Ubuntu on Veronica Mars

[Phillip Pare]

I am busy returning to Windows after having  become rather  frustrated 
with the way that Ubuntu and Open Office is working at the moment.

Indeed a good attempt has been made to break Microsoft's monopoly on the 
software market, but the feel of Ubuntu and Open Office is still 
primitive compared to what one gets in MS Word and MS Excel. The loading 
and saving of documents in Open Office is unaccepably long. Some good  
R&D  is going to be necessary to bring these times into line with what 
one had come to expect from MS Word and MS Excel

I have tried to put Ubuntu onto 4 different machines, some old and some 
new. I have run into numerous problems with permissions, not being able 
to access a serial mouse, not being able to change the resolution of the 
screen, having Open Office not rendering the fonts correctly on 
documents imported for Microsoft Word. The dual boot has been an 
absolute nightmare as I have had to try and come up to speed with MBR 
records, GRUB commands, grub config files, Windows boot config 
files,menu.lst files etc. Just when you think that everything is OK, 
Windows goes and rewrites your MBR and one has to start from scratch 
again. I eventually found an image from which I could create a GRUB 
start up floppy, but then there are so many different options that are 
required in terms of the locations of the boot and root directories on 
the hard drive.

Even trying to get the apget applications working became difficult as 
one has to negotiate the various routes necessary to get through our 
institutions firewall and proxy servers.

Not all the advice that one reads in the forums work because there is so 
little uniformity as regard the hardware that different people are 
using. Every time one has to spend many hours trying to adapt the advice 
for ones own particular hardware configuration.

When printers have been installed not all programs have been able to 
access the printer. One has had to go and enter manually commands like 
lpr -p printer name etc. I have had to read through well over a hunderd 
pages of howto instructions in order to get config files working, Java 
loaded, the latest version of open office converted from an  RMS format 
to debian format package etc. I am tired, my core business lags behing 
and I could have bought quite a number of copies of MS Software if I 
consider the value of the time that I have spent trying to get Ubuntu to 
do what is commonly done in Windows.

In our institution there is limited support for Linux compared to what 
is available for Windows and so again if one attempts the Linux root one 
is on ones own in terms of resoling the plethora of problems that arise.

Regards

Phillip

One seems to have to be a total expert to rectify the
Scott James Remnant wrote:

>On Thu, 2005-04-14 at 11:02 -0700, Matt Zimmerman wrote:
>
>  
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>>On Thu, Apr 14, 2005 at 09:59:05AM -0700, Paul Jones wrote:
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>>>   Just thought that you should know that Ubuntu was mentioned on last
>>>night's episode of Veronica Mars (ep 118 - Weapons of Class
>>>Destruction). They even talk about it for a little bit:
>>>      
>>>
>>If only they could learn to pronounce it. ;-)
>>
>>    
>>
>Or which version of GNOME we shipped in warty ...
>
>Scott
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>