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Over the last month, I initiated a series of emails regarding details
of disk troubleshooting and setting up new systems. Below is a
summary of what I have found.
</p>
</span><div><span><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; line-height: 100%">DISK TOOLS</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; line-height: 100%">Seagate and Western
Digital have free disk diagnostic tools.
</p></span></div><span>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in; line-height: 100%">WD is an executable
that runs under Windows. It recognizes and will run diagnostics on
other brands of disks, including those mounted on USB. I only used it to
read the SMART results.
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in; line-height: 100%">Seagate has a
similar tool. Apparently it requires rebooting Windows before it will
run. Then it keeps running in the background as a monitor.
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in; line-height: 100%">Seagate also has a
bootable USB tool. It is a version of Linux that will copy files. No
diagnostics. IMHO, CABAL people would be better served with a live
USB of a Linux that includes a partition editor, Some of the newer
versions of gnome and KDE partition manager tools will access the
SMART diagnostics. Store that USB in a safe place.
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in; line-height: 100%">BTW, it is possible
to completely copy and restore a full disk, including windows OS,
with just fdisk and dd. Years ago, I found a URL with all of the
steps and did it. I am glad I made my own annotated notes because
that website no longer exists. The full step by step is 2 page long.
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in; line-height: 100%">DISTROS AND APS</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in; line-height: 100%">Earlier in the year,
I wanted to install a particular ap (openscad). It was in debian sid,
but not buster. Gee, I was using testing thinking I would get newer
versions of aps. Obviously not correct assumption.<br></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in; line-height: 100%">So before I did an
install on my new laptop, I looked at available packages. Quite a
few, including gnucash (accounting program) and kicad (PC layout
program sponsored in part by CERN) were also missing from testing.
The versions in stable were quite old. Meanwhile, ubuntu is based on
stable, but has much newer versions of the aps I wanted.
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in; line-height: 100%">DESKTOPS
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in; line-height: 100%">A previous email
discussed RAM and desktops. A little web searching revealed:</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in; line-height: 100%">* Gnome is touted as
being the most fancy and up to date, but you should have 4GB of RAM.
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in; line-height: 100%">* KDE is “less
fancy”, but only requires 2 GB.
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in; line-height: 100%">* LX is described as
minimal and not shiny for systems with 1GB or less.
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in; line-height: 100%">I have been using
LXDE for some time. It generally lets me find the aps I use. I
upgraded to 20 GB RAM, but will still use LX. The most common linux for
raspberry pi also uses lxde, so I have a consistent environment</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in; line-height: 100%">INSTALL CHALLENGES</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in; line-height: 100%">So I downloaded and
tried the live lubuntu. Seemed ok, so I proceeded to do an install.
To be on the safe side, I did the install on a USB SSD. I’ll get to
the internal drive when I am satisfied.
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in; line-height: 100%">Naturally the
lubuntu install is not the same as the debian installer I have used a
number of times. The one place that took many tries was the disk
partitioning. I selected the appropriate drive, but it would not do a
default install. It was not very helpful. Sometimes, just before
committing to reformat, it pointed to something I needed to go back and fix. Other
times, it completed the install, but the install would boot. Some
details:</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in; line-height: 100%">* need to explicitly create 500MB partition for grub or EFI.
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in; line-height: 100%">* need to set boot
and esp flags from a pull-down menu.
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in; line-height: 100%">* But the installer
did not actually set the flags,I had to go back to the live disk and
use the disk partition tool to set the flags.
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in; line-height: 100%">* The original
internal HD was formatted GPT, but the BIOS would only recognize USB
with the old (msdos) partition table.
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in; line-height: 100%">* After trying most
of the wrong combinations of the above,finally got it.
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in; line-height: 100%">BTW, lubuntu 18-10
uses LXQt instead of LXDE. The biggest difference I found regarded
the applications menu. After I had installed many packages, several
were not to be found in the menu. I could not find a version of lxmed
to manually add them. To my relief, I found that the menu was updated
after a reboot.
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in; line-height: 100%">SWAP SPACE</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in; line-height: 100%">As part of setting
up partitions, I naturally recalled the need for a swap partition.
Maybe this was not necessary. After more web searching, here is my
understanding.
</p>
</span><div><span><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; line-height: 100%">Long ago, the full
linux kernel and associated functions was much bigger than the total
RAM. Swap was used to more efficiently save and reload pieces that
were not needed at the moment. The usual recommendation was allocate a
swap space twice the size of RAM. Now well into the 21<sup>st</sup>
century, the linux OS has grown to more than a GB, but most computers
much bigger RAM. With 2GB of RAM, swap is possibly not needed.
Depending on your usage. For example, if that includes handling really big files,
a big swap partition could help performance.
</p></span></div><span>
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