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!

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.

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'?

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.

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*

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.