Going to take the plunge from Windows 7 to Ubuntu - Now all things Ubuntu/Linux

[Huw the Poo]

LSS, yeah, you are completely right of course.  It wasn't until I read your post that I realised that I'm probably not the target audience.  I've never considered myself a power user, but I suppose that now I think about it, I do need to do a fair amount of stuff that Average Joe doesn't.  This whole thing has come as a bit of a shock to me, really.  I was a distro junkie for quite a long time before finally trying out this Ubuntu thingy everyone was talking about, and then bam!  I'd found the perfect distro at last.  I've been using Ubuntu since 6.04 (holy shit that's four years!) and it's weird not to want to use it any more.

I feel your pain, buddy, and really do sympathize. Fortunately there are lots of distros available that will allow you to tinker 'till your heart's content. 

Hehe, yeah, like Debian!  I am so installing it now.  Well, this weekend.  I've tinkered with Gentoo a few times but it simply doesn't like my hardware for some reason.  Neither does Solaris.  And I did once try Linux From Scratch and got pretty far until I hit a problem which just wasn't covered by the extensive docs.

I do want to thank you for your early encouragement. I had lots of false starts on my move from Windows to Ubuntu and I'm seriously glad I stuck it out. It's getting closer to the point to where I can recommend it to my friends who aren't quite as, ah, experienced as I am with computers.

You're welcome, and I can't tell you how gratifying it is to read that.   I'm really pleased it's all working out for you.  Exploring a whole new operating system is, for we geeks, a huge thrill!  It's why I still sometimes dabble in BSD and the like.  Hell, I've even played around with Plan 9 - never again!  If you want to see a weird OS, give that one a try.

[ROTC1983]

I agree Huw:  Messing with a new OS is super fun

[ROTC1983]

One more issue...can't play DVDs...Oh boy   I guess in theory I could just digitize them and call it day.  A bit frustrating though...

[Huw the Poo]

One more issue...can't play DVDs...

Why, what happens when you try?  There's a legal issue which prevents Ubuntu from supporting DVD playback out of the box; have you tried this?

[hitbyambulance]

Linux client for Steam announced?

[ROTC1983]

One more issue...can't play DVDs...

Why, what happens when you try?  There's a legal issue which prevents Ubuntu from supporting DVD playback out of the box; have you tried this?

Installed VLC

[Huw the Poo]

Ah!  Good call.  I've never tried VLC myself but I've heard nothing but good things about it.

In other news, it turns out I already have Debian installed on a little partition all of its own!  Completely forgot I'd done that.  I'll have to give it a good old test and then reinstall it across the disk if all is well.  It'll be like revisiting an old friend.

[ROTC1983]

Ah!  Good call.  I've never tried VLC myself but I've heard nothing but good things about it.

In other news, it turns out I already have Debian installed on a little partition all of its own!  Completely forgot I'd done that.  I'll have to give it a good old test and then reinstall it across the disk if all is well.  It'll be like revisiting an old friend.

I tried the netbook version of Ubuntu but I think I am going to return to the "desktop" version.  I think I am much happier with more freedom on the desktop

[LoneStarSpur]

Ah!  Good call.  I've never tried VLC myself but I've heard nothing but good things about it.

In other news, it turns out I already have Debian installed on a little partition all of its own!  Completely forgot I'd done that.  I'll have to give it a good old test and then reinstall it across the disk if all is well.  It'll be like revisiting an old friend.

I tried the netbook version of Ubuntu but I think I am going to return to the "desktop" version.  I think I am much happier with more freedom on the desktop

What about Peppermint?

[Huw the Poo]

Interesting, I've never heard of Peppermint, although I haven't been keeping up with Distro Watch lately.

A good Linux blog I can recommend, by the way, would be Tux Radar, which is maintained by four of the staffers from Linux Format magazine.  They have a fortnightly podcast which is excellent; not too serious and always amusing.

[LoneStarSpur]

Interesting, I've never heard of Peppermint, although I haven't been keeping up with Distro Watch lately.

A good Linux blog I can recommend, by the way, would be Tux Radar, which is maintained by four of the staffers from Linux Format magazine.  They have a fortnightly podcast which is excellent; not too serious and always amusing.

I stumbled across Peppermint from some RSS feed somewhere. I haven't booted it up, though.

Thanks for the link. I'm getting quite a collection of Linux links. I think I might be getting a little obsessed with it. 

[ROTC1983]

Ah!  Good call.  I've never tried VLC myself but I've heard nothing but good things about it.

In other news, it turns out I already have Debian installed on a little partition all of its own!  Completely forgot I'd done that.  I'll have to give it a good old test and then reinstall it across the disk if all is well.  It'll be like revisiting an old friend.

I tried the netbook version of Ubuntu but I think I am going to return to the "desktop" version.  I think I am much happier with more freedom on the desktop

What about Peppermint?

So, it looks very web centric.  Couldn't I do most of this via my browser?

[LoneStarSpur]

Ah!  Good call.  I've never tried VLC myself but I've heard nothing but good things about it.

In other news, it turns out I already have Debian installed on a little partition all of its own!  Completely forgot I'd done that.  I'll have to give it a good old test and then reinstall it across the disk if all is well.  It'll be like revisiting an old friend.

I tried the netbook version of Ubuntu but I think I am going to return to the "desktop" version.  I think I am much happier with more freedom on the desktop

What about Peppermint?

So, it looks very web centric.  Couldn't I do most of this via my browser?

Yeah. It's just supposed to have a small footprint and be fast. I've not tried it myself, though.

[Huw the Poo]

I've found it useful on more than one occasion to have one of those micro-distros on a thumbdrive.  It's come in handy to recover relatives' PCs when they become un-bootable, for example.

In my continuing saga, I decided last weekend to compromise (between Debian and Ubuntu) and give Linux Mint a try.  So I installed it over that Debian partition I'd found, asked it to install Grub, and apparently it utterly failed with Grub; I still have my original Grub menu and the Mint entries still refer to Debian.  I haven't learned how to use the new Grub 2 yet so I can't just fix it myself, sadly.  I may just try installing Mint again.

[LoneStarSpur]

Well, I went back to Windows 7...just found it too damn annoying to boot into Windows anytime I wanted to play a game.

But I found that I really missed Ubuntu so I'm running it in Oracle's VM VirtualBox now. Seems to work really well.

Now when I want to play AOC I just shut down Ubuntu, kill the VM and go.

[Huw the Poo]

I finally got off my arse and installed Linux Mint a couple of months ago.  Wow!  All my problems have been fixed!  It turns out that my biggest headache, the laggy interface, was due to Ubuntu's implementation of the godawful Pulseaudio.  For whatever reason, Mint's works fine.  I was going to install Debian but they're already on a feature freeze for Debian 6 I think, so I'm going to wait for its release.

So long, Ubuntu.  I won't miss you, and you will never again darken my hard drives!

[kronovan]

Sorry I missed this thread earlier - unfortunately I don't have enough time to read through all of it, so I don't know what's already been said.

I volunteer at an organization called freegeek.org which recycles computers, installs Ubuntu on them and then provides them free of charge to low income individuals and non-profit groups. I've been amazed at how easy it is to install Ubuntu evern on older PC's. I had a little bit of experience with original Redhat distributions of Linux back in the early days of UNIX, and man has it ever come a long way!.

There's 2 things that we've noted with Ubuntu on older PCs; 1.) it's not uncommon for a PC to hang the 1st time Foxfire or any other app that works with graphics is run after a fresh installation; 2.) it's not uncommon for the system diagnostic test to not work. The 1st seems to be related to a graphics initialization process that's built into the OS, and after you reboot you'll typically never experience it again. The 2nd can be avoided it you have a PC with perfectly matched drivers installed, but even then the system test will sometime just never complete without an error. It's been my conclusion that it's just not a 100% reliable utility for the OS. Not a problem if it doesn't work - just use xkill from a console window to end the system test applet.

[Huw the Poo]

It's just been a general Linux discussion thread really, aside from a few posts attempting to help LoneStarSpur to get to grips with it.

freegeek.org sounds like a very worthy project, Kronovan.  Good going!  I'm curious as to why you choose Ubuntu for older hardware though.  Do you at least use a more minimal desktop such as xfce so that it isn't so resource-hungry?  Have you looked into distros designed with old hardware in mind, such as Puppy, Vector, Crunchbang, DSL etc?

As for PCs hanging on first boot after launching something like Firefox, it's odd that that would happen with various different configurations.  Are you using the same version of Ubuntu each time?  The point releases have not been as stable as they have in the past.  In fact, I think Ubuntu in general is nowhere near as solid as it used to be; one of the many reasons I've stopped using it.

[Huw the Poo]

I've decided to run two experiments at once.  Firstly, I'm switching distros again (looks like I'm returning to my distro junkie days) and also I'm trying out KDE.

I chose Sabayon.  I've always been curious about source-based distros and this is the first one I've tried.  Sabayon is basically Gentoo, except that it works.  It will be very interesting to see whether I benefit from the fabled performance boosts inherent in using a source-based distro.

After many years of being tied to Gnome, I'm back in KDE, and....wow!  I haven't used KDE since the early 3.5 releases and I've been following the news of the 4.x release catastrophe and subsequent cleanup with great interest.  Aside from five minutes here and there with a live CD, I haven't touched the 4.x series at all.  It's great!  One thing that Windows has always had over Linux (or the Gnome-based distros at least) is it looks better.  Not so any more!  KDE 4.x looks every bit as good as Windows 7, and indeed some of the eye candy is identical.  I wonder who copied who here.  And at its core, as has ever been the case, is the insane customisation options available.  Sabayon's implementation of KDE is already very attractive and I'm looking to build on that as I go through the myriad options.

So far I'm really happy I made the switch (again).  There was nothing wrong at all with Linux Mint, by the way.  I just fancied a change.  But based on initial impressions I may well stick with Sabayon for a long time.

[Huw the Poo]

So, what was that - three weeks?

Bleeding-egde distros have their good and bad points.  You get the very latest software, but the price you pay is stability.  Even from the beginning Sabayon had a few annoying bugs that I was having to contend with.  Unfortunately one of them was in 'networkmanager' and as a result I often couldn't connect to the network.  That, in turn, made solving all the other problems a lot more difficult.  Then the straw that broke the camel's back was a whole raft of updates that came through on Friday, bringing with them a host of new bugs to delight and surprise me.  I thought I had the time to deal with it all but it turns out I really don't.  I just wanted a 100% working system, so reluctantly I nuked Sabayon.  It's a fantastic distro for a certain type of person, but sadly that isn't me.

So...I still want to use KDE because after three weeks of using Kontact I'm in love.  It's much better than Evolution in my opinion and does absolutely everything I want.  The KDE 4.x desktop is stunning too.  I can't go back to Gnome.  So I needed a distro that puts at least as much importance on KDE as it does on Gnome; preferably a big, well-known distro that should have lots of bells and whistles and a large community.

I decided on OpenSUSE.  I used it many years ago for a couple of months and really liked it - the Yast administration suite really impressed me and the distro as a whole was very polished.  So I grabbed the CD and tried it out.

Woe befalls me yet again!  Everything seemed to work, except...Kontact!  NOOOO!  I can use an alternative for every single application on the system except the PIM.  It has to be Kontact, or I'm taking my ball and going home.  After a day of trying to get it to work, implementing workarounds, poring over error logs, I finally threw in the towel.  As far as I can tell, something in my old KDE settings (from the Sabayon install) was conflicting with the Akonadi server, and some fuckwit developer apparently decided that Kontact simply has to use Akonadi now.  Why?  Oh, fuck knows.  Just to piss me off, probably.

So, with a heavy heart and knowing the same would probably happen with any KDE-based distro, I installed OpenSUSE all over again, this time allowing it to format my /home partition.  Sob!  I had to increase the size of root anyway so that's a silver lining I guess.  But now I have to copy all my bloody data over from a USB external disk before I can start using the system properly.  And I have to make sure I don't inadvertently copy across anything that would stop Kontact working again.  Happy times are in store for me, what?

It'll be worth it.  I may burst a blood vessel in the process, but when I get a fully-functioning, polished, KDE-based Linux system up and running, computing will be fun again!

[ravenvii]

Yeah, if you need it to just work, stay the fuck away from Gentoo and anything like it. They're fun, and it's a thrill getting a system up and running, DE and all, under Gentoo. But for reliability and real usability, hell no.

As for KDE, what about Kubuntu? Jus' sayin'.

Speaking of Ubuntu, I can't wait for the 11.4 release - I want to play around with their new Unity DE. I think it looks awesome, but the Linux community is so polarized - some love it, and some hated it.

[Huw the Poo]

Yeah, if you need it to just work, stay the fuck away from Gentoo and anything like it. They're fun, and it's a thrill getting a system up and running, DE and all, under Gentoo. But for reliability and real usability, hell no.

Heh, yep.  I think I underestimated how much time I'd need to devote to getting a fully working system.  I was making slow progress, but then when that Friday update hit and introduced about a dozen new bugs and problems, I had to wave the white flag.

As for KDE, what about Kubuntu? Jus' sayin'.

For many reasons I'm fed up with Ubuntu and don't think I'll ever go back to it.  Also I've heard it said many times that Canonical don't pay any attention to KDE and that it shows; I had no desire to see how true that was.

Speaking of Ubuntu, I can't wait for the 11.4 release - I want to play around with their new Unity DE. I think it looks awesome, but the Linux community is so polarized - some love it, and some hated it.

I think it's an awful idea.  Canonical are obviously going for the embedded market and are determined to drag desktop users with them.  That said, when 11.04 is released I might fire it up in VirtualBox or something out of pure curiosity.

In other news, I'm loving the OpenSUSE experience!  It's a magnificently slick, polished distro with a superb implementation of KDE.  I had a problem getting Kontact working but that was due to a conflict with my ~/.kde4 files from the Sabayon install I believe; all fixed now.  It's also one of those distros that doesn't include proprietary stuff so I had to hunt around a little bit to find various decoders and the nVidia driver.  But now the system is 100% and I love it.

Of course, I completely forgot until after I'd installed it that it's sponsored by the reviled Novell!  Gah!  Oh well...I'm not completely happy with that but it's not like Novell are making any money out of me.  At least lots of Novell employees work directly on KDE, and it shows.

Oh, and the other thing I forgot was that OpenSUSE is based on RPM!  Nooooooooooo!  I hate RPM and I'm being reminded why already.  It's......soooooo.....sloooooooow!  Why the hell does the Linux Standards Base insist on RPM?  The vast majority of distros uses APT, and there's a good reason for that - it's about a million times better!  I even had to install a dependency myself last night in order to get XBMC working.  Yes, that's right - install a dependency myself!  I don't think I've ever had to do that on an APT-based system.  Bah!

[Huw the Poo]

Oh no!  I don't believe it!  Debian 6 shipped three days ago - and it has an even newer version of the KDE desktop than my current OpenSUSE install!  If only I'd realised before I installed it; the only reason I didn't install Debian 5 was that the stable release was still on KDE 3.5.  Hmmm...I haven't moved much across from my external disk yet...it wouldn't be that big a deal to nuke OpenSUSE and give Debian a try.

I think I smell a weekend project coming on.  I'm such a distro junkie!

[ravenvii]

Calling all distro junkies!

I have plenty of experience with the cutting edge distros (Ubuntu, Fedora, OpenSUSE, and so forth), but I need to find a light AND easy-to-use distro.

Background: a family member's got a really old PC that has an AMD Sempron 2100+ and a VIA Chrome video card (remember that one?). I *think* it has 512 MB of RAM.

And Windows XP is getting slower by the minute. I'm tired of maintaining it, but I want to buy them a year or two before they finally buy a new computer.

And to do that, I want to install a light and easy-to-use Linux distro on their computer. All they do, really, is browse the 'net, instant messaging, view photos, listen to music and some word processing.

I'm looking at either Xubuntu or Puppy Linux. Any thoughts/input?

[Huw the Poo]

Have you looked at Crunchbang Linux?  It's based on Openbox/Ubuntu and apparently it's extremely good whilst being extremely light on resources.  I haven't tried it myself but I've heard nothing but good things about it for the last couple of years.

I'd heard that Puppy had been semi-abandoned but that was at least a year ago now so I can't speak for it now.  Last I used it, it was excellent.  I have also used Vector Linux (light edition) in the past which was great, but again my experience is outdated.  Damn Small Linux is tiny but not particularly user-friendly (again, last I checked) so I do not recommend it.

I'll see if I can think of anything else.  Xubuntu may well be just the ticket though, to be honest.

[ravenvii]

I went ahead and played with Xubuntu, Puppy and CrunchBang on my virtual machine.

Puppy, I think, is the best of them all, but not perfect. Second is Xubuntu, which is much more polished at first impression, but much more heavy on resources, and pretty buggy once you dig in a bit (when I tried to install Chrome, it failed with an error). CrunchBang is definitely out - way too geeky for my purposes and much more work to fine-tune for a illiterate Windows user.

So I'm down between Puppy and Xubuntu. The only reason I kept Xubuntu in the running is because I'd (in theory) easily be able to install Chrome (I don't want Chromium, I want Chrome because it automatically updates both the browser and Flash. Don't give a damn about the principles of open source and all that).

[Huw the Poo]

Fair enough.  Sorry to hear about Crunchbang; haven't used it myself but it's extremely highly regarded for low-end systems.

Don't forget to try live environments on the target computer, to ensure the hardware is compatible.  I'd imagine Xubuntu will come out on top here but with luck Puppy will be OK too.

[ravenvii]

From poking around, you seem to be right regarding Puppy being semi-abandoned.

Here's to hoping the only reason I couldn't install Chrome on Xubuntu was because I was running it off the CD.

I am now checking out Lubuntu.

[Huw the Poo]

From what I've seen on the net you shouldn't have a problem installing Chrome on Xubuntu.  Good luck!

[ravenvii]

Forget Xubuntu, I just tried Lubuntu.

This. Is. Amazing. It's everything I'm looking for here. Lightweight, easy-to-use, nice on the eyes and uses the Debian/Ubuntu package manager, which makes it very accessible for binary installations.

Perfect.

[Huw the Poo]

Cool!  Hope it works well!

[Huw the Poo]

One thing that pisses me off about Linux, and it doesn't matter which distro.  You log on and are shortly informed that there are updates available.  That means some daemon has gone online, downloaded package lists, and compared to what's installed.  So you then click on the icon and the package manager opens up and...immediately starts downloading package lists and comparing, all over again.

WHY?!

Now that I'm using an RPM-based distro it's particularly galling.

Ah well, at least we Linux users don't have to restart our PCs after every update!

[ravenvii]

One thing that pisses me off about Linux, and it doesn't matter which distro.  You log on and are shortly informed that there are updates available.  That means some daemon has gone online, downloaded package lists, and compared to what's installed.  So you then click on the icon and the package manager opens up and...immediately starts downloading package lists and comparing, all over again.

WHY?!

Now that I'm using an RPM-based distro it's particularly galling.

Ah well, at least we Linux users don't have to restart our PCs after every update!

The idea is that there's always updates coming out constantly. A person could get a "there's updates" notification and ignore it for a while before running the update manager. A new update or two might've come out in the meanwhile.

[Huw the Poo]

Yeah, I realised about two minutes after posting that that's probably the case.  Still annoying though.  What sent me over the edge this time is that I upgraded OpenSUSE over the weekend, and now whenever there are updates it uses something called KPackageKit which takes - FOREVER - to do anything.

[Huw the Poo]

(Tl;DR is available at the end of this post)

Linus Torvalds must have some kind of personal grudge against me.  He must have instructed the world's distro vendors to detect me based on IP, and serve me a "special" version of the distro I try to download.  Pour yourself a large glass of wine, sit back, and read all about the latest fresh hell to befall me as I innocently try to use my computer.

It all began with a simple desire to post a tweet.  Just one tweet.  As is the case in the land of free software, there are only about 1,000,000 Twitter clients yet available, so there's only one application - Tweetdeck - I like enough to use.  There would have to be around 5,000,000 clients available before I have any kind of choice.  Tweetdeck it is, then.  To the repos!

But no.  Tweetdeck isn't in the repos.  No problem!  I'll just grab it from the official website innit?  Oh look, a big shiny "download now!" button!  Cor!  All I have to do is click it, and it will install itself over Adobe Air.  Except that it doesn't.  Probably something to do with the fact that Adobe feel the same way about Linux as I do about spiders.  Oh, they say that their godawful software works on Linux, but it doesn't really.  It's all dummy software, designed to work only every fifth Sunday on a specific hardware configuration only.

I probably don't have Air installed anyway, so off I go to Adobe's website to get it.  Another big shiny "download now!" button, and they even give you the choice of packages.  Naturally I opt for RPM because that's what my operating system is cursed with being built on, and nothing else would work.  Well, I could just grab the tarball and compile it myself from source.  Hahahahahahahahahaha!  Man, that joke never gets old!

Anyway.  I grab the RPM and tell this Packagekit bollocks to install it.  But no!  (And here's one of the reasons I hope that the inventor of RPM walks backwards and suffers from an eternally, incurably itchy arsehole)  Air won't install because it's missing a dependency!  What...the...fuck, RPM?  Just install the dependency for me, then!  What is this, 1995?

Fine.  Let's look up the ridiculously-named package on the internet and install it manually.  According to some RPM database there are about 49 packages that contain the dependency I want.  Since I'm not a programmer (and therefore not the intended audience for Linux ("This is the year of Linux on the desktop!"  "No, it really isn't, and if you say that again I will rip your nipples off")) it takes me several minutes to realise which one package out of the 49 will work on my system.  I note its name.

To the package manager!

Search.  <Package Name>.  Result: No problem boss, it is indeed available in the repos but to get it to work I just need to grab these other two packages as well, even though the package you want is simply to make a certain library available and you will never, ever use these other packages and they will clog up your system and make RPM even more slow and annoying and in that subtle but effective way I will bring you ever closer to the suicide you're contemplating.

I really didn't want to post a tweet this badly.

OK, FINE!  Go ahead and download three packages just so I have one simple library on my system.  <Click!>  Nothing happens.  Well, I thought nothing was happening, but I hadn't clicked on "details" on the package manager.  I click on "details" and a nice big window opens up, containing absolutely no "details" whatsoever.  Then I eye my system monitor in my panel and notice that a lot of data is being downloaded.  The cancel button is, of course, greyed out because it's only there for show.  After all, why would you ever want to cancel a process that is running with root privileges and has the potential to royally fuck your system while telling you absolutely nothing about what it's doing and leaving you to just sweat and hope for the best?  Don't you find it exciting?!

Suddenly the "details" window did start filling with stuff.  Details of the fifty or so packages it was installing for me!  What the hell is going on?!  Packages like - I shit you not - udev-configure-printer and some kind of Java SDK and - Jesus Christ - some plugin for Openoffice!

AARRGGHH!  FINE!  JUST DOWNLOAD THEM AND LET ME USE MY FUCKING TWITTER CLIENT!

It all ends.  My system is ready.  I have the library and now I can install Air, then Tweetdeck.  Off I go...I download the Air RPM again, click install and....no.  No.  It isn't my time.  It was not to be.  The installer crashes out with some error, and, crying openly now, I can't make out the message through my tears.  Something to do with...oh god...I can hardly bring myself to type it...*sob*...dependencies!

So.  Those nasty, horrible people at Adobe and Novell have made me want to die.  I'll probably stick around long enough to see whether Guild Wars 2 really is the second coming, but then I'll die.  My will to live is gone.

TL;DR: Adobe sucks, RPM-based distros suck.

[ravenvii]

TL;DR: Adobe sucks, RPM-based distros suck.

And this is new information?

Switch to an Debian-based distro. As for twitter, try Gwibber. Pretty decent, I think.

Adobe, on the other hand,  Flash is all Adobe I can stand to have on my system, and will gladly be among the first to dump it once HTML5 takes over.

[Huw the Poo]

The thing that's keeping me with OpenSUSE for now - although it is on shaky ground at this point - is that KDE really shines on it.  You can tell that Novell sponsor KDE development; it's the most polished implementation of KDE I've seen.  But yeah, RPM is getting to be a little too much.  I think I'll try Debian itself next.

[ravenvii]

The thing that's keeping me with OpenSUSE for now - although it is on shaky ground at this point - is that KDE really shines on it.  You can tell that Novell sponsor KDE development; it's the most polished implementation of KDE I've seen.  But yeah, RPM is getting to be a little too much.  I think I'll try Debian itself next.

Before going that route, give PCLinuxOS a try.

[Huw the Poo]

Well now I can't use SUSE at all.  It looks like the X server broke when the package manage went haywire last night.  RPM is Satan.

I'll have a look at PCLinuxOS, thanks.  Worst distro name ever?

[hitbyambulance]

after using Fedora 12/13 at work over the past year, i think i'm going to stay away from any RPM-based distro from now on if i can possibly help it.