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.

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.

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.

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).

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)

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.

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

( 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.

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.

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.

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 "Fuduntu is great, but why is there no Mumble?"). 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.]

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&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.

The fun started when I ran 'yum update'. I got "Error: Cannot find a valid baseurl for repo: rpmfusion-free". 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.

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.