Jumping into Linux

[teuast]

Hey all! I just finished building my first PC the other day, and my Hackintosh install refused to work and Windows costs money, so I went with Ubuntu 14.04.2. First of all: HOLY CRAP, THE LEARNING CURVE. I had to Google how to do basically everything. Second of all: OH MY GOD THE SPEED. Jumping from a mid-2007 Core 2 Duo T6600 iMac to a 4790K with an SSD, THIS IS INSANE. I'm getting the hang of it, and I'm learning to love the command line in a way I never did before, but I still feel like a kid who's just gotten his driver's license being plopped behind the wheel of a McLaren F1.

 

So first of all: I'm having a lot of difficulty with my hard drive. It scans as /dev/sda (my boot drive is /dev/sdb, don't ask), it responds when I ping it or whatever, and I figured out how to mount it to a directory, but I ran into the issue that I didn't have permissions to write to it, and in attempting to fix it I think I screwed something up. I format the disk and get the following error message: "Error synchronizing after initial wipe: Timed out waiting for object (udisks-error-quark, 0)," and when I try to access it, I get :

 

"Error mounting /dev/sda1 at /media/teuast/e688bf56-468a-44aa-87cb-1155624e7b1b: Command-line `mount -t "ext3" -o "uhelper=udisks2,nodev,nosuid" "/dev/sda1" "/media/teuast/e688bf56-468a-44aa-87cb-1155624e7b1b"' exited with non-zero exit status 32: mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sda1,

       missing codepage or helper program, or other error

       In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try

       dmesg | tail  or so

Anybody have any idea how to solve this and set the drive up so I can use it as my main onboard storage?

 

Second issue: Steam? When I try to run it, it says "You are missing the following 32-bit libraries, and Steam may not run:

libc.so.6"; when I click okay, a Terminal window pops up saying "Steam needs to install these additional packages: libgl1-mesa-dri:i386, libgl1-mesa-glx:i386, libc6:i386"; and when I type in my sudo password to install them, a bunch of other nonsense happens and it doesn't work. I can copy and paste it if you like, but it's a lot. Anybody know how to fix this?

 

Thanks!

 

[Hspasta]

First issue: Is this some storage you're trying to mount manually? Are you sure that the partition you're trying to mount is ext3? It also looks like it's complaining about one of the options too.

 

You shouldn't have to manually mount drives though. Nautilus or whatever Ubuntu's file manager should automatically do this for you.

 

Second issue: Please paste the error messages. If it's too much to post, use a pastebin service like pastie or gist. Have you also checked out their wiki?

[teuast]

1. I'm mounting it manually because for some reason it's not being recognized automatically. I'm sure it's ext3 because I ran blkid on it and that's what it returned.

 

I fiddled with it a bit more, though, and now I have it back to where it was before, with the restricted permissions. It says it's owned by root and under the root group. I think if I can change the owner on that I can get it working the way I want it to. Edit: For clarification, I still don't know how to do that.

 

2. OK, here it is. I have looked at that, but it was probably at about 5:00 this morning when I had already been working on the project for close to ten hours. I'll check it out again. Thanks!

[Tallix]

Chances are that you don't need to explicitly pass the fs type when you mount the drive. Try issuing a simpler command like this one, and letting the program do some of the more complicated stuff for you:

$ sudo mount /dev/sda1 /path/to/mountpoint

As for your Steam libraries issue, try updating your repositories and seeing if it fixes things for you:

$ sudo apt-get update

Follow any instructions or recommendations given at the command line.

 

And while you're at it, you may as well upgrade all of your software as well (this might take a while depending on how much there is to do):

$ sudo apt-get upgrade && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

Then try installing the needed software again.

 

 

If you have not already installed your graphics card's proprietary driver, then you might want to do that. If you install a little tool called Jockey, it should be able to help you with this (and with any other proprietary drivers you might want to use, for that matter)

$ sudo apt-get install jockey-gtk

A quick note: I'm not sure what kind of machine this installation exists on, but if the hardware is old enough the open source drivers may actually be better.

 

 

Welcome to Linux! I hope that your experience turns out to be fruitful.

Also, if you're impressed by Ubuntu's speed, you should see what a well-tuned Gentoo or Arch system can do...

A pretty mature Arch system, which I use day to day, boots in 5 seconds on my laptop, which is from 2006. It has an SSD, but there's still a bottleneck in the SATA I connection.

I once had Gentoo booting in 15 seconds on an old HP workstation with nothing but two single-core Netburst Xeons and a spinning IDE hard drive. It's insane, but installation takes forever (stupid compiling times).

[bradscoolio]

1.

Find out the UUID of the hard drive with 'sudo blkid' should look something like this: F88275C4827587C0

sudo echo 'UUID=*insert uuid here* /media/*insert directory here* ext3 defaults 0 0' >> /etc/fstab

This'll make the hard drive mount automatically at boot.

Find out more about fstab here: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Fstab

 

2. Try installing Steam with 'sudo apt-get install steam' that is if you're not doing it that way already.