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Linux Distro Noob thread of Linux noobs

M

Mooreberg

is sharpening a shovel and digging a ditch
GameplayWhore said:
Is changing the desktop environment really that hard in Ubuntu? It's like the easiest thing in the universe on every other distro on the planet!

You can't just "apt-get install gnome-shell" or something?

edit: In case this comes off as a seeming attack on you, the user, it is not. I'm just genuinely incredulous that a completely normal activity for most of the Linux world sounds like it's a major chore in this particular case.
Click to expand...
I had read installing Gnome in the newer versions of Ubuntu caused problems with Unity. I installed gnome shell in Lubuntu and it is still reverting to fallback mode, even with the additional drivers installed. Fedora has been the only one that runs Gnome 3 correctly in virtual box.

I know how to install desktop environments, I use E17 a lot. I'm just trying to test out Gnome 3 in virtual box and none of the Ubuntu distros seem to work with it. I might just just install another Fedora .vdi to mess around with it.
 
I

Izick

Member
Okay, so Firefox 11 is out, and people on Mac/Windows can update it through "About Firefox" in the menu. So is Mozilla just late with the Linux version, or do we have to update it some other way?
 
G

GameplayWhore

Member
Izick said:
Okay, so Firefox 11 is out, and people on Mac/Windows can update it through "About Firefox" in the menu. So is Mozilla just late with the Linux version, or do we have to update it some other way?
Click to expand...
Generally, you should use your OS's package manager to handle the upgrade (using synaptic or apt-get, in your example) . It is possible, though, that the new version is not yet in the official repositories.
 
I

Izick

Member
GameplayWhore said:
Generally, you should use your OS's package manager to handle the upgrade (using synaptic or apt-get, in your example) . It is possible, though, that the new version is not yet in the official repositories.
Click to expand...

Oh then Ubuntu's software manager will keep that updated as well? Oh that's alien to me. I'm used to updating it myself through the About Firefox, About Chrome, Check for Updates (Opera), etc. I know you can still update Opera on Linux that way though.
 
V

Vanillalite

Ask me about the GAF Notebook
Izick said:
Oh then Ubuntu's software manager will keep that updated as well? Oh that's alien to me. I'm used to updating it myself through the About Firefox, About Chrome, Check for Updates (Opera), etc. I know you can still update Opera on Linux that way though.
Click to expand...

Yeah it'll handle everything for you.
 
I

Izick

Member
angelfly said:
The Linux version is available now. What you're waitiing for is Ubuntu to add it to their repositories.
Click to expand...

Alright, thanks for clearing that up. I'm still a newb, so don't be too hard on me! :p

---------
Just in case anyone has a problem with sound effects playing in Ubuntu in the future, I had this problem and was about to ask this thread for advice, but I managed to stumble across the solution myself!

So, no startup or sound effects were playing, but all the normal sound functions and test sounds worked fine, which is not a big deal, but still annoying. So after a bit of Googling, I manage to solve it with this terminal command.

In the Terminal said:
sudo cp /usr/share/sounds/ubuntu/stereo/* /usr/share/sounds/
Click to expand...

Cleared up everything for me, got all the sounds working right again.
 
P

Pctx

Banned
grumpy said:
That's weird. Ubuntu update manager upgraded my FF installation to ver. 11 about 4 days ago.
Click to expand...

Generally speaking it depends on how it is installed from the get go. If it is installed through the software center, I believe apt-get will get the update once Canonical has published the updated code. This obviously various on LTS releases.
 
I

Izick

Member
I'm just using the Firefox that came pre-installed with Ubuntu. I tried sudo apt-get upgrade, but it didn't upgrade Firefox.
 
T

TheNatural

My Member!
If I install the 12.04 Ubuntu beta, does the official release when it comes out have to be installed clean over it, or will the beta upgrade itself to the official release?
 
V

Vanillalite

Ask me about the GAF Notebook
TheNatural said:
If I install the 12.04 Ubuntu beta, does the official release when it comes out have to be installed clean over it, or will the beta upgrade itself to the official release?
Click to expand...

It'll update to whatever the current daily is. So whenever the official release hits as long as you are patched up you are then officially on the new release.
 
T

The Technomancer

card-carrying scientician
And hey, lets keep this train going!

I've posted this on the Ubuntu forums as well, but what the hell it couldn't hurt to ask here as well. I'm attempting to install Mac, Windows 7 and Ubuntu on my Macbook. Everything goes fine when I install Mac and Windows, but when I install Ubuntu after that it seems to create a minuscule new partition at the top of my partition list. This new partition does not show up in Mac's "diskutil list" or its Ubuntu equivalent, it only shows up when Windows 7 prompts me to select an installation partition.

Why is this problematic you may ask? Because the new partition is designated as a Primary partition, and I can only have four of those. This new partition plus EFI, Mac, and Ubuntu proper is my four, so then my previously created Windows 7 partition gets kicked to being "free space".

And finally if I delete the new tiny partition and re-install Windows then I can boot to Windows but I get an "error: no such partition" when I try to boot to Ubuntu so I'm assuming that the tiny partition contains something vital. It seems that Ubuntu takes two primary partition slots, which is...well...bullshit
 
I

Izick

Member
Flying_Phoenix said:
Is Firefox good at all anymore? Or is it the new Internet Explorer?
Click to expand...

It's getting beaten by Chrome, but it's by no means as bad as IE. It still is an extremely solid browser, it always has been, it just is following behind Chrome, which has been consistently better.

There's a huge gap between always being second and always being last, and I would say that Firefox's future looks a lot brighter than IE's.
 
V

Vanillalite

Ask me about the GAF Notebook
Flying_Phoenix said:
Is Firefox good at all anymore? Or is it the new Internet Explorer?
Click to expand...

FF is still awesome.

Honestly all of the browsers are so fast and fully featured now it's down to smaller details. Who's UI do you like the best or who has the best extensions for you or who has a small feature that you might really use like opera turbo etc..

The biggest key is the fact that especially FF and Chrome (and to a lesser extent Opera) are now on regular mini release cycles. It helps out a shit ton in terms of keep things fresh, and up to date. Before you were stuck waiting for this massive list of shit to get done before you'd see any of it even if half the list was done in 3 months, and the other stuff was going to take another 9.

Beyond that the biggest keys are just individual things. We all know despite how things SHOULD go it never really does everyone. Thankfully if the browser world if you have some kinks you are experiencing with one browser you can always switch to another until the next round of updates hit which could fix some odd issue for you. That's why your crazy not to have a regular browser + a back up installed.

PS: This is ignoring all of the stuff like not wanting to use Chrome cause of Google Privacy shit or hating on IE cause it's MS or not using Safari cause you don't run OSX etc...
 
I

Izick

Member
Brettison said:
FF is still awesome.

Honestly all of the browsers are so fast and fully featured now it's down to smaller details. Who's UI do you like the best or who has the best extensions for you or who has a small feature that you might really use like opera turbo etc..

The biggest key is the fact that especially FF and Chrome (and to a lesser extent Opera) are now on regular mini release cycles. It helps out a shit ton in terms of keep things fresh, and up to date. Before you were stuck waiting for this massive list of shit to get done before you'd see any of it even if half the list was done in 3 months, and the other stuff was going to take another 9.

Beyond that the biggest keys are just individual things. We all know despite how things SHOULD go it never really does everyone. Thankfully if the browser world if you have some kinks you are experiencing with one browser you can always switch to another until the next round of updates hit which could fix some odd issue for you. That's why your crazy not to have a regular browser + a back up installed.

PS: This is ignoring all of the stuff like not wanting to use Chrome cause of Google Privacy shit or hating on IE cause it's MS or not using Safari cause you don't run OSX etc...
Click to expand...

Yeah, totally agree. I use FF mainly now, and I have Chromium on deck, and Opera just to see how it's coming along.

After you install your favorite extensions, and get your settings down, they're very similar, besides some small minutia between them.
 
P

peakish

Member
The_Technomancer said:
And hey, lets keep this train going!

I've posted this on the Ubuntu forums as well, but what the hell it couldn't hurt to ask here as well. I'm attempting to install Mac, Windows 7 and Ubuntu on my Macbook. Everything goes fine when I install Mac and Windows, but when I install Ubuntu after that it seems to create a minuscule new partition at the top of my partition list. This new partition does not show up in Mac's "diskutil list" or its Ubuntu equivalent, it only shows up when Windows 7 prompts me to select an installation partition.

Why is this problematic you may ask? Because the new partition is designated as a Primary partition, and I can only have four of those. This new partition plus EFI, Mac, and Ubuntu proper is my four, so then my previously created Windows 7 partition gets kicked to being "free space".

And finally if I delete the new tiny partition and re-install Windows then I can boot to Windows but I get an "error: no such partition" when I try to boot to Ubuntu so I'm assuming that the tiny partition contains something vital. It seems that Ubuntu takes two primary partition slots, which is...well...bullshit
Click to expand...
Maybe it creates a separate /boot/ partition or something? If you want to reinstall Ubuntu you should be able to manually set partitions and boot stuff at some point. Then just create a single partition and set it as "/". I think that should do it. Or you can make it extended and fancy it up a bit with separate /, /boot/ and /home/ and whatnot, but I don't think that's really necessary.

Edit: Unless perhaps there is something about GRUB being installed on a separate partition on Mac hardware but I couldn't imagine why that would be the case.

On this note, my current notebook has Windows taking up three primary partitions for itself and backup stuff. What a hog -_-
 
K

-KRS-

Member
peakish said:
Maybe it creates a separate /boot/ partition or something? If you want to reinstall Ubuntu you should be able to manually set partitions and boot stuff at some point. Then just create a single partition and set it as "/". I think that should do it. Or you can make it extended and fancy it up a bit with separate /, /boot/ and /home/ and whatnot, but I don't think that's really necessary.

Edit: Unless perhaps there is something about GRUB being installed on a separate partition on Mac hardware but I couldn't imagine why that would be the case.

On this note, my current notebook has Windows taking up three primary partitions for itself and backup stuff. What a hog -_-
Click to expand...

Putting /home on a seperate partition is always a good idea in my opinion. That way you won't loose your application settings when you reinstall or change to a different distro. For example, browser bookmarks, settings and extensions will still be there after a reinstall.

Sometimes this can cause some issues though. For example after changing distro, if there are old legacy settings files in your home dir they could interfere with applications that expect newer versions of those files. But then you just remove that application's dot-folder from your home dir, for example the ~/.wine folder, and new files will be created automatically when you start up the application again. So it's not a big issue and it happens very rarely unless you often change between stable and unstable distros.
 
A

angelfly

Member
Is anyone here having/had to make changes to their setup due to the issue of udev with /usr on a separate partition? Back when Fedora was being vocal about moving things from / to /usr I didn't care since it didn't affect me as I don't use Fedora but now that udev is expecting those changes it is. I've known for a while I'd have to make change things but held off. Currently have a few options:

switch to mdev - poses no immediate issues to my setup but could later on

use an initramfs - 10+ years without using one means I'm in no rush to add complications on top of how I do things

just stick with the older version as long as I can - easy but I don't like keeping unmaintained versions of critical software

Got about a month or two before the version requiring the switch is considered stable in portage. I'll probably end up using an initramfs now while waiting to see how mdev is working out for people.
 
S

survivor

Banned
This might be a bit silly but say I buy a hard drive like this, will it work on a Linux machine? It says it's preformated for Windows and can be reformatted to work on Mac, so can I assume I can do the same and get it to work on Linux?
 
A

angelfly

Member
Zeppelin said:
How is Gentoo doing nowadays? I'm tempted to dive back in.
Click to expand...

No major problems on my end. Only complaints I have are some developers settings certain complile flags in packages and not providing a use flag so I have to modify the ebuild myself but those are small problems and don't happen often.

survivor said:
This might be a bit silly but say I buy a hard drive like this, will it work on a Linux machine? It says it's preformated for Windows and can be reformatted to work on Mac, so can I assume I can do the same and get it to work on Linux?
Click to expand...

It'll work. The preformatted for Windows bit just means it comes preformatted with either fat32 or ntfs.
 
V

Vic

Please help me with my bad english
This week I discovered rtcwake, something I've dreamt about for years now so finding this program feels like an achievement and makes me very happy. Basically, you can use this program to wake your computer from suspend, memory, poweroff and other states at a specific given time. This will be handy!

Ex:

Code: 
sudo rtcwake -l -m mem -t $(date --date='2:16am' +%s)

This command will wake the computer up at 2:16am, based on my localtime from the rtc clock, after being suspended to memory. The date command is necessary to convert the given time to the absolute time "time_t" which then be converted in seconds with the switch +%s.
 
V

Vanillalite

Ask me about the GAF Notebook
Cool Article on one duo wondering about OMGUbuntu's recent downtime, and how they decided they could fix said issue verses waiting through the weekend. Not only did they feel waiting 3 days for a fix seemed like a long time, they figured they had a faster more modular fix and something that could keep this from happening again in the future!

Jorge's Stompbox
Mar 18th, 2012

Redeploying OMG!Ubuntu on to the Cloud With Juju
 
K

-KRS-

Member
The_Technomancer said:
And hey, lets keep this train going!

I've posted this on the Ubuntu forums as well, but what the hell it couldn't hurt to ask here as well. I'm attempting to install Mac, Windows 7 and Ubuntu on my Macbook. Everything goes fine when I install Mac and Windows, but when I install Ubuntu after that it seems to create a minuscule new partition at the top of my partition list. This new partition does not show up in Mac's "diskutil list" or its Ubuntu equivalent, it only shows up when Windows 7 prompts me to select an installation partition.

Why is this problematic you may ask? Because the new partition is designated as a Primary partition, and I can only have four of those. This new partition plus EFI, Mac, and Ubuntu proper is my four, so then my previously created Windows 7 partition gets kicked to being "free space".

And finally if I delete the new tiny partition and re-install Windows then I can boot to Windows but I get an "error: no such partition" when I try to boot to Ubuntu so I'm assuming that the tiny partition contains something vital. It seems that Ubuntu takes two primary partition slots, which is...well...bullshit
Click to expand...

Damn I kinda missed the general question here in my last post...
You probably got help already, but anyway, you should make it into logical partitions instead. A logical partition is a primary partition that can contain other partitions. That way you can have as many partitions as you want. I'm not sure that you can combine logical and primary partitions though, but try to do a logical partition for your linux distro. I think it should work. Then you just create the partitions inside that logical volume. Otherwise you have to delete all the primary partitions and then create a logical partition, but as I said I think it should be possible to combine logical and primary partitions.

The small extra partition you see is the swap partition. Linux uses a seperate partition for swap by default, though it can be set to use a file instead if one wants. Generally it's better to have a seperate partition so the reading heads of the HDD doesn't have to move and jump all over a huge partition to find the swap files. If you just choose automatic partitioning in Ubuntu's setup it'll create this partition automatically, and it seems it makes everything into a primary partition if you're getting this problem. So you need to do it manually. It's very straight-forward so don't be scared. It's basically gparted I think. If you need help there are probably guides out there.

It's weird that it only shows up in Windows though. I mean it shouldn't be mounted to a directory or anything, but it should be visible if you run gparted or check the /etc/fstab file.
 
Z

zoku88

Member
Sometimes nvidia pisses me off >_<

Apparently, 295.20 doesn't work with linux 3.3.0.

I wonder how bad the AMD drivers if the nvidia drivers are generally well-received...

Sigh, apparently they have a fix but haven't released it yet.

angelfly said:
Is anyone here having/had to make changes to their setup due to the issue of udev with /usr on a separate partition? Back when Fedora was being vocal about moving things from / to /usr I didn't care since it didn't affect me as I don't use Fedora but now that udev is expecting those changes it is. I've known for a while I'd have to make change things but held off. Currently have a few options:

switch to mdev - poses no immediate issues to my setup but could later on

use an initramfs - 10+ years without using one means I'm in no rush to add complications on top of how I do things

just stick with the older version as long as I can - easy but I don't like keeping unmaintained versions of critical software

Got about a month or two before the version requiring the switch is considered stable in portage. I'll probably end up using an initramfs now while waiting to see how mdev is working out for people.
Click to expand...
I haven't heard of this problem. Though, / and /usr are on the same partition.

How is mdev besides the fact that it is working, lol?
 
A

angelfly

Member
zoku88 said:
I haven't heard of this problem. Though, / and /usr are on the same partition.

How is mdev besides the fact that it is working, lol?
Click to expand...

For people who don't keep /usr separate it's a non issue. The recent threads on the mailing list show others are pretty upset about the change and a few even looking at BSD options since they're not keen on changes of this sort being forced on all distros. As for mdev from what I've seen it works well. However depending on the your setup and software you use certain issues can come up. There's a page on the wiki with details. I've been following the progress and just waiting for more people comment on how its working for them.
 
I

Izick

Member
Okay, I'm confused. Can anyone explain to me what Unity 2D is? Is it like a less resource intensive version of the standard Unity interface, or what?
 
F

freddy

Banned
Ubuntu Wiki said:
Unity 2D's goal is to provide the Unity desktop shell on hardware platforms that cannot currently support Unity's OpenGL requirements (see Hardware Requirements for Unity for more details).

Its architecture is very close to Unity's as it only replaces the user interface elements but still shares all the same backend components. Specifically, Unity 2D replaces the panel, launcher and places components as defined in Unity's architecture overview. Moreover it does not enforce the use of Compiz as a window manager but instead uses a slightly tweaked version of Metacity.
Click to expand...
It's basically there to try to hold onto users who don't like Unity or can't run it (or won't put up with occasional desktop freezes ;]).
 
I

Izick

Member
freddy said:
It's basically there to try to hold onto users who don't like Unity or can't run it (or won't put up with occasional desktop freezes ;]).
Click to expand...

Ah, okay I see. Thanks.

I didn't know that it actually came with Ubuntu either. Everything definitely feels a bit smoother, but I don't know if I'd use it over the regular version.
 
Z

zoku88

Member
angelfly said:
For people who don't keep /usr separate it's a non issue. The recent threads on the mailing list show others are pretty upset about the change and a few even looking at BSD options since they're not keen on changes of this sort being forced on all distros. As for mdev from what I've seen it works well. However depending on the your setup and software you use certain issues can come up. There's a page on the wiki with details. I've been following the progress and just waiting for more people comment on how its working for them.
Click to expand...

I see.

Any reason you keep /usr separate?

Actually, curious, what is your partitioning scheme?

Besides the standard / and /boot I also have /home.

Though, most of my media is kept on another HDD.
 
F

freddy

Banned
Izick said:
Ah, okay I see. Thanks.

I didn't know that it actually came with Ubuntu either. Everything definitely feels a bit smoother, but I don't know if I'd use it over the regular version.
Click to expand...

Yea, it not a good attempt at all if you ask me but I doubt it was a really a priority for them anyway. I much prefer XFCE as a replacement for Gnome 2.
 
I

Izick

Member
freddy said:
Yea, it not a good attempt at all if you ask me but I doubt it was a really a priority for them anyway. I much prefer XFCE as a replacement for Gnome 2.
Click to expand...

This is why I'm coming to love Linux. There really seems like there is something for everybody.

You can have something that's really simple, and easy to use in Ubuntu/Unity, or you can delve deeper and learn more and more.
 
A

angelfly

Member
zoku88 said:
I see.

Any reason you keep /usr separate?

Actually, curious, what is your partitioning scheme?

Besides the standard / and /boot I also have /home.

Though, most of my media is kept on another HDD.
Click to expand...

I keep it separate for various reasons like recovery, backup, flexibility, and being able to mix filesystems. I keep root on ext3 because I still consider it more reliable but use ext4 on usr since from my experience it handles folders with lots of files a lot better. There are other small reasons as well. As for my partition setup:

/
/var
/usr
/home
/tmp
 
I

Izick

Member
I think I've asked this before, but how safe is it to un-install a desktop environment? Like say, if I install XFCE, realize I don't want it, is it just as easy as un-installing it through the software center?
 
Z

zoku88

Member
angelfly said:
I keep it separate for various reasons like recovery, backup, flexibility, and being able to mix filesystems. I keep root on ext3 because I still consider it more reliable but use ext4 on usr since from my experience it handles folders with lots of files a lot better. There are other small reasons as well. As for my partition setup:

/
/var
/usr
/home
/tmp
Click to expand...

Yea, this seems to be kinda common.

I'm wondering about /var and /tmp though. Do you do something special with your /tmp that would make it so that you would want it on a separate partition (like ramfs or something?)

Some question for /var? Just curious since it tends to not be something I care about that much (unless I was using it as a server or something?)
 
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