every other  copy. ?

[Stub Mandrel]

40 minutes ago, The Admiral said:

To be fair, alacant's statement was in response to my comment that the thread had gone way over my head, as all other Linux threads end up doing!

Ian

Which spurred me to say it had put me off installing Astronomy Linux. Ironically this got me to do it, it was tough and I think I might not have got there without help from this thread. I started on punched cards too, the first PC I used was a Sirius ?

 

[JamesF]

2 hours ago, Stub Mandrel said:

NOOOOOOOO!!!!!

Changing bits of Linux is exactly what I want to avoid!

It's not slow, just no faster than Vista!

I wasn't actually about to suggest that you change things now.  Assuming you continue however, and you start to feel a bit more comfortable with the environment, it's something to tuck behind your ear for later.

James

[alacant]

Three months on. Anyone got there yet?

I get the feeling that unless you've struggled -and mastered-  Linux on a daily basis for a long time, controlling your telescope and taking a photograph through it under indi is just not gonna happen.

I'm still not sure why much of the advice goes that Linux should be installed on an old computer. AFAICT, that serves only to make an already insurmountable task impossible!

Optimism...

Edited October 1, 2018 by alacant

[The Admiral]

1 hour ago, alacant said:

I'm still not sure why much of the advice goes that Linux should be installed on an old computer.

Isn't it because new computers could be locked into MS and would make installation difficult? And of course, you wouldn't want to seriously invest in something that isn't going to work. Well, rightly or wrongly, that's my concern.

Ian

[alacant]

29 minutes ago, The Admiral said:

you wouldn't want to seriously invest in something that isn't going to work

If there was a computer which was known to work when running indi under Linux and it came fully installed and ready to go (say it cost €50), would that remove the concern?

Edited October 1, 2018 by alacant

[The Admiral]

2 minutes ago, alacant said:

If there was a computer which was known to work when running indi under Linux and it came fully installed and ready to go (say it cost €50), would that remove the concern?

I'm thinking more of a general use computer costing £££, not one specifically for astro where the power can be quite small. Certainly for astro use, I'd probably opt for a pre-installed system.

Ian