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Linux Distro Noob thread of Linux noobs

G

GameplayWhore

Member
peakish said:
Well they've "removed" a lot of options that have been standard in most DE's since ever. "Removed" as in from the default control panel, everything can be changed through gconf and various frontends have appeared. Plus they have extension support and even a website set up to automatically install and uninstall them from web browsers. It's quite customisable if you want to. But in a standard set up, they are very much pushing their idea of a desktop environment.
Click to expand...

Hm. Well, as soon as gnome-shell is at 3.4 on Archlinux, I'll give it a look see. It's frustrating, because this distro is usuall pretty fast with stuff like that.
 
I

Izick

Member
I actually liked Ubuntu's default text font as well. I installed MSTFonts so that Google Earth would look right, and I've just let it be since then. It still looks weird, but I'm used to it now.

My only real gripe is the text on the Global Menu bar, when using the radiance theme (white background/black text) looks pretty awful.
 
H

Hieberrr

Member
zoku88 said:
Having not used a release version of Unity, I wouldn't know, but I would say it's all of a matter of perspective.

Some parts of Ubuntu itself always felt not very customizable to me, though maybe that's just my impression.

But my impression is that Canonical was always trying to streamline things with Ubuntu.

EDIT: What I'm trying to say is, I have no clue because how customizable something is usually not clearly described.


The font... I actually kind of like it >///< I downloaded it for my system...

Does Ubuntu no longer allow you to change the font?
Click to expand...


Pctx said:
You ever see the Roboto font in Unity? I rather liked it. In terms of shells, GNOME 3 is really the way to go.
Click to expand...

The font can still be changed:) I ended up keeping it, but making it a tad smaller using MyUnity (I can't use terminal to save my life). The only thing that still bothers me is that the space between letter seems really big. It's really noticeable when you open up your browser and look at the bookmarks in your bookmark bar.

But oh well, I'm happy with it :p I ended up deleting my old Ubuntu partition (100GB) and reinstalling it on a 34GB partition. Good stuff (although I still have it set to auto boot into W7).

I also noticed that the font is VERY close to the OS X system font. I kid you not. Shit is virtually identical :lol
 
I

Izick

Member
Okay, fuck it. I'm getting rid of the MS core fonts.

How come when I try to remove it (through software center) it warns me that I must remove Opera as well?
 
T

ThatObviousUser

ὁ αἴσχιστος παῖς εἶ
So wait, there's at least three of us Gnome 3 lovers in this thread? Sugoi!

I counted Pctx twice. :p
 
G

GameplayWhore

Member
Izick said:
Okay, fuck it. I'm getting rid of the MS core fonts.

How come when I try to remove it (through software center) it warns me that I must remove Opera as well?
Click to expand...

That's really weird. In the three distros I have at my disposal here (opensuse 11.3, archlinux and ubuntu 9.04), none have that particular dependency chain.

First off, are you sure it's asking to remove "opera" or "opera-gtk"? The latter is just the package that lets opera interface with gtk's terrible* file dialog and likely other items (such as the fonts, perhaps?).

Try to remove the fonts, allow it to remove opera, then try reinstalling opera. If it still seems to require the fonts, then you can download a deb file directly from opera.com and install it that way. Note that removing opera will not delete your personal settings. Also, if that doesn't install without trying to install the ms core fonts, then look for a package (in repositories or again directly from the makers themselves) called "opera-next", which is a prerelease of an upcoming version.




* OHO, hark how casually he lets his biases show!
 
G

GameplayWhore

Member
Flying_Phoenix said:
Somebody told me masochism is fun.

So where do I start?
Click to expand...

Your road to pain begins here.

They explain everything in agonizing detail, but if you follow the steps precisely, it should work wonderfully. The only thing they need some work on explaining, I think, is getting the Arch User Repository working, since that uses not-officially-supported packages that you have to handle yourself.


edit: I really, really like archlinux but am exaggerating the difficulties to make it clear that there will be sweaty parts
 
F

Flying_Phoenix

Banned
GameplayWhore said:
Your road to pain begins here.

They explain everything in agonizing detail, but if you follow the steps precisely, it should work wonderfully. The only thing they need some work on explaining, I think, is getting the Arch User Repository working, since that uses not-officially-supported packages that you have to handle yourself.


edit: I really, really like archlinux but am exaggerating the difficulties to make it clear that there will be sweaty parts
Click to expand...
I have an intel dual core 64-bit laptop. Which do I download Core or Net?
 
V

Vanillalite

Ask me about the GAF Notebook
Work on the Ubuntu 12.04 Precise Pangolin |OT| has officially begun. My plan is to have it up by Monday morning, but I make no promises other than I'll have it out by Wed sometime at the very latest. I want it up at least a day before the official release!

I know everyone in here seems to be moving away from Ubuntu, but I figured I'd make the topic anyways especially since we get a lot of people that don't frequent this thread in the Ubuntu |OT|s. Plus it's the newest LTS release so we have to have a topic on that! :p
 
G

GameplayWhore

Member
Flying_Phoenix said:
I have an intel dual core 64-bit laptop. Which do I download Core or Net?
Click to expand...

Doesn't matter. As it says in that section of the documentation, the "Core" is a disc that has all the packages needed for an initial install, while the "Netinstall" only has enough to contact the archlinux servers and start downloading the packages for the install. Basically it's just whether you want to do an install all from the files on disc or you want to do it with freshly downladed files.

I would get the Core Image, because it'll let you do a net install anyway, if you wanted that. The safest download would be Core Image, Dual Architecture. That'd also be the biggest download, so 56K warning here! ;)

edit: itxaka is much more eloquent about this
 
V

Vanillalite

Ask me about the GAF Notebook
itxaka said:
Core has all the packages needed for a normal install, net downloads them from the internet.
Click to expand...

ZOMG it's ixaka! You haven't posted in this thread in a while, and I thought we had lost one if not my overall favorite Linux poster on GAF! I <3 u!
 
I

itxaka

Defeatist
Brettison said:
ZOMG it's ixaka! You haven't posted in this thread in a while, and I thought we had lost one if not my overall favorite Linux poster on GAF! I <3 u!
Click to expand...

I know I know! Too much time working with HP-UX, AIX and Solaris servers made me forget a bit about linux :D

Rocking ubuntu 12.04 since the first alpha, you are gonna be impressed. Most stable alpha/beta ever. And unity is starting to become useful! :p
 
F

Flying_Phoenix

Banned
itxaka said:
I know I know! Too much time working with HP-UX, AIX and Solaris servers made me forget a bit about linux :D

Rocking ubuntu 12.04 since the first alpha, you are gonna be impressed. Most stable alpha/beta ever. And unity is starting to become useful! :p
Click to expand...

I think I'll wait until 4.26 to decide if I'm going to make the switch or not then.
 
G

GameplayWhore

Member
nan0 said:
Which gets a lot less painless if you use an AUR helper like packer.
Click to expand...

I use yaourt. It's pretty amazing*. Nonetheless, whether you use yaourt or packer, the tool doesn't exist in the default repositories, and you have to do extra legwork to get them installed.


* except for the terrible name.


edit: Hm, interesting. I also have packer installed, but it's somehow a newer version than what's available on AUR. How the hell did that happen?!?
 
I

Izick

Member
Took your advice, Gameplay, and I just uninstalled it. It said Opera, not Opera-GTK, but I just checked, and Opera is still there and runs just like it did before. I don't even know anymore. XD
 
N

nan0

Member
GameplayWhore said:
I use yaourt. It's pretty amazing*. Nonetheless, whether you use yaourt or packer, the tool doesn't exist in the default repositories, and you have to do extra legwork to get them installed.
Click to expand...

Yep, you have manually go through that AUR install process once to install it. I think I only did it twice, the first time to install clyde (which was abandoned and then killed by some kernel update) and the second time when I switched to packer.
 
G

GameplayWhore

Member
nan0 said:
Yep, you have manually go through that AUR install process once to install it. I think I only did it twice, the first time to install clyde (which was abandoned and then killed by some kernel update) and the second time when I switched to packer.
Click to expand...

Yeah, for Archlinux noobs:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Arch_User_Repository
After doing the initial install, go to the above URL and use it as a guide to install either "yaourt" or "packer". Both of these apps will automatically make future AUR (which dramatically increases the number of apps you can install and does it in a Gentoo-esque autodownload and compile source code manner) apps that you wish to install, and the syntax is identical to that of pacman, and both apps (well, at least yaourt, probably also packer) also calls pacman automatically to install regular apps, so you never actually need to directly use pacman unless something weird goes wrong with system updates*.


* this will happen.
 
G

GameplayWhore

Member
By the way, anybody use udisks here? It's a command line for doing user-based mounts using the same interface that your graphical file manager uses to mount and unmount stuff, so it doesn't require root access like the "mount" and "umount" commands.

I made a script called "label" in my "~/bin" and then symlinked "ulabel" to it:

Code: 
#!/usr/bin/env bash

while [[ "$#" > "0" ]]; do
 if [[ "${0##*/}" == "ulabel" ]]; then 
  udisks --unmount "/dev/disk/by-label/${1}"
 else 
  udisks --mount "/dev/disk/by-label/${1}"
  fi
 shift
 done

That way, if you've given any of your external drives labels (mine are "voltron" and "optimus"), you can just type "label <disklabel>" to mount it and "ulabel <disklabel>" to unmount it.

I thought this might be useful for some. It was not obvious to me until I worked out exactly what udisks was for, and now I use this custom command all the time.
 
A

angelfly

Member
I do it the lazy way. I know I'm never going to have more than 4 external drives connected so I just have sdf-sdi setup up in fstab with the first partition to be user mountable to /mnt/usb1-/mnt/usb4.
 
V

Vanillalite

Ask me about the GAF Notebook
Izick said:
So Brettison, are you including an "upgrading for dummies"-esque guide for the 12.04 OT?
Click to expand...

It'll be pretty much like the 11.10 topic just replaced with 12.04 info. 11.10 seemed pretty solid to me over my previous efforts, but if you guys/gals see anything else that you want added after relooking at the 11.10 topic let me know.

I'm behind on things (slack on my part), and it's about half way done. I'll get it done by Wed for sure though! :p
 
Z

zoku88

Member
Flying_Phoenix said:
Come on guys. I want to stop my porn from popping up.
Click to expand...

Does Unity use the tracker-miner-fs thing like Gnome 3 does?

If so, maybe you could just stop those files from being indexed in the first place.

Try this command

tracker-preferences

And go to the exclusion tab,

if this command exists.
 
MrCunningham

MrCunningham

Member
Pctx said:
Why would someone need to customize GNOME 3? It's perfect! :)
Click to expand...
For those who want a more customizable version of Gnome Shell, I suggest installing the Cinnamon Shell. I really love Cinnamon 1.4, you can customize it to emulate the old Gnome 2 desktop incredibly well. It's still early in development but it is surprisingly stable. And there's an OK selection of applets for it. It really fixes a lot of complaints I had with the Gnome Shell.

Though I haven't upgraded to Gnome shell 3.4, so maybe things have improved.
 
F

Flying_Phoenix

Banned
zoku88 said:
Does Unity use the tracker-miner-fs thing like Gnome 3 does?

If so, maybe you could just stop those files from being indexed in the first place.

Try this command

tracker-preferences

And go to the exclusion tab,

if this command exists.
Click to expand...

It doesn't. It does ask me if I want to install it though.
 
K

-KRS-

Member
Also if you don't want your computer to ever log which files you have recently used, you can remove the file ~/.local/share/recently-used.xbel and replace it with a directory of the same name. I don't know if every application uses this though.

GameplayWhore said:
I use yaourt. It's pretty amazing*. Nonetheless, whether you use yaourt or packer, the tool doesn't exist in the default repositories, and you have to do extra legwork to get them installed.


* except for the terrible name.


edit: Hm, interesting. I also have packer installed, but it's somehow a newer version than what's available on AUR. How the hell did that happen?!?
Click to expand...
Yup I also use yaourt. Though sometimes it can be pretty slow when you first use it and it has to load everything in. Doesn't seem to happen on my server, probably because it doesn't have a ton of installed packages. But sometimes on my laptop it can take up to 30 seconds after entering the command before anything happens. This only happens the first time I use it, after that it seems everything is loaded into active memory. I've tried other wrappers though but I was never as satisfied with their functionality as I was with yaourt. Haven't tried packer though. And the name is actually a french word if I recall correctly.

And yeah I have also wondered about the installed packages showing up as newer than the version on AUR. I have just assumed that perhaps I changed the buildscript when I installed it because a newer version was out but the script was not updated... or something.

Also, yaourt feels very nice to type on a keyboard with the Dvorak layout. :)
Actually, so does pacman. But yaourt just, like, rolls of your fingers.
 
K

-KRS-

Member
Oh I didn't realize the recently-used.xbel trick doesn't work anymore in Ubuntu. Works fine in Arch Linux with Gnome 3.
 
P

Pctx

Banned
Anyone have a good guide or even want to walk me through how to get mod_security setup on Ubuntu 10.04? I want to punch the wall Andy Bernard style after trying all day to get the motherF'er to work and Apache2 is giving me this error:

Code: 
Syntax error on line 3 of /etc/apache2/httpd.conf: 
Cannot load /etc/apache2/modules/mod_security2.so into server: 
/etc/apache2/modules/mod_security2.so: cannot open shared object file: 
No such file or directory

If my server was a person I would be yelling at it.
 
K

-KRS-

Member
I assume you do have mod_security installed? Or is that included with apache? I use lighttpd so I'm not sure. But the error is clearly saying that it can't find the file in that directory. That syntax error is suspicious though.

Here's some sort of guide, though I'm sure you've already read it. http://www.linuxlog.org/?p=135

I would probably look into what's causing that syntax error. See if there's something on or before line 3 in your config that doesn't look right. I don't know apache very well but I assume it wouldn't give a syntax error when it just can't find the file. Input/Output Error perhaps but not syntax error. Or maybe it does but that would be weird.
 
P

Pctx

Banned
synt4x said:
I assume you do have mod_security installed? Or is that included with apache? I use lighttpd so I'm not sure. But the error is clearly saying that it can't find the file in that directory. That syntax error is suspicious though.

Here's some sort of guide, though I'm sure you've already read it. http://www.linuxlog.org/?p=135

I would probably look into what's causing that syntax error. See if there's something on or before line 3 in your config that doesn't look right. I don't know apache very well but I assume it wouldn't give a syntax error when it just can't find the file. Input/Output Error perhaps but not syntax error. Or maybe it does but that would be weird.
Click to expand...

Yes the .conf can't be found which is causing the issue. My problem is there is no documentation on how to get Apache to see that file. My brain is literally fried after all the reading I've dome today.
 
K

-KRS-

Member
Are you sure the path is correct then? Looking at this page, it seems that modules usually go under /usr/lib/httpd/modules. https://www.centos.org/docs/5/html/5.1/Deployment_Guide/s1-apache-addmods.html

You sure it's in /etc/ ? Seems like a weird place to put modules in. Either way, you shouldn't have to configure apache's paths if I'm reading correctly. To load a module you simply use LoadModule <module-name> </path/to/module.so>. So you just define the path right there and it should work.

I still think it might be something wrong with your httpd.conf. Probably something stupidly easy too, like a spelling error or a line that should be uncommented or something. You often don't notice those errors after working on the problem for hours.

Also check that the .so file has the right permissions.

Edit: Also this, from the link:
If the module is provided by a separate package, the line must appear within the modules configuration file in the /etc/httpd/conf.d/ directory.
Click to expand...

Edit: Oh wait, do you mean apache can't find the httpd.conf file?! That seems really bad. :S
 
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