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Linux Distro Noob thread of Linux noobs
- Thread starter Flying_Phoenix
- Start date
So what, will that install the FGLRX driver, or just give me another option at the add driver app? (I'm fairly sure FGLRX was already an option as well.)
Its 10th birthday was back in '09.
http://www.gentoo.org/news/20090722-anniversary.xml
Like with the Arch birthday that happened recently it's not tracked from the 1.0 release.
Oh, so it's the Anniversary of Gentoo 1.0.
ThatObviousUser
ὠαἴÏÏιÏÏÎ¿Ï Ïαá¿Ï εἶ
So does anyone know what distro Linus uses? 
So does anyone know what distro Linus uses?
For a long time he used SUSE but switched to Fedora since their PowerPC port was better. He's probably still using Fedora.
ThatObviousUser
ὠαἴÏÏιÏÏÎ¿Ï Ïαá¿Ï εἶ
Ah really? I remember him saying Gnome 3 and Unity both suck a while ago, but then recently said Gnome 3 isn't as bad as it used to be, or something. Probably using an alternative environment then, right?
Wonder what desktop environment? I remember reading something a couple of weeks ago about him saying how awful he thought GNOME was progressing.
EDIT: Andrex beat me to it.
Ah okay, that makes more sense than GNOME 3.
For anyone who has used Unebootin in the past: Can you have more than one "live DVD/CD" on it at once?
I heard he was looking for something else for his (or maybe daughter's?) MBA, though.
He also seems to not like SUSE, specifically their security policy. Saw a rant on G+ a little while ago.
ThatObviousUser
ὠαἴÏÏιÏÏÎ¿Ï Ïαá¿Ï εἶ
"Hey, with gnome-tweak-tool and the dock extension, gnome-3.2 is starting to look almost usable."
Maybe he'll come around eventually. Gnome shell is only going to keep getting better.
I don't get the fixation on docks though.
Maybe he'll come around eventually.
Gnome shell is only going to keep getting better.I don't get the fixation on docks though.
"Hey, with gnome-tweak-tool and the dock extension, gnome-3.2 is starting to look almost usable."
Maybe he'll come around eventually.
I don't get the fixation on docks though.
He'll come around when the Gnome developers come around and don't try to do things "their way or the highway."
Seriously, I don't know why they're so against user customization.
Lol, yea, that's the one. I actually commented on that one.
"Hey, with gnome-tweak-tool and the dock extension, gnome-3.2 is starting to look almost usable."
Maybe he'll come around eventually.
I don't get the fixation on docks though.
Do you use GNOME 3, Andrex?
ThatObviousUser
ὠαἴÏÏιÏÏÎ¿Ï Ïαá¿Ï εἶ
Yeah, have Fedora on my laptop (dual boot) but I don't use it much since I could never figure out how to get Wi-Fi to work. Weird drivers (Latitude E6410)
The Gnome Shell is by far the most customizable of the traditional desktops at least. You can pretty much have it work any way you want.
It's not very customizable... compared to Gnome 2.32.
For example, do something like this: Set up a custom screensaver.
Also in Gnome 2, you could use: clutter, compiz, (and I'm sure other compositing managers, if people made them.) And with those, you could use different window decorators (emerald, etc).
I have to say that I think people are being harsh on Unity and GNOME 3, because they can't fathom that the norm is being changed. Every new GUI is going to be buggy and exotic, or foreign, and yes, the beginning stages are always going to be rough around the edges, but the first birth of any new style of UI is going to be troublesome in areas, and just feel alien.
Without new designs though, we'd be constantly stuck in the past, afraid of innovation, and stifling any creativity that could lend toward great design down the road. The beginning is always the rockiest.
As for me, I haven't tried GNOME 3, but Ubuntu with Unity is my first non-Windows OS, and I have to say that I love it. It's different, but it's new and exciting. I already feel at home, after only a couple months. Sure there are a few bugs and missteps, but it's nice to see that Canonical is making big improvements and listening to valid complaints. 12.04 looks amazing!
yeh, sorry-- that is what I meant. reading that slashdot thread; long compile times are still an issue (albeit probably not as big) as back then. upgrading freebsd 8.2 -> 9.0 took like, 8 - 10 hours or something on my atom330 router.
cool bro.
Eh, besides the big compile time at the beginning (if you're like me and install everything at once) compile time isn't that much of an issue.
The only packages that I have that take a long time to compile are chromium and firefox, (about 40 minutes.) Everything else is pretty quick (maybe under a minute?)
And you usually don't have to upgrade that many packages at once (yay, rolling release), so I probably spend about <5 minutes a day on update related tasks.
ThatObviousUser
ὠαἴÏÏιÏÏÎ¿Ï Ïαá¿Ï εἶ
I really dislike Unity, what I've tried of it, but I fell in love with Gnome 3 instantly. Incredibly fluid an beautiful, and a true step forward in workspace management and merging mouse and touch input.
Gnome 3 is replacing the idea of screensaver with this. Still, if you want you can still easily run your own screensaver with xscreensaver or something. Same with window manager, it's pretty easy to run something else in a Gnome session; it's what Ubuntu does by default for example.
There are dozens of components that make up what is a Gnome release, replacing one or two of them as you see fit is quite easy.
The nice thing about the Shell is that it's incredibly easy to customize, much more so than Gnome 2. Just browse extensions.gnome.org for a bit and see for yourself.
Compiz and its highly modular design is kind of a mess that nobody can fix, and that's why most distros are completely dropping it even as an option.
I seem to remember the snort install taking a while. I love it so much, though. such a beautiful sight. CPAN installs are pretty hot, too.
Gnome 3 is replacing the idea of screensaver with this. Still, if you want you can still easily run your own screensaver with xscreensaver or something. Same with window manager, it's pretty easy to run something else in a Gnome session; it's what Ubuntu does by default for example.
There are dozens of components that make up what is a Gnome release, replacing one or two of them as you see fit is quite easy.
The nice thing about the Shell is that it's incredibly easy to customize, much more so than Gnome 2. Just browse extensions.gnome.org for a bit and see for yourself.
Compiz and its highly modular design is kind of a mess that nobody can fix, and that's why most distros are completely dropping it even as an option.
I was just using compiz as an example. The point is, you had an option between different compositing managers. With gnome-shell, you need to use mutter (which, at least currently, I still find slower than what I would like.)
Btw, the lockscreen isn't really a replacement of a screensaver, because it doesn't even do the primary function of a screensaver (ie, to avoid displaying the same image for long periods of time.) An image retention problem. As for using xscreensaver, yea, you can use that, though, I find it a bit odd that you would have to use that instead of being able to access an option in system settings...
That, and you don't don't seem to be able to set a period for gnome to not turn the display off (i see settings in between 10 minutes and an hour.)
About the extension thing, that's not really what I mean. Users shouldn't have to hunt through extensions to be able to customize the default settings. That is cumbersome and inelegant. I'm talking about mainly the system settings. 'System Settings' in Gnome 3 is very...light.
Snort is a network intrusion thing, right? I think I have a snort plushie.
correct
I have a question about the directories in linux.
I wanted to be able to open any file with Sublime Text 2 using just subl in the terminal so I did a symbolic link to /usr/bin/subl and now it works.
What I'm confused about is what's the difference between that and /usr/local/bin? In the former when I do ls I get lots of options, but in the latter when I do that I only get django-admin.py which I assume was put there when I installed Django.
I wanted to be able to open any file with Sublime Text 2 using just subl in the terminal so I did a symbolic link to /usr/bin/subl and now it works.
What I'm confused about is what's the difference between that and /usr/local/bin? In the former when I do ls I get lots of options, but in the latter when I do that I only get django-admin.py which I assume was put there when I installed Django.
Now, I kind of want to find the plushie. It was kinda cute....
I'm guessing you're running stuff on servers then, right? I'd imagine it would be pretty powerful.
To Massa: I forgot you said something window managers too. As in, Ubuntu uses a different one with Gnome 3 (unity?). I wasn't really talking about though.
Though, I actually think it would be somewhat annoying. I've never tried doing it, though. I haven't used anything with Gnome 3 except for gnome-shell.
I was trying to use lightdm with a gnome3 session recently, actually, and I find it somewhat annoying it to set up.
For anyone with Ubuntu, would you mind posting your /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf ? I'm interested to see what I'm missing since I don't seem to be unlocking the gnome keyring upon login.
I'm kind of confused by this question.
I'm not sure what this program is or whatever, but if you want to call things from /usr/local/bin in your terminal just by name, all you need to do is to put /usr/local/bin in your $PATH.
You can see your path by doing 'echo $PATH'. I'm guessing /usr/local/bin is not in there.
try, 'PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/bin'
And put that in some init file. If you use bash, maybe .bashrc.
Using libmutter directly in the Shell just makes it much easier to implement the things it does. This blog post explains it in more detail if you're interested.
Sure, but the design is simple: either the screen is off, or it's in a useful state. The whole idea of wasting energy to display a screensaver doesn't make sense today, so it's relegated to something only the people who really want it can set up.
Having every possible thing in the system settings panel is not the design philosophy for GNOME, and has not been since this.
You can set any time you want with dconf-editor. Perhaps the offered options in the UI could be better, and that may be worth filling a bug for.
If you want easy access to even more customization options just use gnome-tweak-tool. Offering every single customization option available in the same tool is not a good idea because the options you want are different from everyone else's. The goal instead is to provide a simple interface with good defaults that work well.
doing random shit in linux is fun!
unix directory structure is a clusterfuck. basically, bsd really likes /usr/local/* while linux doesn't like it as much.
I think.
Sublime Text 2 is just some text editor like gedit or TextMate.
I'm just confused on what's the difference between /usr/bin and /usr/local/bin. Cause when I was looking online at doing that linking stuff, some used /usr/bin while others used /usr/local/bin
Thanks for the PATH stuff, didn't know how to check it. It says I have both /usr/bin and /usr/local/bin there so I guess both methods work
I see. I guess I will keep it the way I did it then.doing random shit in linux is fun!
unix directory structure is a clusterfuck. basically, bsd really likes /usr/local/* while linux doesn't like it as much.
I think.
I'm pretty sure I've read that a while ago.
The main point, is that it's dumb. The whole world is going towards modular designs because it makes more sense in the long run. Computers are already like that. CPUs are moving in that direction. Cars. SoCs in phones, etc. The reason they're all moving in that direction is because it's easier to change stuff in the long run. (and also, faster to do.) Tying it to mutter might be a good idea now, but it really does prevent options in the future. I think it's very shortsighted.
I would say, making a unmodular system would be considered bad system engineering in modern times.
That's great, but it's wrong. You automatically assume that a screensaver is a 'useless' state.
And the people who want to set it up, should be able to. From the System Settings. You know, like they can do from just about any desktop environment....
You're missing the point... twice.
1) I'm saying the GNOME design philosophy is wrong.
2) I'm not saying to put everything in there. But common things should be in there.
Just to be clear, what I'm saying is not that it's not possible to change these things, just that they made it inconvenient to do so. Ie, the things I expect should be part of the UI.
Specifically, for this, I rarely see UIs where you can select time to do something where 'Never' is not an option. (I can only name one example, which is in Windows, regarding restarting and updates. I don't think many people like that one.)
Having a simple interface with good defaults is a good thing. Assuming you have good defaults, you don't even need a System Settings for most people.
But, you should also have to know that your 'good defaults' don't suit everybody. Therefore, you should allow them to customize in an easy, user accessible fashion. That should be the reason for 'Systems Settings' to exist. For the people who don't agree with your defaults.
I'm also saying, that the gnome-tweak-tool, shouldn't even have to exist. The fact that it exists just shows the failure of the GNOME developers...
I would say more about that, but I think Linus says it better than I in the post Andrex was talking about.
EDIT: Oh, he said a lot less than what I remember him saying. But more or less, those things in tweak-tool should really be in the standard System Settings...
I mean, what would you imagine people with Gnome 3 do when they have gnome-shell but tweak-tool isn't part of the gnome package in whatever distro they were using? You are basically advocating wasting their time searching for settings that don't exist. (which is not something you want a decent UI to want people to do.)
For the hierarchy question, you can do 'man hier' to read what the different hierarchies are for.
Btw, that probably won't answer your question.
I just looked and /usr/bin and /usr/local/bin seem pretty fuzzy. It was probably less fuzzy a while ago.
BTW, Massa, I apologize if I appear as confrontational or anything. When I care about something, I can use some pretty direct and not-so-nice language.
Btw, that probably won't answer your question.
I just looked and /usr/bin and /usr/local/bin seem pretty fuzzy. It was probably less fuzzy a while ago.
BTW, Massa, I apologize if I appear as confrontational or anything. When I care about something, I can use some pretty direct and not-so-nice language.
/usr/bin - stuff installed by the system (e.g standard included programs and stuff installed through package manager)
/usr/local/bin - software installed by the user
That's how it typically works however a lot of people I know set packages to install in /usr/bin anyways. I never do since I like to keep it separate so that I can easily remove and keep track of what I've installed outside of the package manager.
/usr/local/bin - software installed by the user
That's how it typically works however a lot of people I know set packages to install in /usr/bin anyways. I never do since I like to keep it separate so that I can easily remove and keep track of what I've installed outside of the package manager.
Making everything as independent as possible as a blanket statement is bad engineering (for a great example check out the Hurd kernel). With composited/accelerated window managers it makes things a lot simpler and easier to code if you tie the window manager with your window management shell/panel, and it makes it possible to do things that weren't before. It's the reason Unity is a compiz plugin and is tied to compiz, and gnome-shell uses mutter as a library and is coded for that as well.
Notice that the code is still modular, simple and easy to understand (as best as an X11 wm can be), with mutter and gnome-shell living in separate modules and doing different things. The difference is that instead of overengineering an abstraction interface gnome-shell is coded directly to mutter.
Compiz is a case of bad engineering and why it's such a sad mess today.
It is useless by definition, it's a screensaver! Why do you want to waste energy with one, specially on a tablet or laptop?
You still can if you want, btw. It's just not something the majority of people would want, and they won't be exposed to it in Gnome 3's default interface.
So it's a failure of the Firefox developers that most of the available options are only available in the about:config page, instead of being all presented in the user interface? Or a failure on the Gentoo developers that not all possible rc.conf variables were preset in that file initially, and you have to add and change as you please?
Making the settings interface bloated with options doesn't make things more customizable. It just makes them harder (imo) or easier (in your opinion) to customize.
Linus Torvalds has called Gnome shit several times. According to him Gnome 2 was "designed for idiots" or some other nonsense. Fact is he's never designed a decent user interface in his life, and he's been a loud mouth critic of both Gnome 2 and KDE before. Don't know why his criticism of Gnome 3 should be looked at any different, he's just a kernel maintainer.
Anyway, to get back to what we were originally discussing: my argument is that Gnome 3 is not less customizable. You're arguing a separate point, that it's more difficult to customize due to some options being available only in advanced configuration tools. I also don't agree with you on that one, but as I understand it you want different things from a UI than what the Gnome project is trying to offer.
Alright that makes sense. Thanks
Just changed it back to /usr/local/bin to keep track of stuff I install.
Does anyone know the answer to my previous question?
1) If you want to compare this to kernels, you could look at the Linux kernel. Sure, the core functions are integrated tightly with eachother, but everything that isn't a core function can be compiled as a module and be separate. I would be curious to see how big the Linux kernel is when you take out of the modules. Since (AFAIK), a large portion of the kernel is composed of drivers (which a lot seemed to be able to be compiled as modules), I would guess that it's not so big. But imagine if Linux wasn't modular at all? Like, if someone wanted, they couldn't code up their own kernel module on their system and test it right away? I bet the driver development would be pretty slow...
Sure, it's simpler to make these things integrated, but what if it turns out that mutter itself isn't scalable to future workloads and the Gnome developers needed to switch to something else? What will they do then?
This is more about efficiency in the future than efficiency now. Which is why hardware companies are moving toward this model, because everything is getting more complex. Hardware and software. Which is why they need to plan ahead.
As far as doing things that weren't possible before... I'm not seeing it...
Uhm, do you know what the purpose of a screensaver is? It's for image-retention issues. By having a purpose, it, by definition, cannot be useless.
You could say "if the display turns off, you won't have image-retention issues'. But that's not truly the case. There are probably parts of your desktop that doesn't really move (for example, maybe conky or your system bar), you could have an image retention problem in those areas. It's more noticeable if you use your monitor for multiple things (games, or wtv) or if you have multiple OS.
Probably happens when your LCD monitor is older too.
There are probably other reasons why one would want a screensaver.
You're changing my argument. I never said *everything*. Let's use firefox for example. You can customize your fonts in the preferences page. Wouldn't you think it to be ridiculous to have to go to about:config for something like that?
Or how about firefox sync? I would be willing to guess that most people have no use for Firefox Sync. Should that be moved to about:config?
The thing is, most people probably never touch 'preferences' in Firefox. They would be crazy to remove them, though. The existence of 'preferences' doesn't hurt the regular users and the removal of 'preferences' hurts the users that use them.
And? His criticsims of Gnome 3 are valid. Why shouldn't people pay attention to it?
Whether something is really cumbersome to customize or not customizeable at all, is there any practical difference?
If the end result is that a user who would want to customize ends up not customizing at all, does it matter?
ComputerMKII
Banned
Is such a thing even possible?
Unetbootin isn't designed to do it but it's possible to use it for that purpose but it does take a bit of work. The basic method is:
1. Use unetbootin to put something on the stick
2. make a copy of the syslinux config
3. move files related to the distro to a subfolder and change the config to reflect the new location
4. put something else on the stick
5. copy the relevant syslinux config section to the original config file from step 2
6. move files you just put on the stick to a new subdirectory and as before change the syslinux config to reflect it
You basically repeat 4, 5, and 6 for all the stuff you want to add. After that you simply replace the syslinux config with the one you've been modifying throughout the steps. There are easier ways of creating a multiboot usb stick such as using grub2. You can definitely find more detailed instructions on the web.
Alright, thanks angelfly.
Things are modular now. The gnome-shell maintainer thinks it would be a week's job to port gnome-shell to the wayland compositor for example. What you're arguing against is the gnome-shell not using an abstraction layer to work on top of *any* window manager. That could probably be done but it would make the shell itself a lot more complex for very little benefit.
That's exactly how things are done in Linux. Lots of modules, yes, but they're all very closely working together and if you break one you need to rework a lot of things. It's why Linux doesn't provide a stable ABI or API and external modules like nVidia's have to be recompiled for each different kernel.
For example, the very nice gTile extension would be significantly harder to implement if gnome-shell wasn't using mutter directly.
I honestly haven't used a screen that needed a screensaver in over a decade. My phone, handhelds, tablet and TV don't have one. In any case I did some searching and apparently the plan is to provide themed locked screens once it gets implemented in gnome-shell instead of the old gnome-screensaver like it is now, it's just something that needs someone to step up and do the work at the moment.
Right, but nobody is removing the ability to customize your environment or change your preferences in either Gnome or Firefox.
If you remember in Gnome 2 there were two different menus for changing settings (Preferences and Administration) and those two were small and simple in Gnome 2.0, and also missing key features. But by 2.32 they had grown to the point where the Preferences menu wouldn't even fit on my screen without scrolling. Both Canonical and Red Hat ran usability tests and people were completely lost when changing even *basic* settings, like the desktop background. It was a complete mess. Here's an example.
There's no magical formula. Obviously making every single preference anyone could think of available in the default control panel would be a mess, so designers have to think hard about what should be exposed in the UI and what shouldn't. I think it's more important to have a default where anyone can go in and change their basic settings, like desktop background or Google account information.
I'd also like to point out that a significant amount of work was put into extensions.gnome.org. Just like Firefox only provides a common feature set, so does Gnome Shell. What's great about Firefox is that you can have it do pretty much anything *you* want it to do, which is different for everyone, and that's the same path Gnome 3's extensions are going. So the gTile extension I mentioned above is crucial for me when I'm at work on a multi-monitor setup, but completely useless for my dad who runs Gnome on a 1024x600 netbook. This is why I'm saying Gnome 3 is far more customizable than Gnome 2.32 was, it's simply built on technology that allows for very easy and quick changes, and which ones you'll want will be different for each person. Most will probably stick to defaults, just as it happens in Firefox.
I'm not saying they shouldn't, I just don't get why some people put so much weight into what he thinks about UI or what he uses as a distribution for example. To me he's just a hacker like a lot of other people, and while he made a lot of noise about Gnome 2 being "for idiots" or "designed by nazis" quite a few years ago he was still using it all this time apparently; and now he's already done the same with Gnome 3, and then just a few weeks later revealed he was back using it again. It's just a lot of noise over nothing, all over again. In any case, I can't wait to see how he insults the people making Gnome when version 4 comes out!
ThatObviousUser
ὠαἴÏÏιÏÏÎ¿Ï Ïαá¿Ï εἶ
Anyone try/using Cinnamon?
ComputerMKII
Banned
I tried, didn't like it. Now I'm mainly using GNOME Classic, but I'm installing GNOME 3.4 right now. I hope it's good.
ThatObviousUser
ὠαἴÏÏιÏÏÎ¿Ï Ïαá¿Ï εἶ
Let me know your impressions, and specifically what you don't like about 3.4 (and Gnome shell in general.) I'm really curious about it, won't get to try it until the next version of Fedora.
I'm pretty sure it only offers an alternative in Additional Drivers. You then 'activate' it from there. It works on Mint(except the debian based versions) so if you have that on your USB give it a try there first.
I thought I'd miss customisation in Gnome more than I do now, a year later. If I didn't like Adwaita I'd probably still would.
But, eh, I can see the point of the developers believing in their design enough to give the option of changing it only to advanced users - who will have no problem installing Tweak Tool.
But, eh, I can see the point of the developers believing in their design enough to give the option of changing it only to advanced users - who will have no problem installing Tweak Tool.