I'd like to use Linux but...

I didn't like the dash and lack of proper menu on Ubuntu 11.10 beta and 11.5 to such an extent that one of my computers is now ubuntu Lucid Lynx, and the other is Xubuntu 11.10 and I mostly only use Windows 7.

I've found the different flavors of Mint frustrating because of the lack of easier customization, software availability, and software upgrades. (that is part of the point of Mint though). I was looking into Arch because it's the cool contrarian distro lately, but that stuff is several levels above me.

I upgraded to 11.10 (first time I've upgraded an Ubuntu instead of reinstalling) and it was fine, apart from the installer interpreting a small problem with flash-plugin-nonfree as INSTALLER FAILED SYSTEM IS DEAD YOU CANNOT USE YOUR NEW SYSTEM PANIC PANIC which turned out to be a lie. Oh and gloobus doesn't work anymore.

masochistic mule

― the boomtown rats in The Wall (difficult listening hour), Wednesday, October 19, 2011 7:49 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

loll

got mobile broadband working. not entirely sure how (because i upgraded 2 things at once when maybe one would've been enough. usb-modeswitch and wicd). rebooting to working system, download .deb file, reboot to 11.10, dpkg, write down missing dependency, rinse repeat. tedious.

improvements to dash look like actual improvements, at least the button is bigger. and was the desktop menu there before? it has links to documents which will be useful. still don't think unity is for me though.

Trying to find a good low-memory distro for my partner to use on their ~10 year old Dell laptop that they'll still be able to use Google Docs with - been running Peppermint (kind've a Chromebook version of Mint), but it gets a bit slow/choppy at times (cld just be Google Docs, tbh) - anyone have any experience with Vector/CrunchBang/Puppy for this kind've thing?

i liked unity but this rollback to 10.10 (only rolled back there instead of to 11.04 because i had a burned cd of one but not the other) is actually the best thing that's happened to me this month; i'd forgotten how fast ubuntu ran pre-unity. which is my "rig"'s fault as much as the OS's, i'm sure, but whatever.

modem working seems to have been an anomoly. also couldn't find a screensaver, not a one.

now, where's that mandriva cd...

From my post a long time ago, fuse-ext2 mounts as read only and in spite of what is in the documentation I could not mount as read+write and I found other people saying they had the same problem, so I tried Virtual Box with Ubuntu 11.10 instead and after some difficulty with getting it to recognize the USB drive I was able to decrypt and untar the files and hopefully it will be done when I get back from lunch.

Virtualbox on fedora is a nightmare.

i downgraded modemmanager to the natty version, as suggested by a german ubuntu forum page, and my mobile broadband works again on oneiric. lol, progress.

WORKSPACES would be so nice in windows XP where I spend my work days

(virtuawin?)

virtuafuckdat

http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/wisdom_of_the_ancients.png

otm

oh god yes, that's my two decades of linux in a nutshell

yes.

Man, and here I am about to build an Ubuntu 64-bit system and use VMWare to run Windows 7. Am I crazy?

11.10 isn't too bad, just expect to hit a few unique bugs that nobody will ever fix.

Is there a good "So you've used Windows for the past 20 years but now you've seen the light of Linux" online guides or books?

I never finished. The decryption stopped twice at a particular file with the following message:

gpg: [don't know]: invalid packet (ctb=05)
gpg: WARNING: message was not integrity protected
gpg: [don't know]: invalid packet (ctb=7b)

I googled and found messages about possible ascii encoding errors. Is this an encryption error originating with the people who sent the files? Is there anything I should check first on my end? The checksums for the files match. They were transferred on a USB drive.

What file, and where did you get it from?

Is there a good "So you've used Windows for the past 20 years but now you've seen the light of Linux" online guides or books?

^^^^^ I've tried Linux every so often over the last few years, the last around 6 months ago, and I can't make head nor tail of it. A little something to help me find my way around linux after a lifetime of MS would be awesome.

Linux is damn convenient when you're and IT tech or programmer. anyone else here LOVES using Vim?

Raspberry Pi might be enough to make me learn.

vim is nothing to do with linux

technically you're right

yes, in the technical sense that it wasn't written on/for linux, the editor on which it's based wasn't written on linux, it's been ported to like 30 OSs so it's basically platform agnostic, and it's the default $EDITOR on the most popular unix os in the world (clue: not linux)

<3 u caek

<3

argh, I just like the damn thing! stop fucking nitpicking

I'm a disgusting savage that uses Emacs.

Raspberry Pi might be enough to make me learn.

Is this thing getting traction/publicity? I don't really follow tech news, but the project is closely associated with where I work so the I'm seeing Raspberry Pi mentions everywhere at the moment but I don't know what conclusions to draw from that.

the

Looks pretty cheap for what it is, but what are people looking at doing with them? Seems a lot like some of those hard drive-based media center things that just play video, like the ones WD sell, but without built-in storage.

maybe this should be the year I learn to do more than 3 things in vi/vim before running away to nano or a clicky windows editor like the big menu-loving girl's blouse that I am

(this will not be an editor holy war, as I am fully aware that nano isn't very good, but at least it tells you how to use it and you can't get it stuck in some lisp state machine mode or accidentally delete half your document just because you thought you'd try a half-remembered arcane key combo without looking it up)

I've been very happy with my Ubuntu experience so far. I really love how running processor-intensive applications doesn't kill my system, if I need to do something else at the same time the CPU cycles are just taken away from and given to me.

I'm running Win7 in VMWare anyway, though in the long-term I'd like to migrate entirely to Linux. But I'm still committed to my Windows music management software.

this is now running on linux. I'm glad they have

service

svcadm

no way would i run it on my desktop, tho

If only I coul dget my sodding netlink usb wireless receiver to work in Ubuntu 10 - I could dream

i spent a second going "wtf is dget"

it's like wget but for the ddd

Its just my typical typing fail

http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/939

LOVE this

ok real time command line gave me nerdbonerz

i used to use gnome-do a lot and have been jonesing for something like it for windows for years--nothing nearly as robust outside linux. this looks like a sleeker version of that, so i'm p much automatically in love.

Is that the new HUD? Also love it. But is there a way to show all an apps menus?

command line 2.0 interaction is not exactly going to set the mass market on fire

Yeh, this tempts me out of using Windows how?

(saying that, I might try re-installing ubuntu. Last time I tried it wouldn't play nice with my monitors, but we'll see)

I don't think Ubuntu is about tempting Windows users anymore. Shuttleworth has bigger pans.

srsly. they should forget about the mass market, and work on making an environment for nerds that isn't still founded on the idea that you're essentially interacting with a dot-matrix printer.

is not command line, it's just letting you type app names / menu items rather than clicking icons. nobody's going to be piping any grep output to sort using this.

and all this hands to mouse to keyboard and back to mouse would drive me batshit.

gentoo here i come...

obviously things like this are great for some computer users (prob less than 0.1% these days), incl me.

but if i'm typing nouns and verbs to interact with a computer then to say it's not qualitatively similar to the command line is delusional. and for commercial entities like ubuntu to not make the next logical leap re: how this is going to go over in the market... smdh.