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!

Once I started trying to actually work with Cairns, I discovered a problem: it runs really, really slowly. I had Amarok open, streaming music, a terminal window, and Rekonq open. No problem there. I opened a couple tabs in Rekonq, checked email, etc. At some point it began to bog down. I added a 'tech' activity and tossed a bunch of monitors onto it and discovered 100% of the swap space was being used. This machine, with 640M of RAM, got installed with a swap of 400M or so. Aren't you supposed to make your swap double your RAM? I had let the installer define the terms and hadn't checked the swap size.

At any rate, once I got everything except Konsole and Rekonq shut down, a process that involved me clicking a control, leaving the room for five minutes to do something else, and coming back to see if it had responded to my click yet, then clicking something else if it had, I searched for help on managing my swap space. A few sites talked about 'swappiness', a value that can be modified to tell Kubuntu how often and how aggressively to use the swap space. This value was set to 60 as a default, meaning it was going to swap space fairly often. I reduced it to 10, just to see what it would do.

Sadness. (on Indigo)

The next morning I opened Amarok, Chrome, which I installed after fearing memory issues with Rekonq, and Dolphin. A few minor blips in the music stream were all the difficulties I had, but, then, I opted not to use that machine to get my work done. I'd gotten fantastically little done the day before. (In the grand scheme of 'computers hate me today', my laptop's install of KDE decided it wasn't going to load the plasma desktop, nope, and presented me with a naked gray grid and no little commas to do all the plasma things I usually like to do. *sigh* That machine so needs an upgrade/repair/reinstall/miracle. In reference to the screenshot, my lower panel was working, but was hidden at the time of the shot.)

The changed swappiness setting has helped, I think. I've still not used Cairns for any real work, but the draw on the swap space has reduced. The music streaming in Amarok still hitches from time to time, especially when the hard drive is running for any reason. I'm tempted to install another window manager so I can use the machine for my work, but I'm reluctant to toss Gnome on there because of all the associated apps that will get installed. Fluxbox might be an option. It seems that the machine runs well enough once its programs are started and running, much like my ailing WinXP install on BotanyBay. I'm hesitant to use this machine as a test box, since it's supposed to be a backup for my laptop should the upgrade go blooey, but I do want a real idea of whether or not Cairns can handle KDE 4. Ironically, the real 'test machine', Adelaide, now residing in BotanyBay's spot on the bedroom desk, exhibited only minor glitches when installing Mepis 8 and runs it very well indeed. Computers, if you guys could figure out which of you is gonna hork OS hairballs and which ones are going to behave, I'd appreciate a report. Thanks ever so.

Parnaparnti's Win98 install went well, but the 98 had great difficulty with every piece of hardware on the system except the keyboard and mouse. I decided to try Win XP, knowing that the machine was just within the requirements for it. That install went smoothly, and XP properly detected every device without problem. It runs a bit slowly, but the friend I gave it too seems satisfied with it, and that's what counts.

So Parnaparnti has left my home for a new life. In his place have arrived three new-to-me machines, generously donated by the local library, who now don't have to pay to have someone take them away and recycle them.

The first of these machines has been dubbed 'Adelaide' and has been installed with Win XP and Ubuntu Karmic Koala 9.10. The XP did a 98 on me - failing to properly detect the video/display settings. I have a driver disc for that problem, which I'll get to later. Adelaide's primary function is to be my Linux print server; the Windows is there for scanning purposes, as the scanning function of my Epson Stylus combo printer/scanner/copier is reportedly not supported in Ubuntu (and I haven't tried to wrangle with XSane yet, though I plan on it).

I had originally tried to install Lucid Lynx on Adelaide, but the install disc gave me some unusual problems, not the least of which was the fact it would blank the screen halfway through the install process, leaving me unable to interact with the machine at all. So I installed Karmic, which seems to work well. The -14 kernel runs smoothly; the -22 which came with the initial updating does not. Molasses flowing down a glacier would run faster, I think. There are possible solutions to that issue as well, which I've bookmarked and are on my to-do list. For now I'm running -14, which is just fine for my purposes.

The other two machines have not been touched yet. I'll be poking around in those later this month, I hope.