Catching up

Posted on Saturday, December 17, 2011 | | In , , , , , , , , , , , ,


Hello again!  I'm so very bad at actually keeping notes on my Linuxing adventures.  I hang my head in shame.  But not for long, 'cos I do want to actually post an update in here.

In August or thereabouts, Indigo started giving me problems of the 'no GUI for you!' variety.  Seems he thought his root partition was full, except it wasn't.  Two different diagnostics commands gave two contradictory results.  In fact, one said that the root partition was 100% full, but also indicated that there was at least some free space.  Long story short, I asked the Ubuntu Forum people for advice but ultimately wound up reinstalling.  Indigo now sports Kubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal, and I like it just fine.  Indigo had the first real Ubuntu install I'd ever done, and with all my installing and uninstalling of programs and window managers and the like, maybe I made a mess of the Ubuntu partition just a wee bit.  Not sure on that one.  But all's well now, and Indigo is going strong.

Cairns has been changed from KDE to Xfce.  I'm strongly considering wiping the Windows partition, since I'm now nearly 100% Windows free (hurray!).  I found that SimpleScan detects and operates the scanner part of my Epson multi-function printer just fine.  That was the last thing that was keeping me from going Linux only on the main study computer.  I'm planning to move Cairns into the bedroom and bring Adelaide back out into the study, a procedure which will involve either a reinstall of Cairns or a monitor swap, because the text on Cairns is so very small when the machine is connected to the monitor in the bedroom.  Mepis, on Adelaide, has some kind of issues with that monitor as well, so I suspect it's at least partly the monitor's fault.

Adelaide has been running Mepis 8.0 very well.  My initial choice for that box was Linux Mint, but my Mint install disc hung mid-install three times, so I grabbed the Mepis one.  I love me some KDE, I do.  I'm thinking of installing Adelaide with something lighter, though I'm pretty sure the minor performance issues (due to low RAM) are mostly because of the heavier footprint of KDE 3.5.  The only machine I have that will run KDE 4.6+ with any real performance is the laptop, I've discovered.

Unity is now the default window manager for Ubuntu, it would seem.  I haven't played with it very much, but I have to bristle at the graphics requirements for it.  Yes, there's a fallback 2D version.  I tried Unity on a LiveCD a month or more ago and was not impressed.  It takes a lot of getting used to, does Unity.  I did a fair bit of 'what the -- where're the settings? Where's the freaking -- why did you hide this at the top of the screen?  Why would I mouse up to the top of the screen to get at these settings, you buncha dorks?' before declaring Unity was, at least for the moment, too frustrating to bother with for now, especially as it'll only run in its full 'glory' on my most advanced machine.  Apparently Virtualbox does in fact support 3D emulation now so Unity might be runnable on that.  I'll give it another shot at some point.

I'm also intrigued by Gnome 3/Gnome Shell.  Looks nifty, but again, you MUST have 3D acceleration to run it.  No fallback there.  Never liked Gnome, honestly.  But if I can get that running in Virtualbox, I'll see what I think of it too.

Yikes, that was a lot of stuff!  See you next time.  Happy Linuxing!