The DistRogue

Wednesday, April 09, 2008

So Long, And Thanks For All The Fish!

After over a year and a half, several articles featured on Tuxmachines, and over 100000 hits, I may have to shut down the Distrogue. There are several reasons. First off, as you may have guessed from my hiatus, I've stopped reviewing distros. There's something wrong with my partitioning layout that's preventing GParted from seeing any partitions at all. Seeing as Fedora, Ubuntu, and Gentoo all use GParted for disk partitioning, and they're far from the only ones, this is preventing me from installing most distros. In addition, I'm running out of blank CDs and I can't find any that will boot from my computer's disk drive. My 1G USB key also refuses to boot. This leaves me stranded on PCLinuxOS (which runs into a kernel panic every time I try to boot it, no matter what my GRUB setup is) and MEPIS. Great. But there's a chance of fixing my partitioning problem (maybe having to back everything up and clear all the partitions) and finding some working media. Until then...
From MEPIS 7.0,
The Distrogue.

  • I now have a less limited supply of blank CDs.
  • I may buy an 8GB USB key in the near future.
  • Thanks to testdisk, the partitioning problem is gone and I can (and have) installed other distributions.
  • A visual redesign is coming soon, but you'll need Firefox 3 (Safari and Epiphany work too) in order for it not to look ugly because it uses a fair amount of CSS3-only features.
Thanks for your patience.
From Ubuntu 8.04,
The Distrogue.

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4 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

I hope you won't, I love your reviews and your charts and everything. I hope this is a late april fool's joke

11:57 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I had a similar problem with Gparted, it ended up being something to do with the extended partitions, when I deleted one of the offenders, it died. Im afraid I dont know exactly what caused it so I cant be more specific than that.

As for your lack of CDs, I'd suggest getting a few CD-RWs and DVD-RWs :P

Finally, if all fails, what about VMWare Server?

10:56 PM  
Blogger DJ Gentoo said...

Good news: The media problem should be easy to sort out, and in 2 months, I'll probably have backup media available so I can wipe my HD and install something over it (I'm looking at Dreamlinux 3.0, it seems promising). Until then, though, I'm stranded, but stranded with Compiz and Avant. :D Still, nothing's certain...

5:32 PM  
Blogger Unknown said...

I have had Gparted hose my partition table a few times. What I did was back up the partitions I needed using the dd command:

dd if=/dev/sda2 of=/media/backup/partition.image bs=4096 conv=notrunc,noerror

I backed up to an NFS share but you could back up to any other drive, even a USB thumbstick if your partition is small. Once i had my important stuff backed up booted in my USB version of SystemRescueCD http://www.sysresccd.org/Main_Page I then wiped out the partition table and recreated a suitable table to restore my partitions back using cfdisk. I refuse to use Gparted now. It seems like a great program but it has screwed me over to many times.

Hope that helps! Any questions email me and I will try to help.

6:24 PM  

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