Saturday, I plugged it into the Dell to get the SMART info and try to perform the short test, and it made Parted Magic hang during part of the probe phase. I unplugged the drive after powering down the Dell, and was then able to boot into PMagic just fine - plugging the drive back in after reaching the desktop.
It took a while to get to the SMART info window because of the drive, and the short test hung at 90%, so I cancelled the test. I don't remember what happened, but at some point the clicking noise went away and the drive acted normally and the short test reported nothing. Regardless, it seems like the drive is just too unstable to use, since it's questionable when it'll have problems again. I might try it in an environment where stability isn't an issue, but that's something that doesn't come often.
This past Monday, I received my best friend's Raspberry Pi, since he no longer does anything with it (nor did he really want it), and after he sold a couple things, he got a new monitor, which allowed me to use the monitor that was replaced to start with some of the testing I needed to do.
After setting it all up, I booted the Testpi to see what he last had on that SD card, which was Raspbian from back then, and then shut it down to switch to the SD card I had brought with me which had the latest version of Raspbian. It took me a bit to set up routing the internet from my laptop's ethernet to the wirelsss (I hadn't done it in a while and it was simpler than I had thought), but afterwards the Testpi was able to access the net just fine. I was able to confirm a few things, but it ate up a lot of time to download and install stuff - maybe because of how I had to give it internet?
Since he had to work the next day, I had to leave earlier than usual, and when I got home, I tested out openSUSE, and after it took a while to install updates an packages (I had first forgotten to expand the second partition), I couldn't get XFCE to work. I tested Pidora next, and since it didn't have LibreOffice in its repository, I decided that it wasn't a viable candidate. While I could probably find a package source or compile from source code, I want to spend the least amount of time getting everything set up, since I'm going to have two machines to set up (Raspberry Pi 2 and Banana Pi).
The next morning, I was tinkering around more with Raspbian, trying to uninstall LXDE, but eventually I ended up creating a segmentation fault with Rhythmbox, so I called it quits for then. I grabbed Arch Linux and Bodhi Linux, but wrote Bodhi to one of the SD cards, writing Raspbian again to the other, and copying the Arch tar.gz to a flash drive before heading back to my room for the evening.
Bodhi Linux was a short test, since I accidentally deleted the shelf (a.k.a. panel for those unfamiliar) instead of the workspace switcher; I had created another shelf, and put everything on it to test it, since I didn't know what anything was, before finding Synaptic to look at the available packages. Everything I wanted to use was there, which I expected from being something based off of Ubuntu, and I shut down soon after that to swap the SD cards.
I reinstalled and reconfigured Raspbian as a mock set up to how things would be with the Raspberry Pi 2, and once I confirmed everything was fine, I shut it down and went to bed after writing Arch to one of the SD cards, since the Testpi was having networking issues. Well, specifically, the networking issues have been going on since I set the Testpi in my room after getting home from my best friend's place.
In the morning, I booted Arch and went through the installation instructions I found, and eventually got into XFCE... partially - I had the cursor and a light-gray background, but no panels, windows, or right-click menu. I rewrote Bodhi and Raspbian to the SD cards and copied the Raspbian image to a flash drive before leaving it all in my room, since I had an orientation-type thing to go to.
After returning, I started with Bodhi to carefully test and assess it, which I found that the Enlightenment window manager seemed fast and fluid, but that doesn't really mean too much in terms of anything else. With Raspbian, I installed Rhythmbox and tested it with LXDE to make sure it was just something weird that caused the prior segmentation fault, and it was. I had thought I installed all the packages with
apt-get, but it didn't seem that way, and so I had to install them again with Synaptic - going to bed shortly afterwards. (I think I had some sort of problem with trying to use Openbox to fix the fact that I didn't have XFCE, but couldn't get back to LXDE easily, and I think that's what I fixed before going to sleep)This morning, I installed Raspbian to the SD card that had Bodhi Linux on it and did a full installation with all the packages that both the Pi 2 and the Banpi will get, using the "stable" repository instead of "wheezy" (the other card was "wheezy"), and testing them all out and such as well. I then decided to grab the XFCE theme I use and realized I didn't have Filezilla, but after installing it, I came up with a lot of directory-related errors, and was met with more when connecting to Mei-chan. I found that I couldn't copy the archive (not enough space error), and when I went to check, I had no space left whatsoever. I decided to switch over to the other SD card (which is twice the size) and remembered about
vsftpd - which I installed, configured, and tested.I was done after that. Raspbian is going to pretty much be the distro to use, since I can't find anything better to use. I'll have a bit of preliminary testing for the Pi 2 and the Banpi when I get them both, just so I don't hit a brick wall with a blind install.
I don't remember when, but at one point, I tried to play a 1080p video which ended badly - luckily I was able to ssh into the Testpi, find the VLC process ID, and kill it.
It's been a bit of a hell with testing the past couple days, since the network didn't want to work sometimes, causing me to re-run package installation commands a lot to get packages that were partially downloaded or weren't downloaded at all. I think part of the problem was just EMI from a couple power cables, and even though I kinda cleaned up the cables, I don't have any proof that was the cause.
Bodhi Linux is an okay distribution, but some things are just awkward about it (namely the terminal program).
Considering that I was left with about 2GB left of an 8GB card, I decided that I should get 16GB cards for both the Pi 2 and the Banpi, and though the latter probably doesn't quite need that much, I'd rather have the extra space.
I'm quite excited for the Pi 2 and the Banpi (mainly the latter), though it probably won't be until next month when I can buy them.
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