Be Excellent To Each Other

As some people like to read about linuxings:

I'm running Xbunutu on a Compaq Presario 1200 (12XL513).

700 MHz Intel Celeron processor! 6 GB hard drive! 800x600 display! 320 MB RAM! (They come with 64MB, somebody must have liked this laptop so much to get a 256MB upgrade before I got it.)

The laptop's suffered some physical damage over the years; the hinges to the sides of the screen seized up. I executed the obvious solution: WD40! Nah, only kidding. That would have been smart. Instead, I repeatedly opened and closed the screen until the plastic on both the lid and base shattered, allowing me to remove the hinge entirely. The laptop is now held open by a pair of picture hanging hooks and some fluorescent string.



I've been running Xubuntu 7 on it for ages, but then I left the laptop alone for some months, and SPM didn't want to upgrade itself to 9.04, so I had to format and install 9.04 again. It used to be on XP, but then I got got by an EVIL VIRUS WEBSITE because I was running IE6. I figured that it wouldn't run Firefox very well on XP, so I went with Xubuntu. (The reason I got it back to scratch again is that my 'big' laptop got a rootkit from somewhere and is pending investigation and reinstallation. Maybe I should just stop using laptops altogether.*)

All of the stuff that you'd expect of an OS is present and correct. Hasn't crashed once! (YEAH, an OS isn't supposed to give you a GUI, a file explorer application, context menus and such. You know what I mean. Be quiet.) It runs Firefox 3 and Code::Blocks fine (being able to see only six lines of source at once is a bit of a handicap though. And my OpenGL game I'm coding crashes after a minute of play. Nevermind). Can't watch Youtube videos on it, OHNO. The ubuntu-restricted-extras package is suspiciously well maintained for all its EVIL proprietary goodness. Makes Flash work, an' everything. And believe it or not, GIMP is still ghastly in its native habitat.

The kernel has built in drivers for the Pegasus USB Ethernet gadget that came with the laptop, and it automatically detected the 3com officeconnect -CRWE wireless PCMCIA card. It also works with my USB Sumvision SD card reader. It's completely flummoxed by the laptop's battery, but so was Windows, even with the correct drivers. I think Compaq Presario batteries must have some kind of built-in physical obsolescence.

Xfce is really, really neat. You have to poke it for ages to get the text sizes and fonts to look nice, but with the wallis fxwm theme and the mist appearance, it's a compact and functional look that's like XP yet not; a polite mickey take. (The Redmond and RedmondXP styles being impolite mickey takes.) It wasn't my intention to make it look like XP, but ALL other pairings of xfwm themes and Appearance settings look hideous.



I suppose this laptop is supposed to be running DOS (there's a Windows ME license on the base), and old games... but they all suck. ALL OF THEM YES. Especially TIE Fighter. (And it would look more awful than normal, with the 640x480 mode upscaled to the 800x600 physical display.)

* No. And give me all your laptops.

jeez man, get a new laptop!

I have a new laptop! My Acer Travelmate C300 tablet PC is nifty! I don't have the pen for it, though. Defeats the point, yes, but shut up.

Anybody got a Wacom PENABLED pen handy? :/

Luxury! I dusted mine off tonight...

Right. When I were a lad, we used to run Windows Vista on a rolled up newspaper int middle'a road. It'd crash 10 minutes before it booted and set your house on fire if you touched the keyboard

About three years ago I did IT support for schools for expelled kids. At one point I had to look through some PC's that might be chucked out. The most modern of them still did the clicky counter to register 16MB of RAM. The boxes I actually chucked out were made of wood.

I have an Ubuntu laptop! It's a slimline Dell of some kind. Look! There it is!

Whoo Ubuntu!

[edit]Posted from an Acer Laptop running Vista. Fucked if I can remember the last time the Dell got switched on...

XFCE is still impressing me with its simple swish-ness. XFCEFTW.

I almost got Firestarter working and in control of everything, which is a bit of an improvement over Ubuntu 7.04. (The ubuntu bug tracking system for firestarter notes that firestarter can't control dhcp settings properly any more because the configuration for dhcp is now called dhcp3 and nobody bothered to update it.)

KDE is sinister and scary by comparison. It's K-this and K-that, everywhere.

KDE is virtually redundant as far as I'm concerned, Gnome and XFCE give me reliability and power/economy preferences, plus Netbook remix is gnome glory!

I have an old toshiba satelite t120 lying around somewhere. The Windows installation got corrupted somehow so that it too 35 minutes to load, but strangely it would load and then work fine after that.

Xfce Menu is a bit a fiddly to customise. That's the worst thing that's happened so far.

Operation: Inner Space works under Wine! The ingame midi playback doesn't though. BOO.

9.04 isn't too great with my computer, IIRC.

The best raster image editing application in the known universe is IN THE HOUSE. That is to say, Paint Shop Pro 4.10 runs in Wine perfectly. QUITE PERVERSE.

My desktop just fellover, I think this time it isn't temporary.

hardware, y'think?

Ububtu loads up and then after a minute dumps me to the login screen, i login again and after a couple more minutes, it dumps me back to that. This can happen several times before it stops doing it.

It freezes at random, sometimes, the CPU load is up at 100% and a slow, but a reboot cures this

HDD seems to be knackered as it's having to rebuild itself on a daily basis.

Could be a virus i guess.

I'm assuming that the hard disk making a chirping sound like a cricket for a long, long time, and nothing loading or owt, followed by a list of IO errors when i clicked RESTART and just after post the primary slave not being detected (where the UBUNTU thingy is) means it's a dead HDD?

Almost certainly. Well, dying.

BIOS can't see either of them. Oh, dear.

Try an angle grinder.

A quick google suggests it's either a Head Crash, a Mechanical Failure or an Electrical Failure.

http://www.adrc.com/hard_disk_failures.html

Worst I stand to lose if some music, ho hum.

It's often the best course of action.

These are all just Failures really. Although if it's electrical there is sometimes something you can do if you care about the data enough.

Perhaps you've got a cricket stuck in there? That'd play havoc with the heads.

Well, I jiggled about with the leads and the drievs appeared in BIOS.

I tried to laod up UBUNTU and it said:



So, I tried to laod XP and it did. The XP is on the 200gig HDD, the 60 gig has UBUNTU and is the knackered one. The 60 gig drive is approx 7 years old, the 200, maybe 6.

My old computer, Nagi, had some hard drive trouble with its Western Digital Caviar drive over a year ago, and it's been sitting in a box in the middle of my bedroom, without HDD, since then. I learned that you need a super duper computer to run the necessary version of Mac OS X for developing iPhone games, so I've decided to give that a miss for a bit.

After fixing some folks' computer, I was given an old 40gb IDE hard drive. Not big enough to use in my main computer as a games drive, but more than suitable to put in Nagi and see if her remaining components are up to the task of 'being a computer'.

I've had enough of Ubuntu's fiddling around with things when I'm not looking. They updated the gdm, but the new gdm doesn't allow customisable themes. My classy login screen, which I spent NEARLY A HALF AN HOUR putting together, rendered useless! I was aghast.

For Nagi, I decided to use an operating system that revels in being predictable and behind the times.

It's Debian time!


You've gotta love an operating system that uses a BLOOD-STAINED SPIRAL as its logo. It's a little known fact that the Debian spiral represents a DEADLY VORTEX into which your time will fall, trying to get the thing to do anything.

Still, it's good to learn. Right? RIGHT?

To begin, I tried the testing Debian, squeeze. Although I'm sure that I chose the 'Desktop Environment' task, it didn't install one. I'm glad that the lynx (a text console web browser) packages were there, otherwise I would have been completely screwed. With lynx, I could find out all the stuff I needed to get xfce working. (It's called xfce4, not xfce. Aaaaaah. And sometimes it's aptitude and not apt-get. Aaaaaaah.)

Reboot, and desktop! Huzzah!

The sound device enumerator kept putting the PC Speaker as the topmost audio device. You'd think that would simply mean that 'the system has the ability to beep at you'... but no! Even better than that! When I told VLC to play a song, the PC speaker actually did a passable job of playing it. Useless, sure, but I thought it was pretty clever. Had to edit a config file to tell it that the PC speaker wasn't actually that good at being a speaker.

I installed VirtualBox to have a go of some of the other Debians. I can see why a lot of people don't like KDE all that much. The standard KDE 'Desktop Environment' install gives you so much crap it's untrue. And, the crap that it gives you is hideously complicated. I couldn't even begin to try and remove it all.

I decided to start all over again, this time with the stable Debian, lenny. The main reason for this is that I kinda messed up my system by installing all the random crap I could find just to take a look at it, and squeeze doesn't have support for the official nvidia drivers.

Squeeze decided to reveal one final suprise: Brasero, the GTK CD burning application which I was going to use to burn the lenny iso, didn't work. Bah. Had to use K3B in the end. It was something to do with the way that it dealt with the CD drive: whenever I ejected the tray, the tray closed itself shortly after. I think it was trying to mount it or something.

One completely bare lenny later, and I could install xfce4, gdm, synaptic, iceweasel. SYSTEM COMPLETE. That was a lot simpler than I thought it would be.

The stuff in lenny is older than hell (At least compared to Ubuntu's state, OpenOffice is ghastly looking, I had to compile my own Pidgin (WHICH WORKED FIRST TIME WHAT THE HELL), etc), but it hasn't thrown a tantrum or anything. It's just operating... systematically.

In conclusion: Xfce is absolutely super duper. Gnome and KDE get in the way. Lxde is like Xfce except less consistent.

Liunx - if the Amiga had taken off and the PC hadn't, this is whatd be for dinner.

Gotta be honest, for all the griefs there's a certain "HAW HAW I'M USING PROPAR COMPUTERZ" about it all. It feels like computers used to when computers were computers. More the "one day, this''l be able to do anything" feel, as opposed to the "this should do anything now, but it doesn't" feel of OSX/Windows.

I like linux, specifically Debian/Ubuntu (interference and all) but couldn't rely on it.

I quite like Debian for running on my Bytemark server. But having had Linux on my desktop for 3 and a bit years at my last job, I wouldn't want it on my desktop.

linux. ouch. IMHO

Seems like the linux versions of UAE are complete crap in comparison to their Windows counterparts.

The one thing that I could count on this pants laptop for (running Pinball Dreams or old Assassins disks) and it can't do it under linux.

FOR SHAME.

To be fair, OSX gives that feeling once you realise it has a command shell, and an do proper computery stuff straight out of the box.

But without also having the feeling that it's been cobbled together by geeks for free, and absolutely everything you do on it is going to end up with frustrating fiddling about instead of getting what you wanted done (the usual experience I have with Linux every time I've tried it). OS X is a reasonable middle ground between Linux and Windows. What could have been with the Amiga though, eh...

Doesn't the Amiga Forever disks let you boot them up (with some type of linux) and use the machine as if your laptop was an actual amiga ?

** Edit **

http://www.amigaforever.com/kxlight/

Amiga Forever KX Light

KX Light is a GNU/Linux distribution based on a modified version of Knoppix Debian, specifically developed to allow the Amiga Forever CD to be used to boot a PC, if so desired. At the end of the KX Light boot process the GNU/Linux version of UAE is started, featuring the Amiga Forever Workbench 3.X environment.

Huh, so it can!
http://www.amigaforever.com/gfx/screens ... t_anim.gif

Didn't realise that, and I have that version too..

You to have missed out the (approximately) 1,000 bad points that go with that, though.

I have just updated to Ubuntu 10 (insert silly name here) on my laptop.

It's a bit good, isn't it?

I'm changing my mind - this is bloody good. I recommend anyone to grab a Live CD / USB key and give it a shot.

Ubuntu is old news. Mint has absolutely killed Ubuntu.

In what way?

Since I replaced my main desktop computer, I've basically got a 'spare' which I might install Ubuntu on.

Ooh, has it?

Hmm... since it's an Ubuntu derivative, I'd say that Mint relies completely on the work that Ubuntu do.

The only major difference is that Mint comes with flash & various non-free codecs installed saving a job for folk that don't know what they're doing, but if you've half a brain you'll be saving your package selections before you update anyway, that way it'll install all the software & codecs you had in your original install.

It's just ubuntu with more stuff pre-installed to save new folk being put off because they need to do a bit of work.

I meant dead to me. All of the things that I would use Ubuntu for (a rescue disk, a last-minute OS, um...) Mint does (SHOCK), but the Ubuntu 10.04 does CRAZY THINGS that I don't like. (If you like the buttons being IN THE WRONG PLACE, odd COLOURS, and that weird CORNER OF THE SCREEN THING, then Ubuntu 10.04 is for you!)

Given a choice between Ubuntu and Mint, I'd pick Windows XP every time. Mint is less crazy than Ubuntu right now though.

okay, so I install Ubuntu* on an old laptop, but the keyboard and mousepad thingy are not recognised. Well, there were once, but not since then.


*Ubuntu indeed!

So you've got no input at all?

Do they work if you put the live CD in and boot from that again?

It didn't the first install (used my USB Kb&M), then I rebooted and reinstalled and on that install it worked, then on a reload (3 times now) no input. Plugged the USB M in, nothing, but thought that might be a driver problem. Also having problems getting the wireless to work. Can see the network, but can't gain access, but this may be because the wireless in the laptop is old?

Could be. If you plug it into the network, is there any way you can fire off the upgrade software?

I love your Stone Cold avatar

ok, the mouse pad, Laptop keyboard and both the USB Kb and M work on the 10.04 Ubuntu live CD. They work for about 20 seconds on the installation, then freeze and nothing works.

Are you sure the computer hasn't crashed?

no, I appear to be in and running now, but it takes a few attempts.

I can't get either wired or wireless network to work though, although it is possible the wired port is flaky, I don't know the history of the laptop, and it is quite old.