Oh, please, please, COME ON Ubuntu development people!

Thu Apr 21 00:41:04 UTC 2011

On 21 April 2011 01:23, chris <chevhq at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, 2011-04-21 at 01:06 +0100, Liam Proven wrote:
>> On 21 April 2011 00:45, chris <chevhq at gmail.com> wrote:
>> > On Wed, 2011-04-20 at 23:19 +0100, Liam Proven wrote:
>> >> On 16 April 2011 20:52, chris <chevhq at gmail.com> wrote:
>> >>
>> >> > Don't you think it would be nice to move this to sounder.  I am having
>> >> > trouble getting my wheelchair over here.
>> >> >  Picks up ear trumpet and waves peevishly at nurse aid to push in
>> >> > required direction..............  mumbling about his first z80 processor
>> >>
>> >> We can't. The Powers that Be have just shut it down.
>> >>
>> > True, which makes me wonder about the whole Ubuntu/Canonical thing.
>> > Fortunately as you know well, there are other distros, I am at the
>> > moment playing with PCLinux OS, and Denbian stable.  On my production
>> > machine I am switching to Mint 10.04.2 for the mean time whilst I see
>> > what happens with Canonical.
>>
>> Indeed.
>>
>> I've been looking into what Clem Lefebvre is planning for Mint 11.
>> Apparently, it will be based on GNOME 3, but with the traditional
>> panel layout - no GNOME Shell. I didn't even realise this was
>> possible, TBH. That certainly sounds like it will be worth a look for
>> those who like neither Unity nor the GNOME Shell, or whose hardware
>> isn't up to running them in their full composited glory.
>>
>> There is also now a second Debian-based Mint, to go with LMDE, the
>> Linux Mint Debian Edition, which currently uses a GNOME 2-based
>> desktop. There is now Linux Mint Xfce 201104 as well, which like LMDE
>> is also based directly off Debian and not Ubuntu.
>>
>> There are more options opening up for people who wish to leave Ubuntu,
>> Unity and GNOME 3 but keep the Debian base and the power of apt-get
>> and dpkg.
>>
>> I'm not planning to decamp just yet myself. I'm intrigued by Unity. I
>> am playing with it in a VM and whereas I don't find it an obvious or
>> intuitive environment, I will certainly give it a try on native
>> hardware when it's released. I very much like Ubuntu's ease of use,
>> polish, integration, the ready availability of drivers and so on - all
>> things which it does much better than Debian. However, it seems to be
>> more and more apparent to me that Ubuntu is not a democracy and we
>> users must just take what we're given and not grumble about it.
>> Otherwise you'll suddenly find that your desktop has changed
>> radically, or your favourite mailing list is shut down. :¬(
>>
> Thanks for the Information Liam.  I did not realise that Mint was this
> active.  Not having broadband I have to rely on dialup. I( I live in way
> rural NZ)
> My experiences with Ubuntu over their removal of dialup from the
> standard cd distribution was interesting to say the least.

I bet!

If you are in commutable distance from somewhere with broadband and an
Internet café, I'd recommend investing in a couple of 8GB or 12GB USB
thumbdrives. You can fit several downloaded ISO images on to one of
them to take home with you, and if you have a little 1GB one, you can
use Unetbootin (or the Ubuntu Startup Disk creator tool) to make a
flash drive bootable, so that you can try out different distros
without burning CDs. So long as your PC can boot from USB, of course.

I used to download various Linux distros on dialup back around the
late 1990s and turn of the century. It typically took a couple of
days. At least with an old PC running Smoothwall acting as a router, I
could use a different computer and get my email and surf a bit (just
*very* slowly) while I was downloading.

A download manager that supports resuming a broken download is also a
big help. These days I use DownThemAll for Firefox, which I think does
this. Works great on Linux. http://www.downthemall.net/

If it's an option, you should investigate if you can get ISDN. At a
guaranteed 64kbps, it's substantially quicker than plain dialup (where
if you get 30-40kbps, you're doing well) and if you have a suitable
router, you can "aggregate" two channels into a single 128kbps link.
Pretty much any ISP that supports 56K modems will support ISDN dialup
as well, because actually 56K requires the ISP's end to be an ISDN
device, not a POTS modem.

Looks like TelecomNZ does offer it:
http://www.telecom.co.nz/content/0,8748,100173-204156,00.html

> It was at that point I decided other distros were worth investigating.
>
> I had used redhat way back when, but like you initially found Ubuntu to
> be polished etc.  Started using it about version 4 something from
> memory.

IIRC, Ubuntu 4.10 was the very first version. That's when I started,
too, migrating across from SUSE 9.something.

> Still have one old clunker toddling along with 6.04, and my
> wife will not move from her old IBM running 8.04.

6.06? That's pretty ancient! Going out of support any day now, too.
You can upgrade from that straight to 8.04 - if you download the Hardy
"alternate CD", you can upgrade from CD without Internet access.

By the same token, if the machine is reasonably recent, you can
upgrade from 8.04 straight to 10.04 using the Lucid alternate CD, too.
I did this on a server recently and it worked a treat. Again, no
Internet access required.

8.04 to 10.04 is not a huge wrench, but the newer version is a lot
quicker to boot up and shut down, among other things. It's worth
doing.

> Have not looked at 11.04 yet, as I am waiting for the rc which a
> university friend of mine will download and post to me.  So that will be
> my first look at Unity.  Not feeling too encouraged at the moment I
> confess.

I believe there isn't going to be an RC for it, just a 2nd beta
version. Given that it's a matter of weeks, I'd just wait for the
final thing.

I have a few mates in Aotearoa, in the big cities, e.g. Wellington -
if you need some locals to post you CDs, by the way, I can probably
hook you up. :¬) Let me know.

> Have registered with the url you sent me.

Good stuff!

-- 
Liam Proven • Info & profile: http://www.google.com/profiles/lproven
Email: lproven at cix.co.uk • GMail/GoogleTalk/Orkut: lproven at gmail.com
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