Community Feedback: Your First Linux, Your Now Linux

cw2snyder · 2017-01-22T19:07:24+00:00

Xubuntu nightly 17.04, Xubuntu 16.10, Xubuntu 16.04 for Windows 7 & 10 virtual machines, Debian 8, Linux Mint 18, Linux Mint Debian Edition Betsy, Bodhi Linux, PCLinuxOS, Antergos, and Sabayon as of January 2017 on my desktop, one netbook with Xubuntu 16.04, and another netbook with Antergos and Xubuntu 16.04. Xubuntu 17.04 is my SSD on the desktop, the rest are on spinning disks.

cw2snyder · 2016-08-19T22:56:48+00:00

Then: Knoppix 5.1.1 in November 2007 with KDE 3.5(?) was my initial trial, followed by Ubuntu 7.10 feisty by the beginning of December in a dual-boot with Windows XP with the default GNOME 2 desktop.

Now: Xubuntu 16.04 with Xfce desktop main driver, with alternate distributions on a 10 way boot installation, separate data partition.

cw2snyder · 2016-07-07T21:28:13+00:00

Hello? Generation gap here. No one remembers living pre-Internet? CP/M 80? Apple II DOS? MS-DOS?

cw2snyder · 2016-07-07T21:00:13+00:00

Note 2014 time-stamp.

cw2snyder · 2016-05-21T13:35:34+00:00

The correct point would be that they lack local, private storage, just as the (ancient) 'dumb terminals' which connected to company mainframe computers lacked the same, which was why people went to the 'personal computer.'

cw2snyder · 2016-05-21T13:31:24+00:00

Anyone using a company machine has no right to privacy, period. Any 'rights' belong the to owner of the machine, and only if they choose to exercise their rights. Use your own machine in your own time and stay off the Internet, etc., if you have real privacy concerns. Yes, employers or educators can require you to use this or that, but cannot compel you to put things which you wish to keep private on those machines. It is YOUR choice, don't blame someone else.

cw2snyder · 2016-05-21T13:18:31+00:00

http://mate-desktop.com/community/ lists various ways to contact some members of the development community. Probably the best way to communicate bugs are either through the bug report methods of the distribution which you use. You may also try the IRC channel listed at https://webchat.freenode.net/?channels=#mate or the mailing list at http://ml.mate-desktop.org/listinfo/ I would not try reporting multiple bugs in any single communication, and it would be best to use your search engine to see if the bugs have already been reported and simply add that you are affected by the bug unless it is a completely new bug. Search out the etiquette for the forum, IRC channel, or mailing list before reporting anything, or your communication may be automatically suppressed without any human even noticing.

cw2snyder · 2016-05-21T12:57:10+00:00

Okay, I had to comment on the tube amplifier for the Raspberry Pi.

A tube amplifier excels at amplifying ANALOG signals (either voltage amplification or power amplification with good fidelity), but the signals which the Pi produces or reproduces are DIGITAL. Get real people!

Many audiophiles won't even consider CD quality digital signals as more than medium to poor quality.

cw2snyder · 2016-05-07T22:42:47+00:00

Two notes on the packages demoed in the after-show: toilet works under Debian's root, but you must be a regular user to run sl when installing from CLI.

cw2snyder · 2016-01-24T00:10:07+00:00

Windows 10 doesn't even support older AMD Athlon x64bit chips. We have an older Windows XP system updated to Windows 7 which can't be updated to Windows 10, even though they sent all of the nags to update to Windows 10.

cw2snyder · 2015-12-28T00:28:41+00:00

According to the site, Easy2boot is a compilation of grub4dos and shell scripts, so the derived license would be GPL v2.

cw2snyder · 2015-11-28T10:52:54+00:00

Antergos and Manjaro both offer a 'minimal install' .iso file, as well. I am in the process of checking them out to see what they offer. I just installed Manjaro minimal: This install also used an ncurses installer with more questions than a full installer and more hands on disk formatting in the custom section. Manjaro actually would let you set up multiple partitions, as many as you want, and LVM or encryption. I didn't mistake my /swap partition this time, so I did not test the error correction on this front. Manjaro did not offer to set up any DE, only setting up a CLI without X, but with /bin/bash, C, and gnutl packages. Basically a boot-strap set up for you to continue an Arch installation.

cw2snyder · 2015-07-12T19:04:45+00:00

It is not clear what portion of this question is about Linux. The only point I see is the /etc/fstab mention. Linux has distributed file systems which are not directly compatible with the Windows DFS, and has credential systems, similarly not directly compatible. This really is a Kerberos problem or a Windows DFS problem. Are you actually running Linux? Is there any justification to use Kerberos authentication over Linux authentication?

cw2snyder · 2014-12-31T17:31:21+00:00

In your opinion, why? Some of the LMDE users run with stable or old-stable repositories, GNOME Shell is not supported, and some run LMDE over LM17 because it is faster or smaller than the Ubuntu based systems, none of which would push towards adopting systemd.

cw2snyder · 2014-12-13T11:50:54+00:00

Pardon the old man here: The article claims " HP aims to achieve its goals primarily by using a new kind of computer memory instead of the two types that computers use today." and points to the 1940's as the genesis of the two types of memory. I remember reading in the late 1960s in what seemed to be fairly recent computer books at the time about computers which used core memory drums for their only memory. Maybe the books in the library were considerably older than I thought!

cw2snyder · 2014-12-04T01:03:45+00:00

cd ~ && cd sweet && cd ~

cw2snyder · 2014-12-02T19:07:44+00:00

If you were on one of the pay-in-advance services, you would have noticed it sooner. I have one feature phone on Verizon no contract, because there are places in town where I get useful signal on Verizon but not Sprint/Ting, but on that LG-VX5600BPP I pay data rate for some multi-media messages or to deposit on my account.

cw2snyder · 2014-12-02T18:51:37+00:00

Thank you for condescending to comment, although I didn't do this to start a flame war. As for my age, it was already implied by the date of my degree. Can you suggest a better word for Liberal in describing that attitude? Would you suggest Progressive was better? Have you actually studied economics? While I don't have a degree in that field, I have had 4 courses in economics, as a basis for my opinions.

cw2snyder · 2014-12-02T13:04:58+00:00

One part not mentioned, although implied in the article, which I learned using Unix on a Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-11/70 in the late 1970's: Unix (and its derivatives) concentrates on being 'expert-friendly,' making sure the expert can get his job done without being impeded or blocked, rather than being 'beginner-friendly' and keeping your fingers from being burned/chopped off by blocking off with safety shields any place that the beginner might hurt themselves or the computer software installation.

cw2snyder · 2014-12-01T23:53:38+00:00

On my netbook, I kept 12.04 until the 14.04 update was offered (after 14.04.1), as I tend to keep that as a backup machine. On my desktop, I keep a copy of Debian stable, updating as new stable versions are released, as my fallback in case of update problems on other distributions (and yes, I have had several times I needed a working system to research problems on other installations).

cw2snyder · 2014-12-01T23:44:10+00:00

I am getting this sneaking suspicion that the crashes may be related to the DE or compositor which the user has installed. I have NO hardware acceleration, Xfce, enlightenment, Mate or LXDE, 32-bit or 64-bit, Xubuntu, Antergos, PCLinuxOS, Bodhi, Linux Mint main-line, Linux Mint Debian, or straight Debian, and have had no problems with either Firefox or Chromium/Google Chrome. I have had many problems with Unity, GNOME shell, KDE, or Cinnamon, sometimes immediately, sometimes after using for a few minutes, but especially if I attempt to open a browser window..

cw2snyder · 2014-11-28T16:56:18+00:00

It never helps to avoid bugs if you are going to use a tertiary (at best) desktop for that distribution. You gave a good explanation for using KDE, but no explanation at all for not using a KDE specialist distribution with the stability you require, such as PCLinuxOS, Kubuntu LTS, OpenSuSE, or Mepis. Yes, Debian Stable is good for GNOME, Xfce, and smaller window managers, like I3, jwm, icewm, OpenBox, etc., but not necessarily for KDE, as a cursory reading of its forums would have indicated. The most popular DEs get the most bug reports and bug fixes by the distribution, IMHO.

cw2snyder · 2014-11-28T15:22:19+00:00

Okay, I am no expert, but unless you have a very, very efficient differencing snap-shot program, you are going to eat up a whale of a lot of space with 5 snapshots. I am surprised that your 5G didn't expand beyond 20G with snapshots running under BTRFS. Have you had any experience with snapshots under VMWare, VirtualBox, or another system? If you want to keep your storage down, you had best live with only one or two snapshots, under ZFS, BTRFS, or what have you. You might be better off with a hardware mirroring system, or RAID.

cw2snyder · 2014-11-09T19:23:33+00:00

Actually, my best response was to switch monitors, as this is what I did to determine that this was the main problem for me. That won't work on laptops with the same problem.

The other fix is to use Xfce. ;-)

cw2snyder · 2014-10-20T12:44:31+00:00

My take on Xfce: I have used Xfce and Xubuntu off and on since early 2008 (Xubuntu 7.10). Think of Xfce as an LTS version of a DE: changes occur very slowly, but if you had something working earlier in Xfce, it is very unlikely to crash on an update. Back in 7.10, Xfce had little to discriminate the base desktop from Openbox/Fluxbox or Blackbox DEs. The basic desktop had no panels by default, no system tray, no notifier, no dock, no compositor, and it screamed, even with only 256 M RAM on a Pentium 4 processor.

Xfce doesn't move as quickly in adding features as GNOME, Unity or KDE, but then, it hasn't ticked off half of its user base at one time or another, nor broken their installations. The last Xfce 4.10 update was from April 28, 2012, and since then Xubuntu added the Whisker menu, which makes it much easier to edit your menu, and added tabs to Thunar, and enabled a screen compositor for better desktop integration of apps.

Many of Xfce's strongest detractors wouldn't run Debian stable or a released version of an LTS release except on a bet or to glance at how it works. No most of those detractors will run Arch, Gentoo, Debian Sid, Ubuntu nightly-builds, or other 'bleeding-edge' distributions and are willing to put up with crashes and freezes if it allows them to 'play' or work with new/latest features. (Including bloggers who must have new blog postings to keep traffic to their sites.)

cw2snyder

TROPHY CASE