I'd like to use Linux but...

I keep a dual-boot on my main computer, and run the hunk of junk in the living room off of Kubuntu.

However, you can't really use it to game on, so i always need windows.

I am lazy and ignorant.

CBF

Linux boosters tend to irritate me, and I don't want to turn into one.

they're like people smug about not owning a television set.

YES. For real. Like, I like an OS that can use real programs (like Gimp is an acceptable substitute for Photoshop wtf); I like eating food I can afford, sorry it's not organic free-range burghum and mustard or whatever whatever it is you eat; sorry I eat at McDonalds, I like it; sorry I fucking watch South Park it makes me lafff....etc ad infinitum

Linux is 2398478923749 times better than it used to be. No more compiling kernels or locating dependencies or any of that shit, it all just works now.

Ubuntu is fantastic. I switched in March and just don't bother with Windows anymore.

It refuses to install on my PC, so it's not that good is it.

> No more compiling kernels or locating dependencies or any of that shit, it all just works now.

ha, not if you're me - somewhere between edgy and feisty my cpu stopped scaling so it was 1800MHz all the time and fan was much more prone to come on (made the room noticably hotter as well). spent a day or so trying to recompile custom kernels to get it to work again (problem seems to be somewhere between kernels 2.6.17 and 2.6.20, every other livecd i've tried does the same thing). downgraded back to edgy in the end.

spent yesterday evening trying to play flacs, oggs and mp3s and double clicking on any of them lauched a different media player, none of which would actually play all 3 formats.

> (like Gimp is an acceptable substitute for Photoshop wtf)

gimp is a perfectly acceptable substitute for photoshop when you don't have 230 quid to spend on a graphics editor.

lol linux

gimp is a perfectly acceptable substitute for photoshop when you don't have 230 quid to spend on a graphics editor.

It really isn't, except for the mundane stuff. Can it even do CMYK yet?

i always thought the cmyk stuff was a patent issue rather than coding issue but i hear the new gegl engine in the next release will support it.

that said, when was the last time i needed to do cmyk stuff? oh, wait, never. 8)

man the idea of ANYONE paying for photoshop really blows my mind

It refuses to install on my PC, so it's not that good is it.

-- Ste, Monday, 19 November 2007 21:07 (Yesterday) Bookmark Link

Can't blame the OS for the hardware not providing drivers.

if the thing won't even install from the get go how on earth are you supposed to install linux drivers anyway ?!

and i've tried four different linux types too, all refuse to recognise my very simple basic dvd reader,

Windows did.

nuff said.

Manufacturers make drivers for Windows. You cannot blame any Linux for this. It's like putting milk in your car and expecting it to go.

More manufacturers are supporting Linux now, but until they all do there will still be a few problems. Companies like Dell offer Linux pre-installed so you don't have to do anything.

That's what I was doing wrong! I was putting milk in my car when it should have been Sunny D!

somewhere between edgy and feisty my cpu stopped scaling so it was 1800MHz all the time and fan was much more prone to come on (made the room noticably hotter as well).

Really? I'm on feisty and have had no such problem. I did lower the temp at which the fan kicks in in order to stop the bastard overheating (it's a Dell), but I probably didn't have to.

My old PC (P3 866MHz, 256Mb RAM) was ratshit with Win2000, to the point where it got so loaded up with its own crap (and viruses/spyware, presumably) that it was literally unusable. I put edgy on it and it ran like a dream.

> Really? I'm on feisty and have had no such problem.

yeah, is very hardware specific from what i gather. have always had add acpi=off to kernel boot parameters which should make any scaling impossible but, for some reason, it works in edgy. have read pages (in italian and german. luckily acpi is acpi in all languages 8) by people with similar laptops to mine (an Asus A6KM Q013H) who have no such problems (or have other problems). have changed bioses, replaced dsdt tables, recompiled kernels but nothing...

Autumn, I don't actually think it's a driver issue anyway. I tried an old CD drive (which had previously successfully installed linux on an older machine) and this too failed with the same error.

So it's probly my shitty motherboard, which quite frankly has always had 'issues' ever since I bought the shitty thing from PC shitty World

(note to ilxors, never ever buy from PC World. They are rub)

Manufacturers make drivers for Windows. You cannot blame any Linux for this. It's like putting milk in your car and expecting it to go.

A DVD-ROM drive is a generic IDE device that does not need drivers. This probably isn't a driver issue.

Anyway, the fact is, Linux didn't work out of the box on his hardware in the most basic and fundamental way. This "don't blame Linux, contact your manufacturer" attitude, while perhaps fair in some cases, comes across to curious people as passing the buck.

So really, when Linux has problems like this (which is increasingly rare, as you say) it's like giving away organic milk which you claim will work in cars whose manufacturers support it, and then blaming the manufacturer for not publishing the specifications of their engine when it doesn't work. The fact is, it doesn't work. Who gives a shit why apart from the dairy farmer?

A fair argument, but by blaming Linux for driver troubles you're still blaming the wrong entity.

I agree that it should work with an IDE ROM drive though. I've honestly not heard of a difficulty like that before.

A fair argument, but by blaming Linux for driver troubles you're still blaming the wrong entity.

I don't think anyone is actually blaming Linux on this thread.

hi Hanle y!!

someone must have launched an exploding pig against the night sky?

i only like eating food that Abbott can't afford

I'd like to use Linux, and in fact have Gutsy running on my laptop, but for some reason I can't get an internet connection going anymore. I'm working through it on the support forums, but it's slow going. I had my share of issues with connectivity back when I was running XP, so as per usual I suspect it's a hardware issue, but it's no less frustrating.

Here's my thread on the Ubuntu Forum if anyone wants to take a crack at it.

I'd like to use Linux but...

1) I use my machines for work, not just for internet terminals and general futzing around with photos and music and what have you.

2) I've never been motivated enough to learn to make it work even for that much.

3) Why bother?

Linux is fine for x-terminals, but I'll run it on my main machine when you pry Solaris from my cold dead fingers.

You use Solaris as your desktop? Why?

Because he has Suns.

That said, Dave, is there a minimal sparc CD set for getting OpenSolaris runnning? I don't want to burn 6 cds.

Sun will send you one, IIRC.

I don't have a DVD drive or an x86 machine

I don't run Solaris on the desktop, I refered to "x-terminals" and "main machine" yaknow. Terminals live on desktops, computers live in racks.

I'm actually still running Solaris 8, because I want to maintain a consistant environment between my ss1000's and my E3500. That's not a very good reason, but...

E10K's are beginning to get cheap on the used market... mmmmmm.

You can get the CDs for sparc here http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/solaris-express/get.jsp -- Solaris express is "built on OpenSolaris technologies" which may or may not be what you want.
xpost
we have just binned some at our work; they refuse to give them to me "for legal reasons".

Shit, sorry Jon, that link is for DVDs for X86 only. I could have sworn it said CD mailing as well.

3) Why bother?

-- kenan, Wednesday, 21 November 2007 03:47 (3 hours ago) Bookmark Link

I have Vista somewhere on this machine, and every time I've tried to use it it's done something incredibly annoying, or incredibly stupid, or gone wrong in some way. Ubuntu just works.

Linux is a crap option for games though.

i only like eating food that Abbott can't afford

Hahahaha well obv I prefer that food (ie most everything) BUT....I can't afford it.

I have Vista somewhere on this machine

Yeah... I dropped back to XP myself. Just like in the Mac commercial.

vista wouldn't let me :(

i used to use suse but i got fed up with it :(

No, you can't just GO back, you have to reformat, reinstall, and start aaaaaall over.

Upside: a fresh install of XP on a blank drive will mbring back those wonderful long-ago times when your PC was fast.

Dave, you wouldn't believe some of the deals I see on Suns in Manhattan....

Last couple of times I've done linux installs - it has been:
a) quicker than a windows xp install
b) all the hardware works straight away (more than with xp)

I'd recommend Ubuntu or Fedora.
I do still think that there is a massive problem if you need to open word, excel, powerpoint documents.
Openoffice is ok but documents still never come out exactly right. I have this problem with Mac too though
- it's really the lack of a proper office standard than a problem with Linux.

yeah i did but something causes the XP install program to crash xxxpost

Hi Tracer!

My boss is trying to get me to boot off Linux live cd.s like knoppix, but the way I see it if I can't use good applications I'm not sure I'll have much use, unless I was a programmer.
If there is a good linux based multitrack sound recorder...
Still, I am really liking garageband.
I guess its just romatic to think of everyone using their own different OS , but in the end there is a need for everyone to be on the same page too

ew knoppix

Ubuntu is a live CD, use that. Knoppix is suited to small storage devices and therefore a bit rubbish for everything else.

Ubuntu?
Of course after years of poverty I am just learning the entire MAC OS X now too. My parents bought me a macbook to help me throu gh school days.
I wonder if I could run a linux on it? Isnt MAC OS X unix based?

You can run Linux on Apple hardware fine, but as you say the default operating system is Unix-based and considerably better put together as far as the average end-user is concerned, so very few people bother.

[Exception: software packaging, dependency resolution, upgrading and other sysadmin stuff on Debian-based Linux >>> than on OS X]

^^^

I'm upgrading feisty to gutsy and EVERY FOUR SECONDS it's stopping the 50-minute upgrade to ask me if I want to replace a file. YES I WANT TO REPLACE A FILE, JUST FUCKING DO IT.

There is a command line switch to say yes to every question if you're doing this using apt-get rather tha Synaptic.

       -y, --yes, --assume-yes,

              Automatic  yes to prompts; assume "yes" as answer to all prompts

              and run non-interactively. If an undesirable situation, such  as

              changing  a held package or removing an essential package occurs

              then  apt-get  will  abort.  Configuration  Item:  APT::Get::As-

              sume-Yes.

Oh, yeah, thanks, but I'd already kicked it off in the Update Manager thing. It didn't start hassling me until after I'd downloaded the 1.5Gb of updates.

Christ. After upgrading to gutsy I couldn't hotplug usb devices. Had to go into some obscure setting to fix it. Clearly some way to go for the ordinary folk.

I'd like to use Linux but...

1) I use my machines for work, not just for internet terminals and general futzing around with photos and music and what have you.

2) I've never been motivated enough to learn to make it work even for that much.

3) Why bother?

Somewhere in the back of my mind, I knew I'd eat those words. I didn't know it would be this soon, though. So, ok... Windows XP is gone. Completely done with. Now it's all about Ubuntu 7.10, the "Greedy Gardener" or whatever the fuck they're calling it. Some initial observations:

First the bad news. Configuring drivers can be a honking pain in the butt. I still haven't gotten it to properly recognize my 5-button mouse. The driver for my monitor had to be reinstalled a couple of times before it stuck. Don't ask me why. installing fonts is a minor disaster. And of course there's a bit of a learning curve, but really it's not nearly as daunting as it has been for me in the past.

The good things: A very impressive amount of it Just Works. The Totem media player, for instance, is maybe the only media player I have ever seen that searches for codecs, finds them, installs them correctly, and then plays the frickin' movie. It's a brave new world. Also... my goodness it's fast! Even rendering those wacky graphics, like Beryl stuff, is just burnin'. The graphics rendering as a whole is top-notch, and the font smoothing is exceptional -- better than Mac, I'd say. It's highly customizable, which I love, since unnecessarily changing the color of things is one of my favorite computer pastimes. Of course Gimp can't replace Photoshop, but every time I play with it, I'm impressed with how much it does do.

There is more work to be done before I can report on some more essential stuff, like networking. Apparently you can remote desktop into Mac OS? And vice versa? That sounds exciting.

This thread is exactly why Linux should be avoided, especially for desktop use. Plus, guilting people into Linux is really low-down.

Apparently you can remote desktop into Mac OS? And vice versa? That sounds exciting.

Yes, you can use Apple Remote Desktop (faster) or VNC (slower). VNC works with basically every GUI under the sun, except maybe Aegis.

Guilting people into using Linux? Huh??

7.10 has a REALLY annoying bug that means my backlight won't go off when I close the laptop lid, and "da community" won't release a fix until April (probably because it's a kernel bug). This gives me the shits, but the fact that Vista's first service pack won't be out until next year puts things into perspective.

Guilting people into using Linux? Huh??

Do you really want to support the EVIL empire, Microsoft? Are you just a just a puppet, a corporate TOOL who has never considered that the OS yr PC comes with might not be the ONLY OS? Are you really in favor of PROPRIETARY applications that limit FREEDOM in favor of bloody PROFITS? Have you sold your SOUL for thirty pieces of SILVER?

And so on. By and large, folks who say they'd like to run Linux, but... are often speaking from some vague sense of guilt-by-association with Microsoft, not by a desire to have some functionality Linux offers that Windows doesn't. (I'm not saying that anyone here ain't Linuxing entirely of their own free will, etc., nor that there's a Linux guilt squad on the loose.) The geeks who are driven to Linux by a need to tinker never find themselves in need of an "excuse". And I sure have heard a lotta folks offer guilty excuses regarding why they aren't using Linux. This is sad. Folks ought feel no obligation to do this or that or whatever with their computers. If you want to tinker, then do so, but it's not an obligation.

Besides, there are more tinkerable choices than Linux, anyways.

Oh yeah, fair enough.

Beryl/Compiz alone is incentive enough for people to look beyond Windows/Mac.

(Incidentally, whilst typing the above sentence my work Windows PC froze for 20 seconds for no reason.)

The whole reason I went (back) to Linux 10 months ago is Windows-specific issues: Viruses and spyware, poor performance, hulking registry.

I have learned much. Lesson #1 -- RTFM. Do not go off googling stuff and installing programs and drivers that were compatible with earlier editions of the OS. That's a bad idea, born of hubris.

Ok, so I reinstalled and started fresh, and with user manual on screen and a determination not to mess with what need not be messed with, I have reached to point of saying that Ubuntu Linux 7.10 is a thing of blinding operating-system beauty. I installed it on my work PC now, and was amazed -- AMAZED! -- at the way it detected networks, computers, printers... it was the easiest computer setup I've ever had the pleasure of overseeing. It looks great. It feels intuitive. It's endlessly customizable. It runs Office docs with grace and aplomb. It's fast as doo doo. Compared to XP, it's the difference between It's A Small World and Space Mountain. I am totally sold.

:) :)

I'm struggling with red hat seeing my physical hardware (nothing coming from lspci)

It's OK to Google stuff, dude.

The longer you hold out on Linux, the less you have to learn to make it work if you finally give it a go.

It's OK to Google stuff, dude.

well yeah, but it's bad to follow instruction for installing nvidia drivers from two versions of the OS ago, when now all that stuff works out of the box. You end up confusing the machine. Sometimes everything would boot ok, and then sometimes it would FREAK OUT and not know what to load on startup. So, reinstall, start over. Much better now.

they're like people smug about not owning a television set.

So unbelievably OTM. Just listened to two people brag about how they only use open source, Microsoft sux, Apple sux, blah blah blah and then complain that GIMP isn't doing what they want to do. (we have a Photoshop site license here)

BUT IT'S FREE

So I'm getting the gOS PC that runs the Ubuntu-style "Google OS." I'll mess with it a bit, but fully expect to put Ubuntu on top of it. Looking forward to it.

I can provide hints and tips

Can Linux read or write to a HFS+ partition these days?

http://sourceforge.net/projects/linux-hfsplus
http://www.ardistech.com/hfsplus/ <-- slightly better, I think

I can provide hints and tips

-- Autumn Almanac, Wednesday, January 9, 2008 3:02 AM

awes

xp, thanks. Things have certainly moved on since I last used Linux in anger. http://people.debian.org/~terpstra/thread/20071111.064900.63247010.en.html#i20071111.064900.63247010 suggests to me that this is going to be impossible on a Debian 3.0 system on which I am not root.

Is the best bet for a filesystem that both Linux and OS X can read still FAT32?

Ubuntu 7.10 can read and write to ntfs now.

for the folks who need photoshop. it's not free or open source, but it runs on linux.

and it's about half the price of photoshop.

btw is it pronounced lie-nux or linn-ux ?

latter...

http://www.boxingforum.com/photopost/data/2/Lennox-Lewis.jpg

Actually

Yeah but he has an accent, see....

Lee-nux or Linn-ux. But not Lie-nux.

for me, Lie-nux even though i know that's wrong - i knew it was named after Linus T but figured his name was pronounced the same as the Peanuts character... i am too old to change my ways now.

i run linux (new computer) and winxp (old) ... i chose fedora 8 because it has pulseaudio which let's me connect audio software. also cause vista is too pricey and will probably end up being slow. (it's not very fast on my wife's laptop.)

i still end up using my old windows box a lot tho.

seriously, linux has gotten WAY easier than it used to be. you don't have to be a smug fuck... just possibly a poor fuck whose willing to try something a little different.

i say lihnnucks... lienucks makes sense... lee-nucks i don't have the accent for. it would be awkward.
m.

From a job seeker's perspective:

I started with Linux back in 2000. I've only had intermittent opportunities to work with it since then, mainly since I've been employed to do Microsofty things and have lacked the time to take it on seriously as a home project.

A few years ago I decided to do a BA in a completely unrelated subject and now I've just returned to the real world and am looking for a job. I now notice that A LOT of analyst or admin type job adverts now say something like 'experience administering Windows and Linux servers.' This is a pretty sharp contrast to what it was five years ago when you had to ASK your boss to let you run a Linux server.

Surely this can't be true. Surely it's got something to do with trying to push more IT training through the economy, or filter out a glut of workers that are the product of an earlier surge of cheap IT skills. These are pretty unremarkable jobs, often targeted at total n00bs to the industry, so I find it hard to believe the level of skill expected has actually gone up that much and that this isn't some sort of Best Value-generation exercise.

My question for you all is what you think 'must have Linux experience' actually translates to in terms of familiarity with the O/S, considering most people who say they do probably don't (maybe they took Introduction to Linux or some shit two-day course) and most jobs that are framed primarily in terms of a Microsoft-style analyst/support role probably don't DARE actually let average IT bods loose on the Linux servers .... See what I mean?

(This advertisement is primarily aimed at LinUKsers but LinUSAers also welcome to apply.)

i don't know how to partition my hard drive

"must have linux experience" means that you should not immediately freak the fuck out when confronted with a *nix window manager other than Apple's Finder.

and you should know how to get around in bash.

I'm involved in an erp selection process and oracle is recommending running their system on linux. when a tier 1 erp provider is recommending you run a mission critical app on linux, I'd say it's arrived. 5 years ago they would've been recommending hp-ux or aix, so things have definitely changed.

Oracle has been humping Linux for some time. Probably since Oracle 7.

I dunno, I did an oracle implementation back in '99 and never heard the l word once.

I think the thing is everybody's realized you can in fact run redhat and still get "mission-critical" uptimes, so it's not oracle (app vendors don't give a shit what you run it on, it's all the $ame to them), it's the service providers/outsourcing businesses and their customers

and of course very little has actually changed in the last six years or so besides the volume of anecdotes out there supporting linux as a perfectly respectable business decision for a CIO

IMO

Ellison kinda does care, personal vendetta or no.

oracle cares for two reasons 1) they host their apps so they're in the service provider business, and 2) they're not in the os business so if linux support keeps their customers away from vendors with a competing enterprise rdbms (e.g. ms/ibm) all the better

but, yeah there are enough success stories out there that the risk is perceived to be low by trembling cios

I'm not a massive nerd.

thanx for that, pants

beat it kid, the nerdz are talking

richer than you lol

except tom he works for the gubbermint

Le ouch.

um

http://www.clearancejobs.com/security_clearance_jobs_salary_survey3.pdf

Wait why does desktop support require a security clearance?

because the desktops being supported may contain classified information?

why does an FBI cafeteria lady have to take a polygraph?

*plop*

God this is a tough room tonite pls tips in jar by piano.

dude you'd be making so much more in iraq

haw

tax-free too!

however stay-on bonus means you get to keep your arms and legs

RIMSHOT

Well this has been a disappointing thread.

fos, in my analyst work all I ever have to do is log in via putty and dick around with a few unix-CLI specific tools. I suspect the same for the vast majority of the world. if they want a redhat admin they'll advertise for a redhat admin. also remember you are always qualified for the job you want, I thought that was a duh.

the vst player i have my eye on (muse receptor) runs on linux, does using that count as being a linux user?

heh, I chalk up my linux credentials to the one time I had to boot a fedora box up and X11 broke, so I had to go in and diagnose and then edit the config with vi and fire it up manually in order to do something I probably could have accomplished with mv, cp and awk

in other words I think being a linux user means knowing how to solve most problems with the identical end results in at least three different ways

Oh yes, I think that's a problem with /etc/X11/xorg.conf! I know all about 'generic nvidia' Linux drivers too. Hell.

I am feeling pretty okay about this because I can comprehend everything that's being said on this thread. Thanks guys.

Oracle had one of its wet pushes on Linux a few years ago, yeah. It made all this noise about how the impending Red Hat db was rubbish and only Oracle on Oracle Linux was any good etc etc.

Ellison even went through a bizarre phase of clearing everything Microsoft out of the company. That lasted three months. I spent that entire time configuring all the internal apps (mostly Java) to work perfectly on Red Hat 8/9 and received NO FUCKING KUDOS FROM ANYONE.

Linux experience probably means being able to do all the unixy stuff like cron jobs, disk configuration and graceful shutdowns, but also understand package management and compiling the kernel. Or not.

"must have linux experience" = the guy who's job you're taking over solved some problem using magic smoke and a linux server. The MCP here is afraid to touch it.

wet pushes

this one's for you autumn almanac

http://img341.imageshack.us/img341/4281/tynan6in.gif

<3

Posting this from my new Eee PC. It is fscking fantastic.

Everyone needs one of these. Just awes. Thinner and lighter would be great though.

I am bidding for one on eBay now!

Thinner and lighter??

Yeah, the battery pack is annoying. Not a deal-breaker, just annoying. It's still less than a kilo.

okay i'm being unreasonable.

But ... How is the battery life? I've been looking at some of this microlaptops and they're quoting like 11 hours?????

Christ. This thing will get you 3.5.

Does it really? I've been hearing tell that practically it's more like 1.5-2

ugh I hope not. Seems all right so far, but I've hardly pushed it.

Yeah, I guess I'll stick with my five year-old PowerBook. With a $79 battery replacement I'm getting 3.5 (wireless on) and it runs Leopard. At least 3.5!

True, but the Eee is TINY. It fits in my funny little satchel thing.

is that what you call it

A gay friend calls it my fag bag.

Two PCs, ^ running Xandros, the other running Ubuntu. I still cannot believe how quickly and smoothly and efficiently and faultlessly and awesomely everything works.

Every time I go anywhere near Vista it does at least three unnecessary stupid annoying totally shit things every minute.

Oh yeah, Xandros is the one with a swastika-like logo.

oh wow, so it is.

so i opted against getting one for now

but it may magically turn up as a grad gift 4 me

i'd like to use linux but i don't want to have to backup/delete my entire hard drive to install the damn thing. also, i'm too dumb to understand the documentation.

Get one LiveCD and just boot off it.

Also, what documentation?

so i'm downloading an iso for CentOS right now and PRAYING TO GOD everything goes ok. (crosses fingers)

Also, what documentation?

this

I recently upgraded my laptop to something OpenBSD would recognize, so I no longer have to run Linux on anything. Rah.

Also, what documentation?

this

-- Mr. Snrub, Thursday, 3 April 2008 14:15 (7 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

wtf? Just get an Ubuntu LiveCD and boot off it. This gives you a complete Linux desktop environment, and nothing on your HDD is touched. If everything runs and all your hardware works properly, you can choose to install it by clicking a few icons. No documentation required.

Also Red Hat Enterprise is for business. If you want a Red Hat for home use, look at Fedora 7.

just might do that.

As you can see, I know fuckall about linux. But i want to get better!

Heh, that's cool.

Seriously, grab Ubuntu 7.10 from here (select Desktop version 7.10). It'll send you a 700Mb .iso file which you can burn to a CD as bootable. Then restart your PC (booting off the CD obv) and it'll give you a desktop complete with all the main applications ready to run, so you can check sound video, network, etc. If it all works and you want to install it properly, you can choose to click the Install icon on the desktop.

Ubuntu is probably the more compatible and best supported version right now. The new one's out in three weeks if you'd rather wait.

thanks for the help. i've heard nothing but good things about ubuntu.

ubuntu is good but nothing wrong with centos either. i use centos and fedora

They're all good. I think Ubuntu's the easiest to get going, though.

Thinking of going for the RHCT or RHCE, anyone got this?

http://ospublish.constantvzw.org/

I went for the RHCT and fell over at the networking bit because I've never done networking.

(that was for Red Hat 9 btw, so yonks ago)

How hard is it? Its a full practical right?

Yeah. Mine was either three or five days, I can't remember.

(the course, not the test)

I'd like to use Linux, but... AND I AM!!! WOOT!!! I successfully installed CentOS on my new computer and am now decent in vi and I'm about 1/4 of the way through Learning Perl. I guess you could say I'm going to grok perl, because if you don't grok perl, you are pitiful.

Not that I have any clue what "grok" means, but...

good work mang

Yeah, nice. How are you going with the more plebeian apps?

RedHat is shit

Also Red Hat Enterprise is for business. If you want a Red Hat for home use, look at Fedora 7.

-- Autumn Almanac, Thursday, 3 April 2008 14:26 (1 week ago) Bookmark Link

All other things being equal, I would definately be more inclined to push someone off a cliff if I knew they "grokked" pearl.

("grok" is a Stranger in a Strange Land hippy-sci-fi reference, BTW.)

Also Red Hat Enterprise is for business. If you want a Red Hat for home use, look at Fedora 7.

Put down the kool-aid.

Here's what you do if you want a red hat for home use:

http://img528.imageshack.us/img528/745/imageuploadimagezx5.jpg

And don't skimp on the broach.

Finally something we agree on!

Fedora is fucking garbage

linux is for guys who like to fiddle with stuff and find it secretly thrilling when they get to sigh in exasperation when the girlfriend can't figure out how to work his computer.

libcrypt, I would have spent a total of six minutes with Fedora 7. You won't get an endorsement out of me.

What a Lovely Generalization! xp

linux is for guys who like to fiddle with stuff and find it secretly thrilling when they get to sigh in exasperation when the girlfriend can't figure out how to work his computer.

If this were the extent of it, I'd be content to let the Linux guys have their fun. The fact that I'm expected to accept it professionally as the solution to every technological problem under the sun can chafe me a bit at times. E.g., "this is our ancient HP cluster. It's terribly stable, but HP-UX is just so....OLD! Thankfully, we're going to migrate to something new! Like LINUX! Also, we'll save a ton by buying the shittiest hardware we can find which we'll then have to duplicate because we need to cluster it on shitty Linux. Possibly quadruple it, because we're stuck with shitty Linux clustering technologies."

my boyfriend installed ubuntu linux on my old laptop and i'm amazed at what it can do now. a shittyass computer that was formerly only good for card games can now go online again, at impressive speeds. it plays nicely with my printer, unlike my macbook pro (fuck finding the right driver).

my sister is a hardcore "linux guy" who's been running it for a decade. she installed ubuntu on an old laptop for her 85-yr-old mother in law. this woman is so old she was flying supply planes in WWII. (there were female aviators. look it up.) she can handle linux just fine.

xp

Oh hi honey!

You know, I hadn't mentioned it before, but I was actually really disappointed that you figured out to use the linux distro I installed on your machine. I was soooo looking forward to being exasperated and you being lost. (wtf.)

linux is for guys who like to fiddle with stuff

ok, that's hard to dispute. I especially like to pretty-up the desktop, make my own icons for things (note to self: the Gimp has got to go) and stuff like that. And, almost incidentally, I've also learned a lot about networking, basic unix commands, hardware drivers (and... ahem... the lack thereof), memory management, and on and on. I have said it before: I never really understood how a computer -- any computer, really -- works until I started messing with Linux.

^ this

Also desktop linux is fine for 98 percent of home users. Servers, not so much.

NSFW yet sooo geeky

just threw ubuntu over my fedora 7 install. after 1 hiccup, all was well. i'm impressed. even fedora was easy, but this was arguably even easier.

anybody use virtual box?

It's funny how the left penguin is looking @ nipple like OMG my belly is a boob and I'm not sure how I feel about it!

vaguely Cronenberg

ha! bodypaint linux girl was my chat icon for a while, but it had two big problems: nsfw, and even if it wasn't, as a chat icon you can't tell wtf it is. Ah well. I'll find a use for that image one day, I'm determined.

Um...

She reflects most criticism of Linux - you can see what's under the bonnet but it's ugly.

I'm not even going to begin asking what you think is ugly about the girl (I think the paint job is right clever), but what aesthetic standards do you hold operating systems to?

Linux

Mac

Windows

My laptop's drive is slowly dying from some kind of mechanical read arm stickiness... If I carry it in my bag for a little while it can't read the boot sector... Until I hold it up and use an Etch-A-Sketch style shaking method to correct it.

Anyway I'm replacing the drive and considering trying out xubuntu over my usual gentoo install. What's the deal with different ubuntu distros for different window managers? I thought I'd try ubuntu since the gentoo project still seems in disarray at the moment, but I want XFCE. Does mainline ubuntu not provide xfce as an option, or is it just kind of a pain in the ass to try and customize as such?

i think it's an install. installing it (the default download ubuntu) last night it automagically started up with gnome. i would think that kubuntu and xubuntu would be pretty deece. possibly the community is smaller though so releases might not be as frequent. (?)

KDE has that grotesque icy blue look.

what aesthetic standards do you hold operating systems to?

-- kenan, Saturday, 19 April 2008 00:15 (7 hours ago) Bookmark Link

I was joking; playing up the criticisms other people have. Standard Gnome and KDE look terrific, not to mention desktop effects.

It doesn't even make sense to say 'Linux is ugly' (as one of my friends keeps saying) because it's all so customisable.

I thought I'd try ubuntu since the gentoo project still seems in disarray at the moment, but I want XFCE. Does mainline ubuntu not provide xfce as an option

1. Install Ubuntu*
2. sudo apt-get install xubuntu-desktop
3. Switch to xfce at the login screen

Or, install Xubuntu.

* perhaps wait for Hardy Heron to be released next week

KDE has that grotesque icy blue look.

-- fields of salmon, Friday, April 18, 2008 6:15 PM (4 hours ago) Bookmark Link

Yeah it looks like Windows in Winter (For Kids!) or something. I can't get into it.

Anybody know of webcams that are Ubuntu compatible out of the box?

I'd guess absolutely none, but a guy can hope, can't he?

No idea, sorry. What does a hoos want to do with a webcam?

I've just started writing for this productivity blog and I floated the idea of vlog posts in addition to our other content.

Not a "find one or I'm fucked" situation by any means, just an idea I tossed out that we may or may not run with, but it'd be nice to have one to join in my zendo's weekly live sittings too.

Ah, cool. Shouldn't be difficult to find one if you do a bit of Google poking.

KDE4 looks a bit better but still sort of archaic.

This should be a good guide:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/SkypeWebCams

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/HardwareSupportComponentsMultimediaWebCameras

This wiki is awes.

Thanks dude

I was joking

Oh, I see. Yeah, it's so obvious now, at not-the-middle-of-the-night.

(But I SO LIKE the middle of the night!)

werewolves

Hardy Heron can suck my fucking nuts.

ruh roh... what happened?

Here's a list of all the exciting shit that's gone wrong:

- sound-juicer decided I didn't have gstreamer installed and so wouldn't let me use any of my mp3 output profiles, until suddenly it changed its mind and let me have one back
- ongoing network speed problems (200kb/s; used to be 1.2Mb/s)
- no obvious way to make gtkpod the default app when plugging in an ipod
- no obvious way to stop rhythmbox opening when plugging in an ipod
- rhythmbox is shit
- gtkpod 0.99.12 has no 'set cover art from web' option (gtkpod 0.99.10 on gutsy did)
- I had to install a local dns cache just to get decent load times on web pages
- laptop-mode ignores every setting I give it
- battery life is still shit (was also shit in gutsy, was excellent in feisty)
- laptop backlight only goes off sometimes when I close the lid (again, shit in gutsy, perfect in feisty)
- compiz framerate so jerky that I had to turn off desktop cube altogether (no such issue in gutsy)

and now my wife hates me because I've spent the past five days fixing this arsehole thing.

rhythmbox IS indeed shit... but what? Banshee?

amarok?

^^^ one of the several reasons Linux sux. QA == total shit.

sounds like aa had the opposite experience from me. Hardy fixed everything and made it work again.

^^^ another reason Linux sux: Legions of Linuxophiles loudly proclaiming it works for me.

(joeks bruv)

well, I have had the opposite experience as well, and either way that's hardly the meaning of QA, innit?

What I meant above is that there are companies who create operating systems who put the core OS thru a very rigorous QA process before releasing it to the public. Most Linux "companies" are not among them.

another reason Linux sux: Legions of Linuxophiles loudly proclaiming it works for me.

If only they'd stick to "it works for me" and not feel the need to add that clearly you have not read the man page in enough detail, taken enough hours to pick through 7000 largely irrelevant google results, tinkered blindly with 30 different config files which you just have to know exist (and are probably in a different place to where any of the google results say they are), and then patched the kernel yrself, or it'd work for you too, luser.

rhythmbox IS indeed shit... but what? Banshee?

-- kenan, Tuesday, 29 April 2008 14:51 (3 hours ago) Link

I don't get the rhythmbox hate. It's all I need. It's quick, it's got a Last.FM plugin and downloads podcasts and streams net radio, its got a gnome-do plugin so I can hear whatever I want w/two keystrokes. Amarok is slow as fuck.

xpost Oh, you mean learn to use linux? ;)

In this corner, we have "wah, my pussy hurts, they said it just works!"

And over in this corner, we have one of the most concentrated populations of arrogant cocksnots on the internet.

So CentOS buddies how is everything going? I'm going to be using this very soon.

I don't get the rhythmbox hate.

Insufficient control over podcast downloads and the ipod synch doesn't work properly. gtkpod is great.

So CentOS buddies how is everything going?

Now, I'm sure this isn't strictly a CentOS thing, but it is amazing how a simple everyday thing like connecting a USB wireless network adapter and making it work can be so easy in Windows and yet such a pain in the ass on Linux.

Or maybe I should grow a brain and realize that when the package says "SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS: Microsoft Windows 95/98/Me/2000/XP/Vista" they really really mean it.

You can't blame Linux for that.

my hardy version works fairly well. my current source of confusion and delay is my goddam olpc...even rebuilding it with a usb stick seems to fuck up. i think the smart card inside is hosed. (after two or three weeks... boo)

i just hope the kid in nepal or god knows where has better luck than i do.

all you ubuntu guys should just use Debian. dist-upgrade once every three years, if that. your troubles are over.

I don't understand why you're telling people to use debian over Ubuntu. The release schedule is too slow!

So CentOS buddies how is everything going? I'm going to be using this very soon.

I'm been using it for little over a year as a server-only OS and the best thing I can say about it is that it's been stoically reliable.

xp, that is why I'm telling them to use Debian over Ubuntu.

Ubuntu debs are easier to find than Debian debs.

apt-get?

Now, I'm sure this isn't strictly a CentOS thing, but it is amazing how a simple everyday thing like connecting a USB wireless network adapter and making it work can be so easy in Windows and yet such a pain in the ass on Linux.

Yeah, all too often I tend to just expect Linux to work on whatever hardware we have lying around. I make the mistake of thinking that because the operating system is cheap the hardware can be cheap. In future—read, when I have the cash—I will figure out which hardware Linux likes BEFORE I start installing things.

^^

moi aussi.

it seems the typical linux hardware set up that works best is a machine that's actually a year or two older than the latest greatest stuff that doesn't have drivers, etc yet. wait for others to work out the hardware issues, etc. sb live is mostly phasing out in windows builds but it's one of the most supported audio options for example.

used to be fuckin difficult. serial mice and AT keyboards. flickery monitors with no opengl. archaic ethernet. sound?

each time i try a totally new distro i'm amazed at how much easier it keeps getting.

sounds like ubuntu should maybe beta a bit longer though.
m.

caek, I'm talking about apps that build Ubuntu-specific debs. There are loads more of these than Debian-specific ones.

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2045/2453748606_a685097ce3_o.png

lovely package of debs she's got there

i'd decompress those tar balls etc etc

Try as you might, you just can't make "tar ball" sound sexy. Sheeeit, you can't even make "tape archive" sound sexy, much less tar.

back in the day a friend told her boyfriend that she'd like to gunzip his package, tar him up, and pipe him to more. that shot my processor usage up. of course, like 10 years ago, any reasonably attractive woman talking unix...

touch -d

amarok

Gave it a go, and no thanks. I can't speak for its life-enhancing powers if you're running kde, but it does not play nice with gnome. It met my burden of proof for that allegation with great speed and remarkable clumsiness. Crashes pretty much every time you open it, sucks huge processor power when you do something way out of line like pause a track... just doesn't work. Feels a lot like running iTunes on Windows 98. (Looks nice, though.)

Nah, I think I have to stick with rhythmbox for right now. It's lightweight and fast and even when it does crash (and of course it does!) it does so neatly and recovers immediately. Amarok does its level best to force me to cold reboot. Bad times.

Tell me more about gtkpod. I've been meaning to play with that, just for the helluvit, but I kinda seriously doubt it's going to let me sync and update and control my iPod as well as iTunes. I'd be extra charmed if it could prove me wrong.

amarok is a KDE-based app, I believe, so if you are using it on Gnome (and not using any other KDE apps), you will have to load up a lot of libraries and so on purely to service it.

I use audacious - it's not *that* lightweight, but it doesn't have any noticeable effect on the system.

you will have to load up a lot of libraries and so on purely to service it

that woud explain it. I don't think I run any other kde apps. Well, that plus not-totally-straightforward places that I want my library kept.

I installed Hardy Heron last night on my laptop and am really impressed with the overall desktop integration. Of course, coming from a couple of years of wearing the Gentoo hair shirt (I regret nothing) I'm easy to impress. Gnome is seems quick enough that I don't think I'll bother installing XFCE.

My only problem right now is that the screen brightness starts at it's lowest setting when it's booting up. The brightness hot keys work, but only during the BIOS load and Gnome session. So if I'm not quick I have to deal with an incredibly dark and unreadable gdm screen. I don't understand why the screen brightness settings aren't saved.

Power management?

I kinda seriously doubt it's going to let me sync and update and control my iPod as well as iTunes. I'd be extra charmed if it could prove me wrong.

BETTER.

- Can copy from your ipod as well as to it
- Lets you manually adjust play counts (if that's your thing)
- Simply never ever makes a mistake
- About 500 things that I can't think of right now

I'm a Gentoo fan myself. My only gripe with it is: sometimes package upgrades can be painful. Which isn't always Gentoo's fault, but their relatively slow installation speed can make recovery slow. I always back up packages before upgrading them now, so I can do a quick revert if needed. If a library has changed its ABI between releases, and Gentoo's maintainers haven't provided for that, you will suddenly find that half the things on your system need reinstallation.

I was bitten at work the other day when upgrading a Samba server from 3.0.14 to 3.0.18 - a minor change, you'd think. Nope. There's a change to a Samba default that randomly prevents *some* Windows XP clients from connecting, unless you delete all their mapped drives and remap them!

xp Oh, gtkpod doesn't aggregate podcasts. IcePodder is great but there's no Hardy build yet.

I always back up packages before upgrading them now, so I can do a quick revert if needed

Game changer.

amarok
> but it does not play nice with gnome

i use it with gnome all the time. fluxbox even. yes, kde libraries are needed but do people really limit themselves to only gnome apps or only kde apps?

> just doesn't work.

works for me 8) (that said, am using version that shipped with edgy, which might be a lot different. hopefully they've fixed the bug that corrupts flacs when you retag them...)

actually i use xmms most of the time (but that has lost flac support after recent update).

audacious isn't available for (my) ubuntu afaict. beep doesn't play files from the command line (you have to pick them using file chooser) and has a tendency to keep the file info window open and locked to top left of screen.

all good fun.

(isn't lack of (recent) ipod support due to apple changing their keys? or have they been cracked?)

Cracked. Touch isn't in libgpod yet though.

Amarok has always worked okay for me, it's just a bit feaure-rich in areas I don't need and feature-poor in areas that I do.

Sooo temped to work with kde4-desktop for a while btw.

BETTER.

- Can copy from your ipod as well as to it

Of course there's no way I can't applaud people doing whatever they damn well feel with their digital files, but I know how I am, and my music collection would be scattered across nine computers inside of a week if I had that option.

- Lets you manually adjust play counts (if that's your thing)

To what end? (Not trying to sound curt, I'm really asking.)

- Simply never ever makes a mistake

Well, neither does my iPod running Apple OS... now that they've replaced the whole thing twice. At any rate, it was never a software issue. I don't think. Oh, what the hell do I know.

I toyed with the idea of moving my whole library to Linux, haxoring the iPod and giving it argyle wallpaper or something "creative," but after a couple good Linux crashes it occurred to me -- this is why I bought a Mac. I really like the way iTunes keeps my music organized and centralized and makes it easy to sort and tag (anyway I'm good n' used to it), and since a lot of these poor little files are irreplaceable or near enough, I'm practically married to Time Machine.

*ha -- I almost called it Flyback, lol Linux Time Machine gimmick -- say, what do some of you other linuxy ppl use to back things up in a scheduled, hands-free kinda way? I need just your basic backup and restore setup, sqlite database, you know the drill. Flyback has all of that except for one maddening thing -- I still can't get the bugger to backup automatically. It just won't do it. The nice boys on google code have stopped responding to bug reports about it altogether, just muttering "subversion... fixd already" and moving on. But it's not fixed! Oh, anyway.

Fuck Linux and fuck RHEL in partic. Shitty-ass unstable crap. When the sales rep calls me back, I'm gonna let him know just how lousy his goddamned product is.

- Can copy from your ipod as well as to it

Of course there's no way I can't applaud people doing whatever they damn well feel with their digital files, but I know how I am, and my music collection would be scattered across nine computers inside of a week if I had that option.

Most of our CDs and mp3 backups are in boxes under the stairs, so it's loads easier to just pull an album off the ipod if 'er indoors wants a copy.

- Lets you manually adjust play counts (if that's your thing)

To what end? (Not trying to sound curt, I'm really asking.)

Meh, I dunno. Some people like the tally.

- Simply never ever makes a mistake

Well, neither does my iPod running Apple OS

Nice option if you have OS X. As Linux options go, gtkpod is a very stable and comprehensive one.

Backups? Haha, nope. I do /home occasionally. Everything important is constantly being emailed and copied to USB sticks anyway.

Fuck Linux and fuck RHEL in partic. Shitty-ass unstable crap. When the sales rep calls me back, I'm gonna let him know just how lousy his goddamned product is.

-- libcrypt, Friday, 2 May 2008 05:47 (1 hour ago) Bookmark Link

Please please please tell us what happened.

While I was typing all that I BURNED THE FRYING PAN.

Well, for some reason, JBoss clustering using JGroups UDP multicasting semi-reliably fails on RHEL 4 + 5. I say semi-reliably because I've gotten it to work twice on RHEL 4, but I can't repeat that same success even on the same machines with which I first obtained it. The problem isn't necessarily the OS: I have no problems clustering on Solaris 10, and it's not necessarily Linux either: Clustering works just fine on some random Debian image I found on vmware.com. Most annoying to me is the fact that it worked ok twice and failed on approximately 20 other instances.

So instead of switching to a better OS (hello, Solaris?), I have to obtain two JBoss "licenses" (~ $5K/per) JUST to solve this issue, since RHEL 4 is our "standard platform".

java is the cobol of our age

^^^ challenging opinion

I figure this problem has something to do with some idiot security "feature" in RHEL that I can't be arsed to learn about. So some Linux guy will eventually come along and say, "oh, that's easy to fix" and blah blah blah, but the problem is that Linux is perpetually suffering from this kinda bullshit. There's always some asinine issue that wouldn't have cropped up in the presence of reasonable QA.

you man like debian?

I used another Linux to test so that I could narrow the scope of the issue.

You are a terribly ineffective troll, Jon.

Debian doesn't have good QA either, FYI.

just a guess, but maybe try dropping the iptables and/or turning off SElinux to get it working. i don't know what rhel defaults are, but it might be worth a check. semi-reliably seems weird.

No entries in iptables. How do you turn off SELinux?

reboot in default kernel

You are a terribly ineffective troll, Jon.

-- libcrypt, Friday, May 2, 2008 2:42 PM (26 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

More effective than managing packages with rpm

reboot in default kernel

Already went that route too, thinking that the xen stuff was fucking up. Only one bootable kernel, tho, and I'm not about to get into building another.

It wouldn't be bad to have JBoss support, tho, since you get a free license for JON.

check /etc/selinux/config

can change it to SELINUX=permissive in the above file, or i think just run 'setenforce 0'

So instead of switching to a better OS (hello, Solaris?), I have to obtain two JBoss "licenses" (~ $5K/per) JUST to solve this issue, since RHEL 4 is our "standard platform".

-- libcrypt, Saturday, 3 May 2008 04:13 (3 hours ago) Bookmark Link

lol tight-arse penny-pinching management

(mind, getting decent support from sun in 2008 is like pushing diarrhoea uphill)

beyond Sisyphean imagery

http://icanhascheezburger.files.wordpress.com/2008/01/funny-pictures-sisyphus-cat-watermelon-water.jpg

It's not really that management is pinching the pennies. It's more my annoyance. Look, if y'r gonna pay for an app server, why the fuck not BUY a good one in the first place?

I've been managing Solaris/sparc for 11 years now, and the only real issue I've had with their support is that they don't have anyone who knows VNBU, even though they "support" it.

Ah okay, must just be hardware support that sucks then.

Microsoft bringing the lols

That's pretty funny, but what's funnier is that the original blog post thought is was some kind of genuine motivational video or something, and hated it for it. I think that would have made it better.

See what's on employees' laptops

I have a friend who works @ MS and I am gonna rickroll him with that like a thousand times.

VISTA GOTTA GET ME SOME

Fucking Pulseaudio.

which usb to serial adaptor is best

I created a load of logical partitions (on a new hdd) and installed Fedora 9. Not only did it wipe away ALL my logical partitions and create a single one, it put some raid shit all over the drive that I cannot get rid of. SOOO fucking angry right now.

Linux.
Fedora.
RedHat.

Dude, it's hard to have a lotta sympathy for you here.

Yes, yes I know, I just wanted to install it on ONE TINY PARTITION in order to have a play. But no, it had to destroy my fucking hard drive.

Cannot believe I now have to install VISTA in order to fix a problem that Linux created.

Wow I am so incredibly furious.

FIXED.

Fedora goes up my arse forever.

100 Uses of Vaseline

Ubuntu Hardy is a fucking disaster.

Er... in what way? I've got it on the Linux box - was going to net install debian, but debian refused to recognise my network card, so gave up on that idea - and I am neither happy nor unhappy with it, but then I don't do a great deal with it and don't have that much linux experience.

Though it did demand a reboot after some updates. And it does keep trying to give me updates, including for packages I don't have installed. Ahh, it's just like Windows, how reassuring...

Just waaaaaay too many bugs that get in the way. Still head and shoulders above Windows, but nowhere near as good as Gutsy or Feisty.

i've switched to fedora as the default ubuntu build doesn't scale down my processor when it's idle whereas the default fedora build does. and it was easier reskinning fedora than compiling in the required module in ubuntu.

didn't have a problem with volume manager, just choose the right install option and you're fine. selinux though = pita.

and two days ago my £ disappeared. and yesterday it came back.

Prob hold out for Insane Iguana or Jeering Jackal myself.

I hear that Kinky Kangaroo is going to have some way hep features tho.

This is beginning to sound like an awesome Saturday morning cartoon show.

I'd like to use Linux but...

I used the standard update-tool to update from Gutsy Gibbon to Hardy Heron.
Near the end of the process it stopped doing anything.
Now it won't boot.
Good times. Guess I'll reinstall the whole damn thing. I won't really lose anything, so it's not that bad, but pretty damn disappointing nevertheless.

Fuck a Linux. RHELL amirite???

Last straw. Chucking Ubuntu completely and buying a mac. Will continue to be fucking useless until they get their shit together.

I'd like to use Linux but... it has decided to FORGET HOW TO CONNECT TO THE INTERNET IT CAN'T BE THAT FUCKING DIFFICULT U MANAGED IT BEFORE FUCKING UBUNTU

you're joking, right? Autumn "MR UBUNTU" Almanac?? xp

no I'm not joking, so much is wrong with hardy that it's rapidly becoming unuseable.

Go back to Gutsy, for God's sake! I never even updated and my ride's been smoother than smooth.

Gutsy had the laptop lid closing problem which Hardy still has. Feisty was great but there's stuff it doesn't do very well. I have given up and am buying a mac.

I am stunned.

I am aggrieved.

although vista is seriously precisely 983279238749238749234 times worse so at least there's that.

Thomas, are you dual-booting w/Windows on the same machine? Are you connecting to internet router by ethernet? Might you have used Windows between internets working and internets not working in Linux?

If YES to these many questions, check that Wake On LAN is enabled in Windows, as Windows disables some network cards on shutdown, and whereas Windows startup re-enables them Linux startup doesn't. I had this!

Then I installed some ubuntu updates and networking was stuffed again and no amount of manual setup worked in the normal mode, I have to go into whatever the Linux equivalent of safemode is called and then set up the networking manually and start X all still in emergency boot mode, so if you work it out I'd love to know. Grmbl.

(I have onboard ethernet by Realtek, I forget the model number and it's turned off now so I can't ask it, RTL 8somethingE)

Adam does yr eee still only get a couple hours? What OS you got on it? Nick has XP on his new one and using standby now and then he says he's gotten all day on the thing, even playing music and whatnot on it.

yes, dual booting. but using USB ADSL modem.

was trying to pursuade the wireless card to act as an AP, and think I might have screwed something up there. but its not obvious, and always expects you to know which bloody file the settings are kept in and what the command was again that gives you access to write to that file and and and I give up and go back to windows.

Trayce: yeah, maybe 3-4 with wireless off. I've not timed it recently. The new ones from most manufacturers get 6-8.

Yeah its the new larger-screen one N has now, he upgraded. Think he's still using XP on it same as before. Not sure.

Congrats on choosing Mac. You will not regret it. Fuck Linux.

I think the iphone experience tipped me over the edge.

All desktop Linux can suck my nuts.

flabbergasted

Everything is progressing at an impressive rate, then suddenly everyone at once decides that near enough is good enough and stops fixing bugs. Wank.

An actual gameshow I saw in Vietnam a few days ago

http://i269.photobucket.com/albums/jj58/vzbx/IMGP3896.jpg

http://i269.photobucket.com/albums/jj58/vzbx/IMGP3883.jpg

Yes, they are dressed as fruit. No, I do not know why.

In Soviet America, Linux uses you.

Ubuntu 8.10 still doesn't know how to turn off laptop lods. That and Shuttleworth saying he'll stop bankrolling desktop linux means I might as well just fucking go back to winblows.

Intrepid is good so far. Definitely slower. Also, the laptop lid problem remains and nobody gives a shit about it. Perhaps I should update bug #1.

I was really hoping they were going to go with Ipecac Iguana.

Fedora 10 out yesterday ... Plymouth is a good idea. It's just an animated boot-up screen, but I think it's the closest Linux has come to a boot-up process that doesn't overwhelm the casual user with checks and daemons and inits and all that.

The animation is very nice, but you'd hope it doesn't affect booting time.

Also, Ubuntu started masking the daemons/inits list years ago.

that's the first thing i turn back on, i like to see what's happening 8)

(usually because my laptop usually stops at the acpi checks until i add acpi=off to the boot params)

usually usually

Video still pauses regularly, right-click in Firefox still does random things and pulseaudio is still worse than useless. Did I say Intrepid is better than Hardy? I WAS LYING.

it's the closest Linux has come to a boot-up process that doesn't overwhelm the casual user with checks and daemons and inits and all that

[...]

Ubuntu started masking the daemons/inits list years ago.

[...]

that's the first thing i turn back on, i like to see what's happening 8)

For real. I'm starting to think (like some snarky ppl upthread) that there are no "casual" users of Linux, not even Ubuntu. There are those that have computers that they know how to diagnose and (possibly) fix, and then there are those who have broken machines, and any user is moving quickly toward one of those extremes.

I don't know know all of what that text output is telling me when it boots, but I do know the last thing it says before it locks up, and being able to google that helps a lot.

pulseaudio is still worse than useless

Yes. You just have to yank that shit out and put esound back in for all your sound to work; there's no better solution, near as I can tell.

I think what puts alot of people off is the "work in progress" feeling.

holy shit ubuntu in a vmware player rocks

Unity is really really really really fucking horrible.

I have no problem with people changing interfaces and doing new things (especially in Linux, possibly the stuffiest most reactionary OS hivemind in existence) but THIS

I'm thinking of installing Ubuntu on my rubbish Acer Aspire netbook (currently running a funny version of Linux called Linpus which will not boot). Then I will be a proper nerd.

downloaded natty to try it in virtual box. 650M of iso. it then reads more files from network as it installs (language files for 1000 languages i don't speak). then the second thing it does is pop up Update Manager and ask for another 200M of downloads.

(the first thing it does is tell me i don't have the hardware needed to run Unity, probably as it's inside VirtualBox)

Oh, Linpus!

-xpost-

the first thing it does is tell me i don't have the hardware needed to run Unity, probably as it's inside VirtualBox

http://www.webupd8.org/2010/12/how-to-test-ubuntu-1104-with-unity-in.html

yeah, that's exactly what i was reading. but no dice, even after updating everything.

think unity is just forcing people to do what i've been doing for a while now - i run everything fullscreen and alt-tab between them. desktop icons are redundant (are always behind stuff) so i add everything as a top-level menu item or icon to task bar. and i also use vertical menus on left and right as screen is a lot wider than it is tall (this breaks some things though, like notification areas and window lists).

am curious, but in no real rush to upgrade my laptop - am using 10.4 LTS. and i already triple boot it between vista, jaunty and lucid (and fedora something).

I don't mind the concept of Unity, it's not being able to find stuff. Took me ages to work out how to make the icons in that bar thing a reasonable size (turns out that was a hack).

My laptop is a single-boot 10.04 (fuck windows) and has been since, well, 10.04, but I don't think I can be arsed putting 11.04 on there. Everything works as it is.

http://digitizor.com/2011/04/28/after-installing-ubuntu-11-04/ says:

"Note: Unity does not work with the proprietary ATI Graphics Cards driver. It does, however, work with the open source driver. The light weight Unity 2D works with ATI's proprietary drivers though."

which might explain it. will try it tomorrow.

oh dear

i just upgraded to 10.10 and i figured i'd stay there at least till unity gets ironed out.

unity-2d is downloading a bunch of qt related stuff... and mysql client... odd.

ok, i am unity-able now.

if i run anything fullscreen the taskbar disappears. which means i have to move mouse over the tiny ubuntu thing at top left to get it to reappear before choosing the (limited selection of) application i want and that hunting for the ubuntu button negates the whole purpose for having an always-on menu. (the windows key also brings menu back, but hey...)

also hate the scrolling / typing in order to find stuff.

might be ok, eventually. will need lots of personalisation though. i usually have to add a lot of stuff (development tools) but i can generally leave the standard stuff there and work around it as the development stuff goes into different menus. with the new limited amount of application slots i'm going to have to remove things.

You can bring up the bar thing by holding down the Win key.

(i said that!)

system settings available under the SHUTDOWN BUTTON! that's worse than SHUTDOWN being under START.

agh so you did

Also I saw System Settings there but as I was in the process of SHUTTING DOWN at that point it didn't register. What. the. hell were they thinking.

ah just found this thread. my initial thoughts:

just installed it and the windows manager is, well, different

also mildly revolted by the use of the word "Apps" everywhere

maybe it becomes usable with the keyboard shortcuts? seriously tho won't this just make it harder for ppl to migrate from windows? of course it's possible to disable unity but makes me wonder about the direction they are taking ubuntu and whether i want to switch to something else.

also what the hell is up with the scrollbar in evolution? i hate not having the file/edit/view/etc menu at the top of each individual window too. i have a massive monitor and it looks weird to run things full screen.

it's ugly how when you want to bring up the file/edit menu you have to hover the mouse over the bar at the top and then the menu is kind of written across the name of the application.

on the positive side installing flash and skype were easier than i remember before.

finding this wallpaper helpful: http://i.imgur.com/pf1y5.png

seriously tho won't this just make it harder for ppl to migrate from windows?

Shuttleworth wants to get away from the idea that Ubuntu is a response to other OSes. He wants Ubuntu to be a full and confident OS in its own right. Whether he's going the right way about it remains to be seen, I suppose, but I'm impressed with what Unity is and where it's going.

His other big idea is to rule the netbook market. Remember netbooks?

Oh and I agree about the scrollbar, totally hideous.

Unity's actually really good, just give it a wee while longer. I'm now using Windows only when I really need to (eg... urgh, MathCAD)

Oh I forgot to mention, since those angry posts at the weekend I've completely come round. Love Unity now.

When you install it it offers to keep your old Ubuntu where it is and create a whole new 11.04 partition. You don't have to nominate partition sizes or anything. In the past I've had to do all that manually. AND, it downloads updates while you're still at the regional settings bit! Very impressive.

Shuttleworth wants to get away from the idea that Ubuntu is a response to other OSes

that's fine but as far as i can see this is just a step towards mac os x away from windows? unity is actually quite nice on my netbook. i suppose due to smart phones people are getting used to a variety of operating systems so the fact that ubuntu has moved away from the windows-style layout isn't such a big deal.

Unity is really really really really fucking horrible.

― it always seems to have dick smith in it (Autumn Almanac), Thursday, 28 April 2011 09:09 (5 days ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

I'm impressed with what Unity is and where it's going.

― it always seems to have dick smith in it (Autumn Almanac), Monday, 2 May 2011 21:46 (Yesterday) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

?!

Oh I forgot to mention, since those angry posts at the weekend I've completely come round. Love Unity now.

― it always seems to have dick smith in it (Autumn Almanac), Tuesday, 3 May 2011 08:04 (12 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

!!

oops missed that one :)

haven't tried it yet but it seems like it would be right up my alley, i've long railed against the stupidity of desktop icons and the start button.

> the fact that ubuntu has moved away from the windows-style layout isn't such a big deal

except to the people who are quite happy with gnome...

time to start compiling gentoo, i think...

actually, i ran fluxbox for a couple of years and was quite happy with it. even used it with ubuntu - disabling metacity but keeping the gnome menu bars so i could use Network Manager rather than struggling with ppp for my modem. was a bit of a mongrel though and wasn't worth the effort when upgrading.

that's fine but as far as i can see this is just a step towards mac os x away from windows? unity is actually quite nice on my netbook. i suppose due to smart phones people are getting used to a variety of operating systems so the fact that ubuntu has moved away from the windows-style layout isn't such a big deal.

― tpp, Tuesday, 3 May 2011 19:57 (18 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Yeah, Canonical's been steering toward Mac aesthetics for a while now, but (being as objective as possible) UI has in recent years been heavily split (a) between function and simplicity and (b) between getting in the user's way and getting out of it. Microsoft has been charging full-pelt to the former in both cases (although W7 has pulled back on the invasive UX), and Apple and Ubuntu have been going hard toward the latter in both cases.

reading Linux Format suggests that gnome's moving on as well, so even things that stick with gnome will suffer paradigm shifts.

http://www.gnome3.org/

(i still look for the 'up a directory' button in windows 7 every time i open explorer and am annoyed when i can't find it. 'Back' doesn't do the same thing.)

Up and back are different though.

In W7 you can click on the chunk of the path corresponding to "up" in the address bar, e.g. if you're in c:\animals\mammals\weasels you can click on "mammals" to go up one level, or "animals" to go up two. But yes, that is a bit of a faff. It's surprisingly much slower to have to read the screen to work out where to click.

I thought Unity just sat on top of Gnome, so in theory you should be able to disable Unity and revert to Gnome without too much pain? But I haven't upgraded yet (and I mainly access my Linux box via ssh, so I won't be seeing the GUI much) so I don't know.

(I'm not even very clear on exactly what is so different about it. Screenshots aren't helping me much. Off to youtube with me.)

Unity highlights:

- you run most stuff by typing part of its name (like gnome-do/quicksilver)
- if what you want isn't installed, it suggests what you want and provides a d/l link
- the dock is quite like a dock
- it's sort of hard to find some stuff

(the problem with clicking on the path is that not all of it's shown, only the last few directories and when you are deep and the directories have long names (java source trees, hello!) you have to revert to pressing the even tinier << button and then choosing from the ddlb there. i'd rather just hit 'up' half a dozen times. the alternative is to open the tree in the left hand side of the window, but that isn't as intuitive as it was and i haven'e been able to work out how it scrolls (it jumps when you open directories with lots of directories in them, meaning you lose where you were))

> you run most stuff by typing part of its name (like gnome-do/quicksilver)

i didn't like this moving from mouse to keyboard to mouse again

Nah. Hit win key, type name of app, hit enter.

Microsoft seems to be doing a lot of interface stuff for the sake of change rather than investing any real time/money in research.

Sorry for Windows chat on Linux thead, but:

the alternative is to open the tree in the left hand side of the window, but that isn't as intuitive as it was

YES I hate this! I always turn on the "Folders" view in XP (even get cross that if you spawn explorer from the command prompt, as I do daily, there's no command-line option to open the Folders sidebar) but it's almost bloody unusable in 7. You're right about the other disadvantage too; I'd forgotten about that one.

I thought Win7 changing the Start menu so that you were expected to type part of the program name was a bit of a funny move. Interesting to see that Unity does something similar. I don't mind typing, but if I'm going to type things, I may as well just type the whole thing at a command prompt, rather than fight with the start menu, which is bloody awkward to use without a mouse. Hopefully this is a bit easier in Unity.

(actually the music software I use recently went the same way - instead of looking through Plugins -> Effects -> Distortion -> Bob's Super Distortion Plug-In v1.3 you can now just type "bob" or "dist" and pick from a flat list - and that really is a lot quicker. I wonder where this trend started.)

> Nah. Hit win key, type name of app, hit enter.

until you install audacity and audacious2 and audacious-gtkui at the same time...

and you can't remember the name 'ekiga'

(and 'ti' brings up mahjong, with no explanation as to why)

(a quick google says there are folder options to always expand the folder in win7: Organise > Folder and Search Options > General > Navigation Pane)

what do i have to do to get my gtk widgets to use the ubuntu theme?

uglyhttp://i.imgur.com/v3x65.png

"instead of looking through Plugins -> Effects -> Distortion -> Bob's Super Distortion Plug-In v1.3 you can now just type "bob" or "dist" and pick from a flat list - and that really is a lot quicker. I wonder where this trend started.)"

mac os spotlight, surely? The W7 equivalent to that sucks in comparison though.

> Nah. Hit win key, type name of app, hit enter.

until you install audacity and audacious2 and audacious-gtkui at the same time...

and you can't remember the name 'ekiga'

(and 'ti' brings up mahjong, with no explanation as to why)

― koogs, Tuesday, 3 May 2011 22:24 (Yesterday) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Agh yeah, that does suck. I use Launchy on Win XP and Spotlight on this Mac: Launchy will pick up any segment of any word; Spotlight won't. As Unity has pretty much done away with menus, it needs to be better than both.

While I'm at it, I also don't like that the win search and the win+A search bring up two different sets of things. There's no excuse for that.

ummm anyone else finding that windows (or even parts of windows wtf?) seem to suddenly lock up and not respond to mouse clicks? i can't quite pin down what's going on but it's very weeeeeird and happening on both machines i installed natty on.

Not yet. I've heard of people having various issues with the GUI, though. An update will hopefully sort it out.

ummm anyone else finding that windows (or even parts of windows wtf?) seem to suddenly lock up and not respond to mouse clicks? i can't quite pin down what's going on but it's very weeeeeird and happening on both machines i installed natty on.

is your problem is that you'll click somewhere, and then you'll move the mouse and click somewhere else but the interface will act like you're still clicking in the place you originally clicked?

(and refuse to change focus to a different window?)

yeah that sounds like it could be it. not 100% sure though.

it's a really hard problem to describe but we might have had the same one. it happened to me not with the natty update but with a recent update to the x.org display drivers. but i didn't narrow it down to that until after i'd wiped and reinstalled the OS. but that's ok i kinda like reinstalling the OS.

this thread says the problem's fixed in the new version, but i'm just avoiding x.org updates for now (after the OS reinstall rolled back to before the problem). at least until the weekend, when i'll have time to fuck with it and won't have scheduled any of that bourgeois corporate-stooge stuff like "use" my operating system to "do things".

thanks for that info, it sounds similar if not exactly what i'm experiencing. i'm sure after a few more days of trying to "do things" i'll be able to describe the problem much more precisely.

i maintain about 20 machines at the office that are all running various older version of ubuntu. definitely going to wait for these problems to be ironed out before upgrading any of them to natty.

"Fucking with it" is an acceptable and expected solution to problems with Debian and Slackware, not Ubuntu. If Shuttleworth wants to conquer the universe he needs to get on top of the bugs that break the deal. It's better than it used to be (Edgy oh jesus) but it needs to be better.

Oh and Xubuntu is out if you need a reliable Gnomealike.

when i installed natty on my desktop on first boot it presented me with a message "you do not have the hardware required to run unity" and dropped me into a classic-style environment. having just installed it on my netbook i know this is bullshit so try to open the restricted drivers thingy and install the nvidia driver. but having clicked on the restricted drivers tool nothing happens. at this point i start trying a few others things and realise apt isn't managing to connect to the repos, after changing the repo location everything works fine. it's a minor/obvious thought process for someone used to linux/ubuntu but a first-time user is going to give up on the spot.

it's a minor/obvious thought process for someone used to linux/ubuntu but a first-time user is going to give up on the spot.

this is key to the whole Linux Thing and they really really really need to get on it. the community's improved in the past few years, but that thing still happens where well-meaning people switch to ubuntu for whatever reason and then go to a forum and ask how to do such-and-such, and the linux people get bitchy like UM IT'S PRETTY SIMPLE HAVE YOU TRIED TYPING SUDO MOUNT -T NTFS /DEV/SDA1 /MNT/NTFS and it's like no they haven't tried typing that because it's not nineteen eighty-fucking-five.

(i <3 doing things in the terminal though it makes me feel cool)

but whatever, the last wine update randomly made morrowind work again, so i'm happy.

xp the "helpful" Linux community is the exact opposite ime. If someone ever bothers to acknowledge your question the answer always begins with "oh GOD why am i wasting my time with this crap, okay look just go to launchpad and log a bug BUT MAKE SURE IT'S NOT A DUPLICATE" etc etc. Unacceptable even to people like us, and the absolute end of the line for your average nanna.

When I properly installed Natty at the weekend it took nearly two hours to download the updates at 13.7 kbps. That's another major thing they need to sort out, especially with Canonical treating Ubuntu as a trojan horse for paid services these days.

at some point last year i had a c++ problem and i went on irc to see if anyone could help. a guy was so obnoxious to me about asking for help with something "obvious" i called him out for being such a prick and was swiftly banned. honestly had to have a time out from the computer i was FUMING hahaha

wow

buncha neckbeards.

> it's a minor/obvious thought process for someone used to linux/ubuntu but a first-time user is going to give up on the spot.

but i felt the same with windows update problem this morning:

"Failed with error C87923749879238749872934879879.
Click here for more information."

(click)

"Uknown update error C87923749879238749872934879879.
Was this helpful?"

NO

"Why wasn't this helpful?"

...

Yeah, Windows has been creating that false sense of security since Win95, chucking up helpful friendly troubleshooting tools that ask you a load of questions, get you to check obvious things ("IS YR COMPUTER PLUGGED IN Y/N") and in the end just leave you stranded. Never helped me once.

but that's ok i kinda like reinstalling the OS.

so true <3

So, I've got quite a speedy Win7 machine, why should I have a go at Linux? What's the advantages?

I'm hoping for a more measured response than most articles I've seen written by Linux superstans.

haw, feel like on this thread you're more likely to get snark

this is actually a really hard question. i don't know about 'advantages' really it's quite specific to what you use your computer for. for me i can do everything i need to do in linux (except for the odd frustrating thing) so why would i not use it? once you get used to having a vast amount of free software and downloading stuff with one command at the terminal it's hard to go back imo. whenever i try to use a windows machine now i spent hours searching out software to do what i want and then discover i have to pay for it.

i have no experience with this (but am considering it), but isn't another appeal of linux the idea that it can 'rejuvenate' old hardware? i'm thinking that i'll reconfigure my 2008 MBP as a linux box when i get a new computer soon-ish. ideally i could have it as a dedicated 'media' box or something.

that's definitely true. the main distributions themselves probably aren't suitable for this but there are many lightweight linux distros out there. i managed to install linux on my old pc in my childhood bedroom that has like 32MB of RAM :)

Yeah, I have a low-powered atom board in a mini case running linux effectively as a torrent box (something I don't mind leaving running overnight because it uses a tenth of the power of my main machine) and file server (so I can stream mp3s from there instead of downloading them to the desktop and then wanting them on the laptop or whatever)

it's not running a particularly lightweight distro, just an out-of-the-box Debian, but command-line only - there's no monitor attached and all logins are over ssh

before that I was running xubuntu on an 8-year-old laptop which someone else was throwing out because it was too old to run XP, but not too old for me to run Linux and read ILX, tit about with Perl and some basic OpenGL and making music in schismtracker, etc

I'm hoping for a more measured response than most articles I've seen written by Linux superstans.

― Yossarian's sense of humour (NotEnough), Friday, 6 May 2011 05:06 (1 hour ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Until Win7 came along, the main reason was simply and compellingly that Linux was not Windows. Vista was a condescending harassing piece of shit, and everything from WinXP back underperformed against Linux.

Now that Microsoft's slowly getting its shit together and W7 is decent (so I've been told – I've not used it) the main reason to dump it is malware. Yes you can slow down your machine with a security solution, or you can just go with any other OS on the planet and not have to worry. Linux fits the bill here because it's free and because it runs on hardware built for Windows.

If you use Win7 and you're happy with it, then, the two real points of value that Linux can offer you are:

- free stuff
- no malware

Those two points are countered by:

- the loss of some applications you probably rely on (e.g. Office*)
- limited support if things go wrong

* despite what you've been told, OpenOffice/LibreOffice is not a good enough substitute

i.e. i am talking you out of linux

i was going to suggest get vmware player for windows and try out any number of linux distros.
but vmware makes you go through this whole signup thing and i dunno...
if you can get it working, it's great for virus-free browsing, installing demos of things that you don't want infecting
your actual machine.

or just do this

or this

AA's post is pretty comprehensive. i've been out of the windows loop since xp (not because i've been using linux so long but because i used xp so long) so i have nothing to say about either vista or 7, but that is indeed What I Hear. i've never had any problems with openoffice but i basically only use the word processor (i've heard bad things about the excel/powerpoint manques) and i've never had an office job. actually i've gotten really snotty and hippie lately and started filing all my writing in plaintext. which i edit in emacs.

but yeah you're basically getting free stuff and security in exchange for your computer becoming more of a hobby and less of an appliance.

(oh and if you play any game more advanced than spider solitare stay far away)

ha unity just froze

xp oh yes Linux is now the worst OS in existence for games (and I mean that factually i.e. of the 11 current distinct platforms I can think of it's #11)

did they port tux racer to PS3??

let me log into psn and check, oh wait

Right, I've installed that Wubi thing and I'm posting from Ubuntu. Ain't it speedy! A few things are a bit annoying (transferring bookmarks and t0rr3nts over from Chrome and utorrent, Flash doesn't seem to work in Chrome) but I'll have a play over the weekend.

I'll need to keep Windows for gaming, but I could get used to this!

After a couple of days unity freezes and the machine needs to be restarted. The solution offered by your friendly helpful linux community is "FILE A BUG REPORT". >< THIS close to dumping linux forever.

I don't know if that is better or worse than the other standard fanboy-of-slightly-esoteric-software response "it works perfectly for me, you have clearly done something wrong and know nothing about computers (p.s. how dare you complain when you could just find the bug and fix it and recompile everything ever and submit a kernel patch, just like that)"

Yeah that, or a third outcome: "there is no open source driver, blame the manufacturer, sign this petition and this petition and this one and this one and then submit a complaint to the manufacturer"

btw I found that bug and yes it asks people to try compiling alternative kernels until they find one that works

(i.e. in the 21st century a suitable and technically feasible response would be "click this link and say 'yes' when prompted, if it fails then follow these simple steps to remove it")

I just put Ubuntu (Bitchy Baboon) on an external bootable drive but during upgrade process it totally fuxored the whole filesystem- I couldnt even boot. Good thing I hadn't done anything with it and I can just start over. Still, it is fast when its working.

Bitchy Baboon

laughed

glad i gave this nonsense up on the desktop when the developer preview of os x came out.

got End of Life messages trying to update ubuntu 9.04 this morning 8(

(am using 10.4 day to day but keep 9.04 around just in case (and it was 32bit rather than 64). plus there are things there that i still haven't migrated, like my thunderbird folders full of mail)

spent the last day trying to use rpmbuild and just plain NOT GETTING IT

i think i get it now, the different files have to exist in a directory before you tar them up?

update to ubuntu 10.04 just killed my skype :(

could be skype killed your skype - they are having problems today

I am wondering now if my persistence file is only 4gb will that mean I cannot use the rest of the 250gb for anything or if that is just system settings and assorted shlit. I got a weir d browser called doobie that only finds german web pages

installed ubuntu 11.04. chose the old darkish theme ('Nw Wave') as it has the buttons in the right order. only the new top menu thing doesn't understand themes and is showing the menu items in black on dark grey.

one thing i like - banshee info and controls on the volume control applet.

so is that the end for compiz and the rotaty cube thing?

3 years using ubuntu, boot drive filesystem is fucked up for 4th time as of last night.. shitty disk utilities think it's a superblock issue... wasted a world of time last go round trying to fix it, guess i'll just reinstall. the system gives me a heads up though because first i notice that images stop loading in browser, and then notice i can't create or delete files or folders on that drive. i can copy them, though, so I got to copy off whatever i wanted before i rebooted to bad news. this sucks though.. can't be that common, so i wonder what i'm doing wrong.

also 10.04 boot cd will never install... gotta go back to 9.04 or something and update upgrade update.

You can't install from the 10.04 boot CD at all? Really?

fixed it... still don't know what's causing the initial corruption, but apparently what's been going on in my recovery attempts is the ubuntu livecd automatically attempts to mount the drive - or do something with it - and that attempt just waits and waits forever, so you can't fsck the drive from the livecd desktop, and lots of other utilities fail or behave mysteriously. Burned a slax disc and fscked from there, rebooted, everything seems back to normal.

I don't know what's wrong with the reinstall.. i think my disc is a good burn of a good image, maybe not.. but i've always had to install an older version and leapfrog ahead.

have you tried the 11.04?

nah not yet... didn't really know if i wanted to mess with the Unity desktop or whatever. I'm a late adopter.

you don't have to use Unity ( but actually, it's fine.)

just select Classic Desktop at the login screen

hey in ubuntu 11.04 does anyone find that sometimes totem won't let you skip through an mp3? SO annoying

Why would you use totem?

Btw I just tried it and on the second mp3 I tried, it wouldn't let me skip through it.

i don't really like banshee or rhythmbox, i just like going to a folder and playing mp3s in totem....pretty annoying bug this.

banshee seems wicked buggy, almost unusable for me for some reason. I wish there was a lightweight winamp type thing for ubuntu.
I just sintalled 10.4 alongside windows on my new work pc - but getting the drivers for th wireless newt gear usb receiver is going to be bitchy

XMMS?

You wind! I also am having trouble installing FFMPEG for some reason - I feel so lost in linux land at times like this. I finally figure out how to install the program utuberipper and it doesnt open when I click it - sheesh

audacious(2?) is a pretty lightweight player and a bit more up to date than xmms.

open when you click it? what is this, windows? 8)

(what bugged me this morning was trying to remember the name of the program that handles pdfs. works when i double-click on them but i was trying to add a pdf to the task bar and just dragging it there didn't work. was 'evince' ffs)

audacious seems to work well for me - thanks

I was sitting there using my macbook today thinking "I will never buy a mac again" they're too expensive. All I really use mac for anyway is garageband and surely that can be done with some other software

thaaaaaaaaaaat is a toughie

If I see one more bit of John Mayer trying to teach me to play guitar I will throw my macbook into Steve job's gaping hole

maybe we should try and do a s/d music making software for linux?

anyone ever tried this one: http://www.mixxx.org/ ?

there is a thread somewhere for linux music tools. but these things change so frequently.

i have tried mixxx but not recently.

i love mixxx a lot

anyone tried ardour?

yea, if anyone has any experience with ardour, I'd love to hear about it.

I looked at the webpage once

lolz

I have used audacity on ubuntu with no problems for more modest recording of band jamz purposes

if I am deep in the creative process I hate to suddenly get some bug to fix - garageband is great in that sense. it owuld be nice to have a really basic yet solid "tascam porta studio" type app

the jack aspect scares me... linux audio in general does...

as in the audio input on the machine? or a usb input?

jack the extra extra layer of audio libraries on top of pulse / alsa / oss / whatever

http://jackaudio.org/

yeah the interaction between jack / pulseaudio / alsa / oss is something i've never understood either

http://www.indygo.de/misc/linux_audio.png

lol

linux in a nutshell

Recording music on a computer is beyond me, but have any of you tried the UbuntuStudio flavor? It claims to be preloaded and configured for creation.

also, DeadBeef is my favorite music player. It's closest to boring unmodified foobar2000 in use.

audio in linux is so fucked.

whyfucked?

that diagram is a pretty good explanation! there are a whole bunch of different libraries/driver sets and all of them are half-finished and sometimes programs only like one of them, or two of them, or one of them only if it's "wrapped" inside another one, and sometimes updates break them, etc.. for a while after installing ubuntu i couldn't get sound from more than one program at a time, which i tell people i "fixed" but which really just stopped being a problem one day because i lit the right number of votive candles. things have been pretty smooth since then (although the sound in the native linux version of quake 3 could not be convinced to work and i eventually just installed the windows version under wine) and like everything else in linux It Gets Better but it's still the thing i've had the most problems with.

(what bugged me this morning was trying to remember the name of the program that handles pdfs. works when i double-click on them but i was trying to add a pdf to the task bar and just dragging it there didn't work. was 'evince' ffs)

― koogs, Thursday, June 30, 2011 9:08 AM (2 days ago) Bookmark

loled @ this btw, love/hate the gnomic (gnumic) linux app names. "ekiga", "gwibber", "brasero", "pitivi".

hate microsoft and everything but you know what was a good name for a program? "word".

lol that's a good point actually

like everything else in linux It Gets Better

lol

the first ubuntu release that used pulseaudio was pretty dreadful - even the startup sound got the glitch remix treatment. second version was MUCH better. and it's a while since i've had any specific trouble (about a year ago, mplayer -ao oss to get decent playback of some media or other)

love/hate the gnomic (gnumic) linux app names. "ekiga", "gwibber", "brasero", "pitivi".

― my Sonicare toothbrush (difficult listening hour), Sunday, 3 July 2011 04:37 (3 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

also all the kde names that absolutely must begin with a k (no love there, just hate)

i experimented with ubuntu for a couple weeks before giving up in frustration by the sheer amount of effort i needed to put into things just to run super simple tasks. plugins, plugins, plugins, plugins....

so i aint h8in but can anyone explain to me the appeal of linux outside of server usages?

You feel cool

- no viruses
- no adware
- no spyware
- free stuff
- no windows
- less nagging (less an issue c/w win7)

Linux is good for my yak shavey moods when I want everything to be esoteric and command line based and use tiling window managers that you have to recompile to configure and stuff like that.

i've probably mentioned it before since i'm so rmde proud of myself but i went to linux because my Vista hard drive died and i didn't feel like replacing it so i used an ubuntu livecd and no hard drive for like a year. eventually i updated to booting off of an SD card. it's the living in a van down by the river of computing.

anyway other than flash, mp3, and some video codecs i don't know about any plugins.. but i just web surf and draw stuff so..

sheer amount of effort i needed to put into things just to run super simple tasks. plugins, plugins, plugins, plugins....

what are these super simple tasks?

most things in linux now are pretty easy!

please do not mention moonlight/silverlight

also all the kde names that absolutely must begin with a k (no love there, just hate)

I can live with this as it's the only clue most of them give you that they need KDE before you install them, and I don't run KDE

they must be confused by the word knome/gnome

On the subject of audio in Linux, I've had a lot success with AV Linux.

http://www.bandshed.net/AVLinux.html

The developer has JACK working fairly well, and its a Realtime Kernel so latency isn't really an issue when it comes to recording.

Ubuntu Studio on the other hand is just vaporware.

I've also heard really good things about Studio64, but I only run Linux on older 32 bit systems so I've never tried it.

As far as Ardour goes, it works, but I'd suggest paying for it you want anything other than basic functionality. You can't even really edit with the free version. You can pop files back and forth between Ardour and Audacity but its extremely time consuming and tedious.

I use the native Linux version of Renoise and its very very stable. One of my favorite pseudo DAWs, but its still tracker software at heart, so if you can't stand coding I'd suggest something else. All that being said I also own a Macbook and wouldn't recommend putting all your eggs in one basket if you've only got one computer. I've tried about 8 different flavors of Linux before I found one that I liked and that was stable enough to use for audio editing and songwriting.

One word of caution: AV Linux is kind of a bear to set up.

Its much easier to transition from Ubuntu to it, than doing it from a Windows PC.

I'd suggest getting Ubuntu set up on a partition and then using it for a month or two before moving over. Get to know various software in the Debian environment so that you know what kind of stuff to tweak the basic AV Linux build with. I'm no coder, I just smash together bits and pieces of other people's code until something works. It really helps to be willing to completely scrap an OS and start over again if you have to.

But AV Linux does have very detailed step by step install directions which is a refreshing change of pace in the he-man world of open source software. Seriously though, this guy built an OS by himself and it works really well. That's Bill Gates territory in my book.

As long as I'm doing the knowledge dump thing.

http://www.64studio.com/faq_user

I found this FAQ on Studio64's site enormously helpful when I was setting up my USB audio interface with JACK.

"The performance of my USB audio interface with Jack is poor. I can't get low latency without xruns, using the default Jack settings. What do I need to change?

USB audio interfaces can act strangely when set to 2 periods/buffer, the usual default for PCI sound cards or onboard chipsets. In Jack Control, please set Periods/Buffer to 3 and Frames/Period to a fairly high figure, say 256 or 512. Then try lower Frames/Period settings until you reach the lower latency limits of your system. If you don't need full duplex, setting Jack to Playback Only or Capture Only will improve performance."

I use a cheapo Alesis one, its got 2 ins, 2 outs and a Midi In/Out.

With Renoise running the JACK server you can do some really amazing stuff, it makes Rewire seem like a quaint toy in comparison. On the other hand if you use VSTs heavily in Windows getting them running in Linux is enormously difficult. That's one of the few battles I gave up on. I just settled on using Linux based plug ins, which are mostly pretty terrible.

These days I mostly use Renoise for composition and then move the file over to the Macbook and edit them in Logic.

I would like to try all that if I had the time. As it is I am considering getting my cassette based tascam out of the basement.

I have a Mac at work. I would like to read files on a 2 TB USB drive with an ext3 filesystem. If I install VIrtualBox (virtualbox.org), will I be able to do this? The VirtualBox documentation mentions Linux 2.6. How is Ubuntu related to Linux 2.6? I've heard the former works with ext3. Has anyone done this before? Should I be concerned about memory or anything like that? Thanks in advance.

Check out Vagrant: http://vagrantup.com/

More than likely you'll get a command line-only linux install you can connect to locally, but the setup time will be very low.

go with Ubuntu 10.04, the latest LTS (long term support) release. it's the most stable and doesn't have Unity.

any recent ubuntu will work with ext3 (ext3 is commonest but last generation file system, probably 10 years old now (yes, added to kernel in 2001) and superceded by ext4 (2008) and, soon, btrfs).

and 2.6 is the kernel revision, and any recent ubuntu will have a 2.6 kernel.

the bigger issue might be usb support in VirtualBox. was a time when the free version didn't support it.

Actually, this is probably easier:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/fuse-ext2/

Support for ext2/ext3 disks in OS X.

Thanks! I haven't had a chance to try this yet because I've been sidetracked with other projects, but hopefully before the weekend, I'll get to try different options ... This is when I am truly thankful for ILX!!!

Hello Justin86,

We at Ubuntu Forums would like to wish you a happy birthday today!

lol

I am very disappointed at the lack of nerdery in that birthday greeting. Like I'm sure the slackware forum sends you a message in obfuscated c or something.

also kind of lol that this is the first one of these i get after being inactive on the forum for like 3 years

pysched for the linux spotify if it ever occurs

http://www.spotify.com/uk/blog/archives/2010/07/12/linux/

well look at that

I tried it but after install it would not allow me to log in - shit!

you need to be a premium member.

"UPDATE: Spotify for Linux is now also available for Spotify Unlimited subscribers."
I idiotically thought that was the free version

that puts me in the unusual position of using a program for free in windows but paying for the linux version

Had Ubuntu shares visible and r/w in Lion. Rebooted Ubuntu and I can't see the shares anymore. I think that's the end for me and Linux.

after months of annoyance i definitely think 11.04 is the worst release of ubuntu ever. has anyone else had the thing when you go to install a printer and it asks you for a root password?.....A ROOT PASSWORD?

if the next release isn't a lot slicker i'm gonna switch distros. what do non-ubuntu people use?

linux 4 life

Top 10 here --> http://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=major

Linux Mint is probably the way to go now. I'm out of touch with the whole scene but that one comes up a lot.

has anyone else had the thing when you go to install a printer and it asks you for a root password?.....A ROOT PASSWORD?

No, but I don't think I've tried printing from 11.04. Unity crashed so often that I moved to unity-2d.

I see no point in going back to Gnome if they're killing it off completely in 11.10.

er bollocksed up the paragraph points there

it is a bit of a worry. i'm on the LTS of ubuntu so i should be ok until, what, 2015 (which is probably 2 laptops down the line). it's not just ubuntu and unity either - gnome3 uses a similar paradigm. never got on with kde since v4

i did try crunchbang, which uses fluxbox (which i'm familiar with) but the black theming made it unusable (too many reflections) and changing it was non-trivial.

I've not seen gnome 3 in action so can't really judge. kde 4 impressed me and gave me the shits in equal measure, but I've never been a kde person.

Linux Mint is probably the way to go now. I'm out of touch with the whole scene but that one comes up a lot.

Apparently I'm so out of touch I haven't heard of Linux Mint. What's it good at?

Last time I went to install Ubuntu it would, strangely, recognise my network card in "LiveCD" mode but not when actually installed, so I went with Debian because it recognised my card right out of the box, and I was fairly happy with it, but the epic waits for things to be deemed "stable" enough to go into the stable repository (which I was sticking with because otherwise something upgrades itself and possibly breaks, or breaks something else, every other day) are a bit tiresome.

(Mind you, most of my Linux use is command-line only - monitor is rarely plugged in, mostly just ssh in from a Windows laptop - so I realise that many of the big selling points of "use our distribution because it has nice themes and custom graphical widgets" may be a bit lost on me)

mint's traditionally been ubuntu with all the multimedia stuff added back in. last i heard it had promised to eschew the unity desktop bits that ubuntu have added and delay moving to gnome3 until it's mature. it also does something wacky with the menu which i don't like, it's like an entire panel that pops up. and it's a bit green.

http://www.linuxmint.com/img/screenshots/isadora/menu.png

wth

precise pangolin? it's a scaley anteater...

upgraded to ubuntu 11.10 today and couldn't get the window system to open because something was wrong with my nvidia drivers, messed around trying to fix things from the terminal for an hour before throwing my hands up, reformatting the OS partition, and installing 10.10 from CD. fuck unity.

and yet of course i still have this pathological urge to delete all my config information and try to install 11.10 again from scratch what is wrong with me

the joy of linux

masochistic mule

lol exactly

just upgraded to 11.10....last chance for ubuntu

and yet of course i still have this pathological urge to delete all my config information and try to install 11.10 again from scratch what is wrong with me

yeah i've never upgraded without feeling there is something *wrong*

I use 10.5 but mostly I just check email and the Glen Matlock fansites - right solid as a bitch IMO

i also upgraded to 11.10 today. no mobile broadband now though. humpf. (reboots into the last LTS)

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.

looks cool though

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

If they do it right, that shouldn't happen. You can almost drive firefox entirely from the keyboard already (especially with LoL installed); this would make that complete. GUI shouldn't preclude good keyboard-driving.

I don't see this setting the world on fire but I still love the idea. Navigating application menus would be exactly 200 times easier if you could just type what you want to do.

otm

i hope it's clever enough for that and it's just word-matching. Mac OS X already has this with Cmd-? (which is v. useful)

*not just

> You can almost drive firefox entirely from the keyboard already

but the example in the video was inkscape...

I don't know inkscape in particular, but if you're using Photoshop without one hand on the keyboard you're doing it wrong. Menus like this would be a big time saver there.

> if you're using Photoshop without one hand on the keyboard you're doing it wrong

but that's just keyboard shortcuts, this is typing words, which is different. and if you're typing with only one hand you're doing it wrong (or at least inefficiently)

it's more the forcing their millions of users to change how they do things, proclaiming that this is an improvement that we must* all use (see also unity), making everybody's current working practices redundant, throwing away accumulated knowledge of how to do stuff. that's what annoys me and why i'm staying on the last LTS for as long as i can. if they were starting from scratch, then yes, let them do what they wants. people will use it if they like it. but don't dictate.

* ok, there may be a choice with this, but there was no choice with the unity / gnome3 switch. or kde4 for that matter.

(arguing over guis is the new vi vs emacs)

Yeah, it does seem like they're forcing these changes on users in ways that not even Apple does.

i don't suppose anyone here is an NFS expert by any chance?

i love how completely stoned the last few big ubuntu ideas have been

We think of it as “beyond interface”, it’s the “intenterface”.

not very keen. it's much more effort to think of the right word for what I want to do, than just to read it off a list. that's unless it can understand thingy and wotsit in context.

that's another good point. that said, i was trying to get open office to not number the heading line on a spreadsheet yesterday and none of the menu items sounded like they'd do it. ended up adding another column and putting my own number in it.

post just now on slashdot about cinnamon, which looks to be mint making gnome3 work like gnome2 (actually, i'm not entirely sure what it is because the project's front page is all taken from the wikipedia page for the spice http://cinnamon.linuxmint.com/?p=1 )

We think of it as “beyond interface”, it’s the “intenterface”.
― occupy the A train (difficult listening hour), Wednesday, January 25, 2012 3:08 PM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

otm

"its like, what if you could just tell the computer what you're thinking......and it knows man"

Mac users are probably the easiest to inflict change upon, and *nix users are probably the whiniest. Ubuntu users would be the most open of the *nix user spectrum, though that's not saying much. Intenterface is the worst name I have ever heard btw (and iOS autocorrects it to 'intent efface').

that is exactly backwards dude

Mac users have so much faith in the church that in most cases they hump every change like a dog, whereas *nix users (correctly imo) want every function in history to be available to them forever

if by *nix you mean linux then i cannot think of a group of users who care or think less about user interface. and i don't mean that in a "lol linux is ugly" way. i mean it seriously. i mean "flexibility"/"power" is, by a very long way, the most important thing to them. changes to the gui have pretty much no impact on what they mean by flexibility and power.

damn good point

um i don't know if you're paying attention but we're not talking about a user INTERFACE

there are 30 page philosophical screeds on ui paradigms and the history of beos disguised as os reviews every time a new version of os x comes out. daring fireball got where it is today by being a pedant about ui. and he's read by regular os x users. i doubt anyone reads the discussion of linux ui revisions except the developers writing about it on their own mailing list.

not defending either approach btw

So really, when Linux has problems like this (which is increasingly rare, as you say) it's like giving away organic milk which you claim will work in cars whose manufacturers support it, and then blaming the manufacturer for not publishing the specifications of their engine when it doesn't work. The fact is, it doesn't work. Who gives a shit why apart from the dairy farmer?

― caek, Tuesday, 20 November 2007 10:41 (4 years ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

i have read this post many times today and still have absolutely no idea what i was talking about.