Zorin

Ian hi, and to BC and the Linux side of things!

Just read your profile - Storage "9 TB'ish". Cool - I have 5TB plus change. With that sort of storage, the world of Linux is your oyster.

Wigan, Lancashire? Reminds me of a football team, - my wife's family hailed from Yorkshire, or is that a dirty word?

Enjoy, and look forward to hearing more from you.

Wizard

Edited typo

Edited by wizardfromoz, 20 January 2015 - 06:40 AM.

Thanks for the warm welcome, Wizardfromoz.

I have storage wise A 1Tb WD green, 2x 1.5 Tb WD green, 3 TB seagate, 1.5 Tb Samsung wireless media drive, caddy I can stick some of my old drives in A 500/320 or 2x 250 Gb and 4x fujitsu SAS cheetah's witch were raid striped as my old boot drive before switching to SSD.

Yes Wigan does have a football team although not really very good, but on the rugby side we do much better.

My father was born in Pontefract Yorkshire so not a dirty word at  all.

I use Zorin for ease of use and install simplicity, I have quite a few friends using it along side Windows now and to be honest really like Robolinux on my PC as my preffered OS but doesn't have the drivers for most laptops so Zorin is a good easy to use alternative.

It has a bit of a mac feel to the interface and is as easy to use as Zorin and as many other distro's out there, I regularily abuse an old 80 Gb with an old machine whitch never has the casing put back on any more just for messing with different distro's.

I have in part converted some of my family and friends to use Linux especially when surfing because it is so much more robust than Windows and do a lot less cleaning of friends and families machines now.

Love open source and it's community etc and hope MS stays far away!

Regards, Ian.

Cat, thanks for the insight on opera, I've also had troubles with midori, and to a lesser extent firefox updating, on and off.  Also, I've said a few times in different threads the same as you did about finding what fits for you.  There are enough distros to find several real good fits, and we all don't like the same thing.  I don't remember who said it, rburkartjo or jonuk maybe, sorry if it's someone else, as I was beginning, that the desktop, mint, mate, lxde, xfce,  etc make a large difference in the feel.  I've tried one Open suze (it was in a build I accidently downloaded in Sept) that I really liked.  I've installed open suze with every desktop they offer on my other computer and it aint the same, doesn't feel right.  That's just an example, I'm not asking for help.

   And Wiz, my Zorin has an updater icon in a conky, or is that docky a line across the bottom, plus I have it set to notify me daily if updates are present.

  And Paul, as I mentioned above, is it possible windows is going the same speed, but zorin (esp the lite desktop) is enough faster to make windows feel real slow.  Keep playing with different distros, and you should find a couple real good fits.  Most of the ubuntu distros I've used have the same basics as far as I know.

  ianmcqui thanks for the info on the z icon, I was on a different distro but knew there was a way.

Looks like there's a lot of users here whom enjoys ZorinOS, and that's great! 

Had I known it before Mint (don't think it was around or known well then), may be running it myself. 

 

 

I have storage wise A 1Tb WD green, 2x 1.5 Tb WD green, 3 TB seagate, 1.5 Tb Samsung wireless media drive, caddy I can stick some of my old drives in A 500/320 or 2x 250 Gb and 4x fujitsu SAS cheetah's witch were raid striped as my old boot drive before switching to SSD.

Ian, that's a massive collection of backup drives you have there.....well over 2x what I have in 4TiB total, two 1TiB Samsung HD103SJ's (many regarded as better than Caviar Black of the same specs), a 1TiB WD Caviar Black, and two 2.5" 500GiB backup drives, one a Hitachi, the other a Seagate, all SATA ll. Also have a 500GiB WD RE4 in my main PC, which I was using for quick backups, until all of these "crypto" infections came along, after that, it became a Data drive to the three SSD's, and also have my Linux Mint /home & Swap partitions (the root partition is on a SSD). 

Was tempted to grab a 4TiB WD Backup drive on promo for $119, and here's the reason I didn't. The negative reviews by far outweighed the positives, and at that price for the space, it just looked too good to be true. Maybe it was the cheap enclosure, but if it's cracked open, there goes the warranty. My guess is that it's a drive they came out with, didn't perform or sell well & repackaged as a backup drive. Rarely though, have I seen these fail, normally it's the cheap connectors in the enclosures, which are plastic & retains heat bad. Half of the negative reviewers reported bad sectors from the go. 

I prefer to use a docking station anyway, if a backup is going to take awhile, such as the internal RE4, can place a fan close to the drive if it's getting more than warm to the touch. 

Oh, and I almost forgot, do have a 1TiB Seagate (SATA lll), however it shipped with my Dell PC & will have to leave as is until the warranty expires in September 2017. Then will make a backup drive out of it too. Actually that drive is 3 egg rated on Newegg, with high failure rates, maybe it was for the best I got it out of my PC. 

I doubt I'll catch up with you on storage any time soon!.

 

 

And (dare I incur the wrath of my good mate Cat?) - in many ways I would call it more of a dropin replacement for Windows XP/Windows 7 users than even Linux Mint Mate.

That may be so, and to be fair, there has been reviewers of ZorinOS on sites there open source is at least somewhat promoted, who stated the same. Linux Mint isn't the "only" drop in replacement for Windows, just the most popular for now. A large majority of Linux Mint users came straight from Windows, many others are defectors from Ubuntu when they went with the Unity desktop, which was very unpopular at release, don't know about now. 

Everyone has their right to opinion here, as well as choice of Linux distro, and that I want to make clear. 

I'd much rather seeing folks running Zorin over XP & Vista, and their computers, if possible, would thank them for the less strain on components. Especially those coming from Vista, the OS should have been named "Bigfoot", had it once on my second best computer, a MSI notebook (specs in my sig below), and it weighed it down. Very seldom did it use less than 4GB RAM, and CPU usage would always be hitting 60-80%, and idle at 20%. Can't imagine the strain it placed on the computers it was built to run on. 

Anything to get folks off of these insecure (or heavyweight) OS's, I'm all for!

Cat

Zorin is very young as distro's go and I tried it as soon as it was released when I spotted it on Distrowatch, Ilike Mint too and have it on one of my drives as well.

I have for example the touchpad dissabled while typing set in Zorin's settings, it doesn't work! My big fat hands still move the cursor to a place I don't want to be and messing up a sentence, so bit of cardboard taped over it works fine. I do low tech when needed!

WiFi doesn't allways connect and believe me only a restart does the trick, you can resart the router, type in PW again nothing works and very strange and annoying. It's done the same with another router so I'm at a loss to explain why it does this, could be a bug but I think router.

Your getting a good collection yourself and I tend to stay clear of anything above 2Tb because Windows sees them as 846 Mb even partitioned as two 1.5TB and Linux doesn't of course it has no problem?

Docking stations are a Godsend for people like us and I don't know about the failure rates concerning drives, it is a mass produced item after all.

Yep I wasn't that keen on the unity desktop either and I agree wholeheartedly about Linux and it's community choice, freedom and not being controlled by some uncaring money orientated company is just a breath of fresh air.

VISTA!!!! I thought profanity wasn't allowed on this forum.

In 2008 just before my Nieces finals to get into college, 2 days before actually! Well Windows Vista did an update and when Norton did it's scan it deleted it along with part of the boot sector making an unbootable machine and a Niece in tears.

I had some help from a friend at a local computer repair shop help me rebuild the boot sector and all was fine she got her files off and into college.

So Norton went and I kept my eye on the damm thing, an update would install, things like WiFi would stop working, another update working again! So I may have been the first person in the UK to run out and buy W7 out of shear desperation, I was still using XP God rest it's soul.

I have two dogs looking at me with 'hey you where's our walk'? the little one, the lapdog I think would come back as a laptop instead or thats what it's eyes are telling me I'd get more attention. LOL.

Nice chatting!

Ian.

So far, have been lucky, have had only one SATA drive fail on me, the dreaded Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 (500GiB), of which there are thousands of forum posts over. Could have repaired it, but the trouble didn't justify it, fortunately had just backed it up 2-3 days before failing. 

IDE drives were a different tale, have had 4-5 Maxtor drives fail, but to be fair, all had over 3 years of time actively on (over 1,000 days). Yet at the same time, have some WD 80GiB's last much longer (over 1,400 days & would fire up, if I pulled the PC out of the closet. It's just that a Dell Dimension 2400 no longer meets my needs, but who knows, one day I may use it for something. 

About ZorinOS, have any of you donated, received & installed the Ultimate or Professional editions, and if so, what extra features are included? Is a license key needed for the install, or can the same ISO be used on multiple computers? If it could be installed on more than one, that lowers the cost. Really, only Ultimate would appeal to me. 

Cat

The only drive failures I come accross are 2.5" drives really, when Windows is being a pain and they've skimmed the laptop accross the room out of fustration.

Thats the problem I supose how many times do you need to back something up? The reason I have so much storage is so I don't loose something, the 3 TB drive is the main second drive and the three green drives shut themselves down if you don't access them every few minutes, so effectively switched off and not consuming power etc.

The media drive is for convienience only as it will stream to the smart TV or any other device, so that means I probably have things copied four times at least in some cases.

Apparently cooling the drive with dry ice can extend the time you need to recover information on a drive that is about to die. Hate hearing those death clicks! Don't forget to seal it in a water tight covering first!

I think as regards to IDE drives as opposed to SATA basically the industry got better at making drives and the technology was there to back it up.

Any one using the relatively new WD red NAS drives? A trade off between speed and longevity, rated 24/7 use not like standard HD's rated 8/5 ish?

I have an old WD 80 Gb too from early 2000 ish and still going strong for some reason! Dust in machines and over heating is definitely a major problem to the longevity of hardware.

I have found the basic install of Zorin to be perfectedly adequate for daily use and haven't purchased an upgrade as yet, the ultimate edition is what I'd go for as well at only a tenner! Don't really know how much better it would be though and can you install on more than one machine I don't know either?

With linux it's kind of like being at a candy store and there is so so much to choose from, instead of a vending machine with only one type of chocolate bar on offer.

The Linux world is percieved as too geeky and people just want to open a box and it to work I guess, thats the problem. When I tell friends or people I meet and when the conversation drifts in a particular way, I tell them about the Linux and open software community I think the 'open' bit scares them somewhat and would rather place their faith a big corperation. BTW the conversation always tends to drift that way if I can do so. LOL.

I'll continue for the moment to use Zorin as a freebee for now and install it for friends etc that I think it will suit. If I try the upgrade I'll let you know.

Just coming up on the time where I re format the machine and put the Windows disc back in and start again with a fresh install, not that I have a problem but a habit I've aquired over the years and then put a Linux distro back on as well.

Keep them drives cool and carry on!

Ian.

I haven't made a donation yet either, I sort of like the lite mode, or did, I messed up installing a new desktop on opensuse, and installed it on all 5 operating systems on 5 different partitions (all logical).  That's why I still reluctant to use terminal much.

 

 

Apparently cooling the drive with dry ice can extend the time you need to recover information on a drive that is about to die. Hate hearing those death clicks! Don't forget to seal it in a water tight covering first!

  Aren't you taking the excitement out of it?   As far as backing things up on a external drive kept plugged in, my wife's laptop just started not booting, come to find out it was reading the external hard drive as a cd (first on the bios list) and trying to boot from that.  She unplugs it now when she boots, and no problem.  

Hi  bud, I've got opensuse on one of mine too and it's OK, 13.2 is out now, have you got the t shirt, mug or cap LOL from their online shop?

Which desktop were you using and whitch one were you changing to if you don't mind me asking,?

I'm kind of an xfce man if available on a particular distro and I suppose try and make whatever I'm using feel sort of the same as something else as much as possible. That way at least when someone catches me using a distro I haven't used for a while so I don't look like a two year old with a rubiks cube.

The other day messing with a W8 machine hadn't messed with W8 a few months, I did everything except chew the corners of the dammed thing for a couple of minutes LOL.

I really don't like the task of getting someones treasured data and photo's off a dying HD.

I remove the drive and plug it into my HP then run the analysis software.

Iv'e had some surprises on just how many fly errors and moved blocks have been made to keep it working, you have to admit drive software at least with regards to SSD is like having a mini computer running your HD.

I have the same problem with an HP 8Gb pen drive and it's been reformatted a dozen times so go figure! It was also read as 8.2 GB capacity when first used and since then only 7. whatever. HP magic?

I find some lite distro's are a bit too lite for me and I don't know what Zorins is like but with the size and minimal cost of pen drives what difference would it have on speed if running a full version?

Since this damm HP pen drive tries to boot anyway I might down load Zorin lite and give it a look.

Great if using a work machine or someone elses machine to not leave any traces of your activities and I know you can just install the Tor bundle to a pen drive or Palemoon portable, sorry off topic again.

Keep your thoughts coming bud, Ian.

I'm not sure which desktop I was trying for.  I accidentally downloaded a build for my windows 8 uefi laptop, and really liked it.  I've tried every desktop they list in the install, that's sort of nice, and got some instructions for installing from the terminal.  I tried lxde, and every distro except peach switched, and I think it already was.  Also they all started running the same background picture.  I have a way of messing up when I try using the terminal.  I'm thinking it may be a thing with logical partitions instead of primary.  This old machine will only divide into 4 primary partitions, I guess that's one good thing about the new ones.  I guess some old men should stay away from computers.  O well, it's fun learning.  One of the reasons I started was for a hobby after I retired, but I stay busier now than when I was working.  

And come on back Paul, we'll let you say things here too.

He'll be back - the OP is a professional muso (muzo) and works and sleeps odd hours.

 

This old machine will only divide into 4 primary partitions

That does not apply just to old ones. Linux only supports four primary partitions.

Once you see yourself as needing more, you go into the partition table and make one of the partitions "give birth to" an Extended Partition. The extended partition can support any number of Logical Partitions, subject to available space, and you can fill those with Linux Distros. Any and every Logical Partition can be made bootable.

You can only subdivide one (1) Primary Partition in such a manner.

To give you an example I have a 2TB HDD with LMM17 Qiana, Zorin OS9 and TimNet formerly known as Zorbuntu. I am going to flick TimNet over to my 3TB external HDD so I don't lose the curious mutant, and I will work on its secrets from there.

Over time, I might have decided that 50GB is heaps of space for a Linux Distro (I am excluding Home folder/Partition for the moment, also Swap). I can then shrink the first partition to 50GB for LMM17, the 2nd housing Zorin to 50GB, and put a 3rd Distro allowing 50GB on the 3rd partition.

That leaves me with the 4th and final Primary Partition, of 1.85TB, to play with. Create the Extended Partition, generate 37 Logical Partitions of 50GB each, and fill them with 37 Distros. 40 Distros, all bootable, on my HDD.

Sounds crazy, but possible.

Wiz

 

 I have a way of messing up when I try using the terminal.

Me too.

Hey guys- back from rehearsal- I don't know how i did it -but I installed Peach on a 150 gig partition,however, now I have only the bootloader for Windows7 and Peach- my LMM and Zorin have disappeared. I guess i can format that partition again,but not sure if the other bootloader will come back- I should have known better that to plunge in without talking to you guys first- also- How do I save and post a screenshot- or do i have to upload it to Photobucket or something like that?

 

How do I save and post a screenshot

See my comment at #9 over at your Peach Topic ... you're getting your Topics mixed up.

Perhaps we will have to name them with chords, or the Tonic Solfa

Laughing WITH you, Paul, never AT you

Wiz

BTW - good time to start using Aptik and Timeshift, have we spoken with you about them?

Try this again, google just closed on me in the middle of things.  I posted a partial (I'm getting more forgetful) response on your peach thread.  Go ahead and enter peach, play some if you want, but go to grub customizer, enter your password, choose burg over grub2 (some of the intelligent people here might be able to explain a burg to you), then on the next page is where I get confused.  

You will get all your options for operating systems, generic, recovery mode, default, and a few other's on every distro.  It will list ubuntu for most ubuntu derivatives and the version (the partition number is there also).  It looks something like

Ubuntu Gnu/Linux with Linux 3.13.0-37 generic (default, etc) 

menuentry/script:linux/Partition :/dev/sda 13 (Or whatever your partition is)

The ones you click on will be what appears on your boot menu.  Make sure you click on every one you want on the boot menu.  Altho you can get back in and change at any time.  What you mark are your boot options.  Then you save.  I just checked, and I might have lied.  You can move the options up and down to change the order they appear.  (I don't want to change mine, and save is the next option for me going thru my grub customizer.)  Then I think you can box or mark all in order and save.  You must save and then install to MBR (master boot record) .  You do the last in file in the grub customizer.  There are a lot of other options for changing things there too, for the way it looks, etc, pretty basic stuff.  If you find what they do let me know.  And if you want to cheat, there is a help menu.  I'm good at trying something new while I'm real busy and messing everything up, so I haven't changed anything else.  I hope this helps, I'll be back on and off and checking this and the peach thread.  It's nice to have people trying what I like.  Hope you do too, but we are each different and so are our likes.