A Smattering of Stuff: TextRoom v VLC, Synaptic troubles, The Ow My Printer Saga

Posted on Tuesday, December 22, 2009 | | In , , , , , ,

I haven't been in here in a while. Just wanted people to know I'm still Linuxing more-or-less happily, and that there's a teeny update to the VLC vs TextRoom saga.

In KDE4, TextRoom and VLC seem to be able to cohabitate peacefully. The typewriter sounds in TextRoom are non-functional, but that's fine with me because I've determined that I don't really need them. In my Xubuntu Intrepid Wubi install, it's a no-go.

Oh, speaking of my Xubuntu Intrepid install, it may have to get reinstalled. Seems I performed a Stupid User Trick in October and tried to install the kubuntu-desktop package without enough hard drive space. Er, heheh. So now Synaptic won't run. I consulted with the Ubuntu Forums people and their advice was: run clean and autoclean and if that doesn't solve your problem, nuke it and start again. Le sigh. The system still runs just fine. It's just that I can't install any packages or do any updates. When I reach that point where I need it updated, I'll have to make a decision on what to do with the machine. Go Ubuntu only? Can I work out my troubles with XSane before then? And my Windows machine printer is under the weather, so what if I need to print from a Windows system, like my primary desktop? For the moment I spend more time in Linux than in Windows and it's not a big deal to print my documents from the Linux even if I composed them in Windows. I'll cross that bridge when I come to it.


Partitioning. Ergh.

Posted on Thursday, September 24, 2009 | | In , , , , , ,

Due to last night's aborted regular Xubuntu install, Parnaparnti now has a Linux partitioning scheme on the HD space not occupied by Windows. I tried to delete those partitions to get back to the unallocated state, but Gparted in Puppy wouldn't let me. I'm sure I don't know all the ins and outs of Gparted yet.

So in went the alternate Xubuntu Jaunty CD and I forged ahead and let it re-size my existing Linux partition (sda5) to put this Xubuntu command line install there. It created two new partitions, one of which is root, which I suppose is fine. But it created another swap partition at #8, and there's already a swap for an ext3 system at #6. The size it gave me for usable space is about 3Gb smaller than what I anticipated. For the moment I'm letting the installer have at it and I'll see what a mess it's made when it's finished. Hopefully I'll be able to use both the 4.7Gb partition and this smaller one together to get the 7-ish GB I know should be available on the disk.

I've realised how to go ahead and delete the unwanted partitions. Duh. I wiped out all the ones created by both the current and previous install attempts and am allowing Xubuntu to create a single new partition for my filesystem, plus a swap partition. Ain't this excitin'?




Xubuntu Command Line Install (CLI)

Posted on Wednesday, September 23, 2009 | | In , , ,

I gave this a brief go tonight on the VirtualBox. I'm not sure I know exactly what I'm doing, but it's in a VB so I'm not inclined to be especially worried about it. Being the impatient type I decided to try installing the regular Xubuntu on Parnaparnti. He powered through up until 50% of the system was installed, then popped up a 'your CD/CD drive is messed up/dirty or your computer is too hot' error. I thought it would reboot or give some other sort of, 'sorry, not gonna work' indication, but instead it logged in (not with the credentials I had defined in the install). After waiting five minutes for it to load the desktop, I rebooted. I'm fairly certain it was trying to load the LiveCD environment, and that's very much not going to work with Parna. Such a brave boy, though, my Parna. :)

Alternate CD is burning on BotanyBay right now.


VLC and TextRoom == Itchy and Scratchy

Posted on Wednesday, September 23, 2009 | | In , , , ,

Brief note as I'm about to head out the door: I noticed today that TextRoom crashes on opening if VLC media player is running when it's opened. I tried loading TextRoom first, then running VLC, and TextRoom stayed! Then, however, there was no sound from VLC when I played music with it. At this moment I can't reproduce the error I got when I first ran TextRoom from Terminal, but just now, with VLC running, I got this message: Unable to initialize audio: No available audio device.

I've heard something about Linux only being able to serve audio to one device at a time. I'll have to look into that. Does TextRoom play sounds? It doesn't need to, in my opinion. Maybe I can disable that feature.

More later, when I come back and bang on this relationship a bit more. Sit down, VLC! TextRoom, put down that bat! Both of you go to your rooms this instant!

*sigh*


It begins with (X)Ubuntu

Posted on Tuesday, September 22, 2009 | | In , , ,

I've successfully installed two flavours of Ubuntu on virtual machines and via the Wubi installer, and I haven't been disappointed so far. I've learned a lot about Linux, xorg.conf, and the difficulty of getting Linux OSes to see and properly utilise their hardware.

I've determined that Xubuntu might be a bit heavy for my 256M memory PII processor 5GB hard disk space machine (Kurdnatta); it seems to run slower and slower every time I use it. I only wish the system requirements on the Xubuntu site had been written in such a way that I would have not thought this distribution was suitable for my machine. To me, if the recommended is 384Mb memory and I have 256, I think I'm good to go. No mention was made of processor speeds or HD space.

I'm currently experimenting with a few lightweight Ubuntu-based distributions such as CrunchBang and Fluxbuntu.  Through research on the Ubuntu forums, I've determined it might be possible to install a lightweight, custom install of Ubuntu on my old laptop, Parnaparnti.  A Fluxbox install is currently running in VirtualBox on my primary machine.  We'll see how that turns out.