Vanillalite
Ask me about the GAF Notebook
Not hard. New versions of things like Ubuntu or Linux Mint well automatically setup a LAMP stack for you if need be during the install too.
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Linux Distro Noob thread of Linux noobs
- Thread starter Flying_Phoenix
- Start date
Not hard. New versions of things like Ubuntu or Linux Mint well automatically setup a LAMP stack for you if need be during the install too.
Vanillalite
Ask me about the GAF Notebook
ComputerMKII
Banned
Elementary OS Beta 2 just came out.
Vanillalite
Ask me about the GAF Notebook
I saw this as well. I'm tempted to reinstall as through all my distro hoping that was the OS I stayed on the longest which should say something.
I had a bit of spare time at work this week so I decided to try out some distros.
Live Voyager is possibly the best looking Xfce distro I've used out of the box. Manjaro looked nice, if a little Minty, but this one blows it away. It's packed with modern features too. It has a dash like App explorer, Synapse, Conky out of the box, radio streamer on the panel and a lot more. If you're looking for something with the polish of Gnome or Unity but cant get past your love for Xfce and don't want to mess around installing a lot of things, then this is for you. The direct download was slow for me so maybe try the torrent.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=--KCpjzk7z0
http://voyager.legtux.org/
Live Voyager is possibly the best looking Xfce distro I've used out of the box. Manjaro looked nice, if a little Minty, but this one blows it away. It's packed with modern features too. It has a dash like App explorer, Synapse, Conky out of the box, radio streamer on the panel and a lot more. If you're looking for something with the polish of Gnome or Unity but cant get past your love for Xfce and don't want to mess around installing a lot of things, then this is for you. The direct download was slow for me so maybe try the torrent.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=--KCpjzk7z0
http://voyager.legtux.org/
Vanillalite
Ask me about the GAF Notebook
Legit thanks! I'll definitely check this out.
I just downloaded the net install and spinning up a new VM. Looks pretty slick thus far from the video reviews I've seen.
GameplayWhore
Member
Playing around with Gnome 3.8.1 on arch right now. Just curious, but when I log back in, will my session be restored with the windows in their last workspace or just in a starting workspace? I'm trying to get a hang of how they're dynamically handled. Also, in there are keyboard shortcuts for going to the left and right workspace, but I don't see how (or if) the number of columns are changed. Is that a "adding in next version" feature or just a throwback that they forgot to take out from a prior version? Or did I just gloss over where to set the number of columns?
Hmm. I also seem to be missing a system tray. I know that Gnome now has a new notification area with special integration for messaging programs, but I use a copy of pidgin on a shared server (that is to say, I run it remotely via ssh so it has the same history on every computer). Is there a way to enable/add this capability?
I like how window dragging has been moved to Super+MouseLeft instead of the old Alt+MouseLeft. I kind of wish that they did the same for resizing (it used to be, and in some environments still is, Alt+MouseRight).
Hmm. I also seem to be missing a system tray. I know that Gnome now has a new notification area with special integration for messaging programs, but I use a copy of pidgin on a shared server (that is to say, I run it remotely via ssh so it has the same history on every computer). Is there a way to enable/add this capability?
I like how window dragging has been moved to Super+MouseLeft instead of the old Alt+MouseLeft. I kind of wish that they did the same for resizing (it used to be, and in some environments still is, Alt+MouseRight).
The session manager still seems to be there, but I don't think they've made the effort of working with it and the dynamical workspaces yet. At least by default nothing is stored after reboot, I haven't seen what happens if you switch it on.
Workspaces are created in one column only, I think because it would be too messy to be able to juggle them all around in a dynamic way. The short cuts for moving left and right might be for Gnome Classic (available from gnome-shell-extensions in Arch)?
Super+M pulls forward the notification tray, you can also get to it by pulling the mouse beyond the lower screen border (I think 250px is the required amount). Not sure how Pidgin integrates into it ...
Lasthope106
Member
Anyone here dual-booting Win 8 with Ubuntu 13.04? Any major issues to be aware of? I want to dual-boot on my laptop. How is the graphics support for nvidia graphics on Ubuntu? Last time I got way deep into Linux I was using Fedora because they always had the best driver support of all the distros. Is that still the case?
There's a "feature" in Win8 that renders the NTFS drive useless in other OS's.
Don't recall what it was.
EDIT: Ah, here it is: http://www.h-online.com/open/featur...8-Fast-Startup-puts-data-at-risk-1780640.html
It's basically the result of them "cheating" to get fast startup times.
I'm not dual booting win8 but read this page.
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UEFI
Also Nvidia support is much better across most flavours of Linux so it shouldn't be a deciding factor in what distro you use these days. There were some reports of Driver installs through Software Sources messing up and borking an an entire install but most of those seem to be solved by just reinstalling the OS. My advice is to do a software update first then install the drivers early on and reboot just to make sure. Overall Nvidia has stepped up their support of Open GL and it shows.
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UEFI
Also Nvidia support is much better across most flavours of Linux so it shouldn't be a deciding factor in what distro you use these days. There were some reports of Driver installs through Software Sources messing up and borking an an entire install but most of those seem to be solved by just reinstalling the OS. My advice is to do a software update first then install the drivers early on and reboot just to make sure. Overall Nvidia has stepped up their support of Open GL and it shows.
FWIW Fedora 18 seems to have amazing UEFI support, setting up everything automatically, and the best graphical installer I've used yet. They also seem to have integrated the ntfs-3g fix mentioned above for the "fast restart" feature (it should still be disabled but at least no data will be lost), then again Ubuntu probably also has at this point.
I wish Fedora wouldn't primarily be a testbed because I've been getting a huge hardon for Red Hat and their developers this last year.
http://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/Fedora/18/html/Release_Notes/sect-Release_Notes-Changes_for_Sysadmin.html
Yea, I was pretty impressed with Fedora 18 and SELinux seems to behaving itself as well. Agreed on the installer looking good and I think they have one of the better look grub menus out there as well. I'm pretty sure I even got some sort of notification that recognised my Nvidia card and offered me the latest drivers or something as well. I almost switched to using it as my everyday.
GameplayWhore
Member
AAAUUUGHHHH!!!!
LibreOffice is driving me to extreme annoyance.
Every time I run it, it brings up the recovery dialog. Every time I tell it to recover, it either complains about file locks (there is no existing instance of the program running anywhere else on the involved files) or spectacularly fails to recover the files.
I just disabled saving autorecover information (good gods, why can't it just autosave?!?), but I would really love if it would just silently try to recover then either silently succeed or silently fail and, if the latter, bring up a blank document. It there any way of manage this?
LibreOffice is driving me to extreme annoyance.
Every time I run it, it brings up the recovery dialog. Every time I tell it to recover, it either complains about file locks (there is no existing instance of the program running anywhere else on the involved files) or spectacularly fails to recover the files.
I just disabled saving autorecover information (good gods, why can't it just autosave?!?), but I would really love if it would just silently try to recover then either silently succeed or silently fail and, if the latter, bring up a blank document. It there any way of manage this?
GameplayWhore
Member
I've done that. It still wants to autorecover next time, and it still does a consistently poor job of it. It's probably because I load files over shared network connections. Ideally, those are indistinct from local directories, if a bit slower, but in practice they can cause some degree of annoyance.
Hrm. So I'm finding that I run a lot of graphical programs with switches ("kate -s <profilename>", "opera -pd <profilename>", in addition to mount and backup scripts I like to manually trigger, et al). I'm still fooling around with Gnome 3. How do I add a custom command to the side launch bar?
Does anyone know of a printer and scanner that does not have any issues with Lubuntu or Xubuntu? I've tried various modern HP printers with HPLIP and they have various compatibility issues.
I am setting up a computer running Lubuntu or Xubuntu that will mainly be used offline.
I am setting up a computer running Lubuntu or Xubuntu that will mainly be used offline.
I think you'll have to create or edit the shortcuts in Alacarte (or go directly for the .desktop files).
You might have read it already but theres some things you can do here and a list of printers as well.
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Printers
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Scanners
Thanks for the links. I was also hoping someone here had first hand experience and could recommend some hardware. I tried a few that were listed as working perfectly but that wasn't the case.
Automatisch
Member
Switched my laptop to F18 until EL7 comes out. My only goal at this point is to get Optimus working on 3.9 + proprietary drivers, but I'm going to hold off for a later release in order to make sure everything is working better. I'm really curious what kernel version ships with EL7, since the cutoff point will be soon and a beta should be out towards the summer time, most likely after the summit.
I am using a Canon Pixma MG5320 with Ubuntu. You have to get the drivers from one of the Canon websites in Asia, because one of the Western ones appear to recognize Linux as a possibility people would want.
I haven't used it as a scanner directly to the computer, but it does great multipage PDFs (no feeder, hand swapping the pages) and images onto a flash drive plugged into the front. I should try scanning wirelessly through the GIMP someday, I suppose.
Anyway, it's been painless as a wireless printer for me.
GameplayWhore
Member
Okay. I was typing "menu" in the launcher in the hopes of finding a menu editor to add apps with. When I get home, I'll try to check for this app. I take it that Alacarte is part of the Gnome 3 metapackage?
Hm. So it seems that completely disabling autorecover does not, in fact, stop LibreOffice from trying to autorecover whenever I start it up. This happens in opensuse and archlinux, in KDE and Gnome, whether I've exited last time via explicitly closing the program or by logging out. It's really kind of a head-scratcher to me.
https://www.spotify.com/au/download/previews/
I can't remember if someone here was asking for this or not. There it is, in any case.
I can't remember if someone here was asking for this or not. There it is, in any case.
I am using a Canon Pixma MG5320 with Ubuntu. You have to get the drivers from one of the Canon websites in Asia, because one of the Western ones appear to recognize Linux as a possibility people would want.
I haven't used it as a scanner directly to the computer, but it does great multipage PDFs (no feeder, hand swapping the pages) and images onto a flash drive plugged into the front. I should try scanning wirelessly through the GIMP someday, I suppose.
Anyway, it's been painless as a wireless printer for me.
I asked around and a friend actually owns that exact model, so I can try it out! Thanks!
Yep. Good deal. A friend of mine was doing some similar shopping around (for Windows laptop and iPad) and he brought his stuff over and tried it out live right in the living room here. Having a standalone printer is really pretty awesome, because you can just tote it around the house to wherever you need to work with it.
I think Spotify is in the Ubuntu Software Center now. It is for me, at least.
Anyone else using OpenSUSE 12.3? I just recently switched from using Debian distro's as my defact since I'm in CentOS pretty much all the time and SUSE has really gotten better.
For you gamers, yes STEAM works fine on OpenSUSE.
The one-click installs are nice, YaST2 isn't as moronic as it once was and zypper is about as good as yum for updates. Pretty impressed.
For you gamers, yes STEAM works fine on OpenSUSE.
The one-click installs are nice, YaST2 isn't as moronic as it once was and zypper is about as good as yum for updates. Pretty impressed.
Q
qizah
Unconfirmed Member
What do you guys use for your Twitter clients? I've been using TweetDeck for Chromium but I'm kind of annoyed having it opened as a tab and would prefer something on the desktop. I've heard Hotot is pretty good. Any other suggestions?
Automatisch
Member
12.3 is good and I think more people should try it. That said, YAST still feels like it has too many things that don't really do anything different than stock programs, and I don't like the default repos compared to Fedora but you can easily fix that with 1-click installs and adding Tumbleweed. I've also had problems with how they name certain libraries, and compared to apt or yum zypper feels a little slow. I think 13 should be a really good release if they take to heart some of the criticisms 12.3 got, but overall it's a really good alternative to Ubuntu and is still my favorite KDE-distro.
youta
Member
I've used the following under Ubuntu and Mint:
Samsung ML-2510 printer
Epson Perfection 1260 scanner
They both "just worked" without any extra drivers, but unfortunately they're old and probably discontinued by now :/
GameplayWhore
Member
The point of YAST isn't that every module is revolutionary in some way. It's that there's a one-stop place you can go if you want to. It's kind of like webmin. I could easily install myphpadmin and other web interfaces to various servers and programs on my machine, but I can just install webmin, as it handles almost everything I need.
You're right about zypper seeming slower. I think it's a matter of it checking the repos more often, but I'm not sure. On the other hand, I have far less dependency hell and problems installing packages from official repos (which is something that should never, ever happen, but there we are) in opensuse compared to other distros. Arch is pretty good with this, too, with the exception of doing a $(pacman -Syu) and missing the tiny, tiny line of text that tells you to manually do something critical among the huge wall of regular install messages.
1) I've got an NTFS data partition that my Windows and Mint partitions both use. When Windows sees that Mint's been changing it it sometimes tries to "repair" the partition, resulting in all of my version-controlled files saying they've been changed. How do I stop this? For reference, the data partition is after the Mint partition, which is after the Windows one.
2) Ctrl-F doesn't work in Mint. In any program. The keypress just isn't detected. If I use xbindkeys it shows that when holding control, pressing F doesn't even register. What up?
2) Ctrl-F doesn't work in Mint. In any program. The keypress just isn't detected. If I use xbindkeys it shows that when holding control, pressing F doesn't even register. What up?
Automatisch
Member
Trust me, I know the point of YAST as I've been using SuSE since the old days (6.3; even bought boxed copies), and back then it was revolutionary because it was the easiest way to get things like your xserver configured properly with SaX. A lot of what it used to do is already done with the DE settings, and having things like "Install Virtual Machine Hypervisor" and "Manage Virtual Machines" when all they do is install KVM/XEN and load virt-manager just seems ultimately pointless to me. The usefulness of the "one-stop place" has diminished since everything is integrated much more tightly IMO. This is just how I feel, and if you get use out of YAST then it clearly has some use left for some people I guess, and maybe it just doesn't serve my needs.
GameplayWhore
Member
Easy. Mouse the partition with the "ro" option.
(I would not trust NTFS as a cross-platform partition type, at all -- its internals are not as publicly documented as most other filesystems, and that's by design; if you are using it in this way, I strongly recommend that you backup the entire partition regularly)
I take it that it shows both buttons being pressed when you run xev, right?
(warning: seemingly pretentious underlined section headers follow; I put them in because my response was getting a bit walloftexty, so I thought it'd be easier to get the gist this way)
First, you want to see if the combo works at all
Try switching to a vtty (hit ctrl-alt-f1 and hope to the gods that your distro didn't disable this option, as it's genuinely useful) and see if it functions there (in terminals, ctrl-b acts like the left arrow key and ctrl-f acts like the right arrow key, so you can just type a bunch of text, hit left a few times, then try ctrl-f to see if it moves the cursor to the right).
Then, you might want to try a different desktop to see if your specific desktop is the problem
My first guess would be that the above two items works like a charm and that the desktop environment you're running accidentally reserved that key combo as a keyboard shortcut. Try logging into a different environment or window manager to test it. LXDE is a decent quickie one to try (I think the package in your distro is "lxde-core").
Check to see if your keyboard shortcut is being intercepted by your desktop
Anyway, I'm guessing that Mint uses Gnome 3 as its default desktop and that you are using that. Despite using it for the last week, I can't remember exactly how you get to the shortcuts. It's probably something like "right click on desktop, click "Settings", click "Keyboard and Mouse", choose "shortcuts" tab). I don't think it had a filter bar, which would be really really nice right now, but you can scroll down every line to look for an errant ctrl-f that it might have added. If it's binded at the desktop environment level for some trivial action, then regular apps might not see it when you hit it.
Also yell at me if all the above seems stupidly complicated.
Automatisch
Member
Been playing with Cinnamon 1.8 a lot lately and I think once it hits stable repos I'm going to probably start using it as my main DE. I hadn't used it since the initial release so it was nice to see how far Clem's come with it.
Also, since I had been using Fedora 18 I guess I should comment on that. Most of the reviews/discussions I've read are pretty much spot on, and this is definitely one of the worst releases in recent years. The new anaconda is awful and my initial boot had some bugs which seemed to not get fix with updates. Yum is getting replaced with DNF so I may mess with the F19 or F20 if they end up putting it in, but I highly doubt I'll ever use one as my main OS unless it got glowing remarks. I've been on the fence with Fedora for a while, but after 17 and now 18's weak releases I'm going to probably end up maining wheezy until the unfreeze. Since I'm still working on my RHCSA I'd prefer to use EL6 fulltime but I'm resigned to using VMs as my Asus N56VZ has problems with it.
Also, since I had been using Fedora 18 I guess I should comment on that. Most of the reviews/discussions I've read are pretty much spot on, and this is definitely one of the worst releases in recent years. The new anaconda is awful and my initial boot had some bugs which seemed to not get fix with updates. Yum is getting replaced with DNF so I may mess with the F19 or F20 if they end up putting it in, but I highly doubt I'll ever use one as my main OS unless it got glowing remarks. I've been on the fence with Fedora for a while, but after 17 and now 18's weak releases I'm going to probably end up maining wheezy until the unfreeze. Since I'm still working on my RHCSA I'd prefer to use EL6 fulltime but I'm resigned to using VMs as my Asus N56VZ has problems with it.
ComputerMKII
Banned
Cinnamon is pretty much perfect. I'm waiting for 1.8 to hit the official repos to try it but if it corrects as many bugs as announced I'll be more than happy.
Mouse the partition? Wut? You mean mount it?
What would you recommend instead of NTFS? I want something that can store files > 4GB.
Oh God, I'm a huge retard. I thought I explicitly checked for this before, but apparently not. Haha, at least it works now.
Thanks for the help.
GameplayWhore
Member
Mouse the partition? Wut? You mean mount it?
What would you recommend instead of NTFS? I want something that can store files > 4GB.
Oh, snap, that's a really legit issue. I do know that a really long time ago I used ext2 with a windows driver, and that option exists these days for both ext3 and hfs+ (the OS X default filesystem, I believe), but instead of being a great idea it just exposes the horrible truth that there is no heavy duty filesystem that has true native-like support for every OS.
The NTFS route is supposed to be well supported enough to not have the problems you describe, but obviously that's not the case. :/
Terrible alternate suggestion (or decent suggestion but maybe more of a down the line thing for you): Make your storage drive a cheap NAS that can share via SMB and/or NFS. Both Windows and Linux support both nowadays. I use a cheapo raspberry pi with an external drive attached to do this, personally. Nice bonus is that minidlna works like a charm, so I can watch all my videos on my Android phone or my tv media player even when my desktop computer is off.
No problem. That kind of solution is most common because everybody, no matter their average awesomeness, has moments like this.
edit: ha! Yeah, I had meant "Mount the partition". I've been very tired and dumb this week due to finals and prep for a regional Burning Man event. That's for a scenario where you only need to save files when you're in Windows and only need to read them in Linux, so it was not an entirely serious suggestion.
Automatisch
Member
Played with Manjaro for a bit, and for an out of the box Arch it does things pretty well. Based on my own experience and reading around forums and reviews I wouldn't advise it just yet for a full-time distro unless you don't mind some bugs and whatnot, but the driver detection and other neat things they've added are similar to what Mint has done recently with 15. I think once they've hit their 1.0 milestone it will be a worthwhile full-time distro, but I had issues with basic stuff like EFI booting and other areas where the installer would straight up just fail certain portions of the system setup.
ComputerMKII
Banned
Cinnamon 1.8 has hit the Romeo repo. It's very good but t hey haven't fixed the bug that shows a black background instead of your wallpaper when using Expo or Scale.
Automatisch
Member
Yeah I think 1.8 still has a few bugs reading around so I'd hold off with 1.7.x for a while. Also not a fan of the new MDM and will be keeping GDM, but other than that 1.8's new stuff is pretty great bugs aside.
Make sure you upgrade Muffin too though, as that can fix a lot of the issues people are having.
Oh hey, Mint 15 RC is here. How long is it usually between the RC and the stable release?
Eh, perhaps I overreacted, I think it's only actually happened once (maybe twice), I was just too scared to use Windows for a while, but it hasn't happened since then. I'll stick with NTFS for now, I suppose.
Using an old or semi-old distro after being used to an up-to-date one with good respositories like Arch or debian unstable is frustrating as hell. Using CentOS 5 at work and the repositories are quite...lacking, even with things like rpmfusion included. When I try to compile things from source, half the time I lack a new enough version of some core library.
Using CentOS 5 at work and the repositories are quite...lacking, even with things like rpmfusion included. When I try to compile things from source, half the time I lack a new enough version of some core library.Automatisch
Member
Using an old or semi-old distro after being used to an up-to-date one with good respositories like Arch or debian unstable is frustrating as hell.
Any reason why you'd need anything super new on a workstation? EL5 is pretty old but it should have most anything you'd need to get work done.
Obligatory: Back in my day we had to edit Makefiles in vi and compile in /tmp because we didn't have enough room in ~ ...Using an old or semi-old distro after being used to an up-to-date one with good respositories like Arch or debian unstable is frustrating as hell.