so, uh... i wanna go back to linux

[johnny]

a while ago, it got to the point on my ubuntu setup that a la carte wouldn't even open anymore. something was very wrong with it. i guess i should have ran it from a terminal to see the errors it sent back, but it didn't occur to me at the time.

but the kde menu editor works pretty nicely. my only complaint was that it seemed to.. re-order some of my menus when i saved them, without asking me. but oh well, everything that i wanted was there, at least.

[johnny]

so i'm giving swiftfox a try, but to be honest, i'm not noticing a huge difference between it and firefox. i've actually been using opera mostly, lately. it's come a looooooong way.
deb packages for ubuntu: http://www.getswiftfox.com/ubuntu.htm

[raublekick]

i am really skeptical of how good swiftfox is. is it just an architecture optimized build of firefox and nothing else? i've used the 686 kernel in ubuntu and never really saw too much improvement, although people do claim that full 686 distros are much snappier. but i doubt that one package, especially one that's pretty intense anyways, is gonna get all that much better.

i really need to get my middle mouse button working. i think about it everytime i sit in front of my computer but i never actually do it. i think i said this before. deja vu.

[johnny]

wheel mouse? i dunno, my middle button/wheel has always worked fine.

[raublekick]

really? it's just a logitech wheelmouse, nothing special. the wheel works, but the middle click doesn't. i've fixed it before, i'm just lazy.

[johnny]

have you accidentally set the xorg.conf setting "Emulate3Buttons" to yes? 'cause that might confuse it?

[raublekick]

it's just set to the whatever it detected when i installed.

[johnny]

ah, bizarre. 'cause so is mine, and i have a generic logitech wheel mouse too. odd that mine would work perfectly, and yours doesn't.

i'm not sure i could live without the handy middle-button-to-paste-highlighted-text feature.

[johnny]

so i've pretty much decided that xfce is my window manager of choice. it's got the best balance of lightness and speed, and features and useability. i think i might install arch linux, with xfce. i hear arch is quite fast.

[raublekick]

i installed arch but couldn't get networking working. i spend a few hours getting help on their IRC channel, and after trying several things, the conclusion of everyone who helped me, and myself, was "i dunno, i mean, everything looks fine, it should work"

i'd really like to try to get it working again sometime, but that might not be too easy with my laptop. plus it's pretty plain. no arch-desktop package, just straight up plain gnome, kde, xfce, or whatever.

[johnny]

i ended up installing arch. it went pretty smoothly, and it's working nicely, but there are some configurations i had to do which i think ought to be done automagically (though i guess i did learn a thing or two, in doing those configurations on my own). and it is pretty speedy. finely tuned!

i don't really like pacman, though.. i'd prefer portage, or even aptitude.

[raublekick]

from what i used of pacman, i really liked it. but asking for arch to do things automagically is like asking debian to speed up their development process, it's just not how it gets done in that distro.

so, thank the fuck god for live CDs. last night i tried to get my second monitor working really quick so i could try to play a DVD on it. well, after i restarted, X wouldn't launch... it would load up all the boot up stuff like normal, and then when it would get to where it should switch to the logon screen, it just stuck at the bootspash image with a 0 progress bar and no info at the bottom. i tried commenting out some stuff in xorg.conf myself, but i wasn't sure exactly what the second monitor settings added and if they added stuff anywhere else. anyways, booted up the live CD, mounted my kubuntu partition, copied xorg.conf from the live CD to my hard drive, rebooted, and like magic i was right back to where i was before i messed around with it.

i think i am gonna work on a back up script in my spare time that will be something like 'backup -Xfmh ~ /my/target/location' where X determines if it should back up xorg.conf, f for fstab, m for the modprobe info (i have to blacklist my internal soundcard), and h for home directory. i might make it more complex because i don't always want all of the hidden .whatever folders copied. well, i guess it's good to do regardless, but the most important is my mail folder.

[johnny]

yea, xorg.conf can be pretty touchy. one wrong word, and..! yikes.

i guess pacman is okay, but portage is still a zillion times better. i just don't know whether to stay with arch, or go back to gentoo, on this machine. ubuntu goes on my laptop because so far it's been the only distro able to figure out my laptop's hardware straight away. it's all pretty standard shit, but attempting to install other distros has been nothing but problematic. suse was close, but it was still a pain to get x working correctly. and i wasn't a huge fan of suse, though it did have it's strong points. but that was suse9. maybe (open)suse10 is an improvement? i haven't bothered to investigate that.

[raublekick]

so johnny, what do you think of all these distros moving over to Gnome now? Suse used to be heavily KDE, and now opensuse is Gnome. Mandriva used to be KDE, now it's Gnome... ok that's only two... But still, it's now the case that almost all of the big name distros are Gnome based.

my Gnome vs KDE struggle is that i like the concepts and beliefs of Gnome so much more, but KDE just does things much better in the long run.

[johnny]

i think it would be have been better if some of those distros were gnome-based several years earlier, 'cause up until now-ish i think gnome has been the better window manager, overall. but now with kde4 on the way, i'm not sure what to think; kde4 is looking pretty nice.

but i also think that gnome is friendlier to new linux users, which counts for quite a bit.

[raublekick]

yeah i agree. but i also think gnome helps promote the idea that linux isn't powerful. i dunno, it's hard to explain, but gnome is really simple, and that can hurt it. Windows isn't simple, but most everyone can manage that. My feeling has always been that Linux is just a different, but by no means harder, way of using your computer. The only reason it is hard at first is because it is different. If you went from using Linux all your life to suddenly wanting to try Windows, I think Windows would be the one that is too hard. so then people use Gnome and it is way simpler than Windows, and that can come off as not as useful (although in some respects it is true).

last year we were working on a program in the linux lab at school, and my one friend stretched all of the desktop icons to their full size and was like "look, MyFirstLinux!" wow, did it ever look like just some toy computer.

KDE4 should be the bees knees, though.

[johnny]

i wouldn't necessarily say that gnome helps promote the idea that linux isn't powerful. but even if the simplicity of gnome does make linux seem less powerful to some people, i'm not sure that its much of a problem. the averge computer user doesn't need linux to be powerful, perse; they just need it work, so they can.. browse the internet, email, work with open office / koffice / abiword, maybe play some games every now and then, etc.

[raublekick]

oh yeah i completely agree. the average computer user only needs the basic functions of an e-machine, but still things like flash and even photoshop (despite the gimp covering almost all needs of the average computer user) keep people thinking 'what? this sucks!"


speaking of koffice, have you tried it out? i never touched it because i know how to use openoffice pretty well, and it never seemed like koffice would be any better for me.

[johnny]

i used koffice a bit, but that was a few versions ago. it was okay, and i'm sure it's better now. i'm not too crazy about openoffice anymore, though, so i just stick with abiword. and i guess if i had to do spreadsheets i'd probably use gnumeric.

[raublekick]

hey johnny, i know you get a boner over XFCE, so maybe you will like DreamLinux, they seem to have a really awesome XFCE setup. i think i might test out the live CD sometime.

http://www.dreamlinux.com.br/english/index.html