cimorene

Wax and I are cat divorced but we've now switched bedrooms. So I've got the dining room, which is the warmest room in the house now, and Snookums and Tristana can stay glued to the radiator all day and all night. It was getting increasingly difficult to pry them off of it when I had to take them upstairs to bed - after being shut out of the dining room Snookums would go downstairs repeatedly and I'd have to carry him back up. The last night we slept upstairs I had to go downstairs and carry him up three times.

Anubis isn't nearly as fussy. He has been happily sleeping under the duvet with Wax, who is more cold-tolerant than me anyway. And I am happy to not deal with the cold air outside of the bed now, and it's much easier to feed Snookums in the middle of the night... but the mattress in the real bed is nicer and the bed is just overall cozier, I guess. I suppose it evens out well. It wouldn't be fair if literally everything was nicer down here.

Anyway, Wax has the Chromebook upstairs now because she's started watching terrible tv shows on it in bed, which is what she does to destress whereas I binge read fanfiction. The Chromebook is from 2017 I think? Which means the second-newest laptop is from... I guess... 2014? When I was binge-reading this wasn't a problem, but now that I'm trying to get some knitting done the internet keeps failing out and then crashing and you have to reboot to fix it, and of course it doesn't have an optical drive to fall back on. (I may be reduced to watching video files from one of the external hds.) Wax dug out the second-newest full laptop, which is one year older and has an optical drive still, but apparently the newest OS on it doesn't have all the codecs installed and it can't play the DVD we tried to test in it.

I ordered a new laptop to install Linux on (we're probably going to switch to Linux Mint on it and also our desktops going forward, as Ubuntu and all its other downstreams are all currently fucked by a reliance on Snap packages), but it's not here yet because, obviously, packing and shipping is currently at its slowest due to the holiday rush.

Did I mention that it's too warm downstairs for flannel sheets? That's really sad and I am sort of hoping it gets a bit colder still so that I can switch to flannel down here too. That's one of my favorite parts of winter. But it is cool enough to sleep under the weighted duvet at least. On the minus side, the bed (futon) in the dining room is right against the radiator and, as I said, the cats are mostly glued to it. Snookums usually sleeps in my arms for most of the night, but here it's less than half the time. Tristana came and cuddled me twice during the night, but she's stretched out along the radiator the rest of the time.

I had to upgrade because I have had Issues since the last long term support release that I fixed by upgrading to an intermediate release, and the intermediate release's support expired. Actually, though, I was having a problem with it too - web discord and desktop discord both stopped working. The upgrade fixed that. Issues I encountered:

Snap Firefox

All Ubuntu (and Ubuntu variant) Firefoxes are now provided in snap packages, a newer management system that is supposed to make it easier and smoother to update for the developers, something to do with a sandbox, and that they SAY is going to result in faster performance long-term, but currently is slower. Like when they first released 22.04 in April, users were all getting like 15-second launch times when they first clicked the app icon! So. They also made it really hard to work around this and install it the old-fashioned way. And there's a bug that I personally experienced where in fact, Firefox would not launch... at all.

Google suggested I should launch in safe mode and remove extensions because one of them was probably doing it! Nope, safe mode wouldn't launch. Some kind of lib issue.

Google suggested this lib issue was caused by a window manager bug, so I should switch from the default Ubuntu window manager to Wayland. Nope, same problem.

Google suggested I could switch the display driver, GDM3, to Xorg or Nvidia. I don't have an Nvidia card, so - Xorg. Nope! Same problem!

Google suggested I could try to satisfy the mistaken belief of the browser that a lib was missing by manually installing an old package that would contain, I guess, the old names of the lib files or... something, but it the package names were all already installed and they just switched to 'manually installed'.

Someone suggested I could just completely remove the Snap package and install the old-fashioned way and OMGUbuntu provided a tutorial. It worked! Buuuut it's not ideal because the desired behavior is for basically everybody to use the Snap. The manual install thing from OMGUbuntu is actually intended for developers. But it was the only fix that I could get to work, SO... ?

New appearance settings

Ubuntu's default style now comes with a choice of default dark or light and a choice of highlight colors, accessed through a new Appearance tab in the Settings dialogue. As a result, some of the functions previously handled by the Gnome Tweak Tool/Tweaks are now managed there. But some of them aren't: you can't change the system font or icon theme or the style of non-gtk applications from Settings. But every time you open the Appearance tag of Settings... it resets all the other settings you've changed to defaults.

So go to Settings, tweak the dock size/icon size, close it again and all your icons are once again ugly. Reopen Tweaks and reselect icon theme.

Aaaand it's also reset the appearance of the text editor and the command console to defaults every time even though you don't even control those through the Appearance tab (because text editor and command console themes are text and background color, not button color, which is what the GTK theme controls). But nope, gotta reset both of those too.

Everything else is fine now except the things that were my fault, namely, updating my music library - the tags - but trying to load old versions of playlists with the wrong filepaths. I have to manually fix my playlists now, but whatever, I guess.

Wax and I have both been using Ubuntu since 2008 ("Hardy"). Sometimes in the early years when we installed a new system from scratch, the monitor wouldn't even work right until you googled for solutions. But we've never been unable to get everything working before, including SAMBA (local area network filesharing Windows protocol. There are native Unix filesharing methods, but we have never investigated these... although maybe we should start...).

Now in 2022, I'm running Ubuntu 21.10 ("Impish") and Wax is running 21.04 ("Hirsute"), and we BOTH spent several hours trying to get SAMBA to work and eventually gave up after making everything worse. So I just plugged my phone into her computer, then mine, then hers again with a USB cable to share some folders in both directions. 🙃

Possibly we should switch to another variety, but all our attempts to try other varieties in the past have petered out. Debian and Fedora were too much work for me (they're designed not to work out of the box per se). The LXQt and XFCE desktops in Lubuntu and Xubuntu always turned out to lack some key functionality that made us switch back. Gnome currently has the best integration for my Google calendar and other shell extensions like weather, a timer, media controls with hover-and-scrollwheel function, and capslock indicators in the top bar. Ugh... maybe we should try KDE.

For years, the Gnome 3 desktop environment was still very young and unripe, and the little calendar that popped up when you clicked on the time in the top bar was just the current month's date numbers in a grid with the current day highlighted. You could install a calendar program called Evolution (it's older than Gnome 3) and sync it to your phone/external calendar/Google calendar, so your reminders and appointments would go to the computer automatically, and you could get desktop popups and reminders from Evolution, but you couldn't launch Evolution from the calendar. In the last couple of years, the Gnome 3 calendar finally evolved to the point of displaying your schedule and calendar notifications in the calendar popup, automatically (once you go through the Google sign-in)! So you don't need Evolution to get the notifications anymore.

For years, too, I always installed a third-party Gnome shell desktop extension to put the local weather and an icon next to the date and time in my top bar. But now in Ubuntu 21.10 (and hence in next April's new long-term support release as well), this can happen automatically and natively! You download Gnome Weather and Gnome Clocks from the software channels, then put your desired settings in them - location and units in the former, and cities whose world clocks you track in the latter. Then you close them and you never have to open them again - their information appears from then on in the date/time popup!

Funny story, though. When I downloaded Weather, it opened itself for the first time already set to Turku. It must have got this from location services, because the closest the system comes on install is setting the timezone to Helsinki. I opened the settings and changed it to Pargas, and closed it again, and for the past couple of weeks, the Turku weather has been appearing in the popup, but when I click on the weather section of the popup, it opens Weather... which is already set to Pargas. (I've rebooted the system and installed updates several times in between. Not cleared the cache though. It wasn't a big deal.) But I rebooted yesterday and when the computer woke back up, it was saying Pargas in the popup. Okay then!

My software updater (Ubuntu 21.04) told me the other day that I urgently needed to upgrade to the current version because support had ended for the one I was using.

I tried the Upgrade function in the software updater. (The last time I tried that it borked several parts of my system and I had to reinstall from scratch. But the automatic way takes like 10 minutes vs like 2-3 hours if everything goes well with a clean install... so I tried it.)

I rebooted my system and no browsers would launch... at all. Guess it didn't work!

I used waxjism's computer to make an install stick and used that to create a clean install.

~30 minutes later after system reboot, I discovered the clean install... ALSO wouldn't launch any web browsers. The clean install only has one browser though, Firefox, so it's not QUITE as suspicious as the upgraded one's two. I use the software store to install Midori, one of those lightweight browsers, and google how to fix either Firefox or Chrome.

↳I learned that this is an Ubuntu-specific problem - other variants are not having it. Basically Ubuntu and Mozilla agreed, together, to replace the standard Firefox in 21.10 with a "Snap package", which is a new software packaging system for Linux (?) that is renowned for being slow and buggy. Great idea guys! Basically they're using the whole userbase as a beta testing pool because the next release (22.04) is going to be a long term release and they want to make sure it's stable by then because in the long-term I guess they're trying to migrate it to Snap packaging, whatever that is, for good. Anyway there are lots of people installing their OS and finding when they click on the app icon it doesn't launch, and that applies to Chromium too (Chromium is the fully open-source browser that Google uses as the basis for Chrome). Chromium is also now a Snap and it's also not launching for some people, which is why mine didn't work.

So I removed Firefox using the software store to get rid of the Snap package and installed it from the command line, opened it to make sure it worked, then deleted its user profile directory and replaced it with my saved one, and it worked.

But then I discovered I was going to have to start over because on install I accidentally got my two media harddrives mixed up. The names were swapped so all the filepaths were wrong and all my links would be borked, and when I tried to fix it in fstab it didn't fix it in the file browser.

So I reinstalled from scratch again. This time when I went to remove Firefox with the software store, the software store wouldn't launch either. I googled about this using Midori and ultimately couldn't figure it out, but I was able to install gnome-software and it worked, although some of the icons were broken and it looked a little sketchy. The reinstalled Firefox launched as desired, but for some reason replacing the profile directory didn't work this time. I signed into sync and recovered my tabs, but all my extensions and toolbars are gone.

And now it's been a little more than three hours, so I guess my estimate wasn't far off! I'm mostly done now. The theme is all that's left.

Wax and I are both long-term Ubuntu linux users. (We've dabbled in other OSes, not ENTIRELY Ubuntu-based ones - Debian and Fedora have been experimented with - but Ubuntu and Ubuntu variants have been what we've used for most of the time for more than a decade.) So although we are not super linux-literate, we're both intermediate users more or less.

So when I complain that Ubuntu didn't work out of the box, I'm not concerned with my own convenience here: I've installed OSes that weren't expected to do that. My issue is that Ubuntu presents itself publicly, and people continue to introduce it as, the new-to-linux-friendly distro, and even specifically to tout its Working Out of the Box-ness, when in fact it has never reliably worked out of the box (there ARE distros that do! I would start with Linux Mint, if someone isn't familiar with Linux and wants to dip a toe in, though)...

...but yesterday when Wax installed Ubuntu 20.04 it reached new lows, because 20.04 has a bug where, just in general, the software center doesn't open. That's the sole application that you use to install programs! Someone who isn't prepared to google for hacks, comb through threads, and try multiple command-line solutions is gonna be sitting there with no way to install new software on the OS, unless they think to google how to install software directly from the command line instead!

Not only that, apparently the team released an official 'fix' for the bug on Launchpad which also did not fix the issue! Wax had to uninstall and reinstall the program, which changed its name in the list of programs and its package name incidentally (?!?!), before it would work. Mine worked, but I upgraded through the software center from the last release while Wax's OS was so old it was no longer supported and she made a clean install from a usb stick.

I really want to do all that leaving-Google stuff but this admirably detailed article is so long that my executive function just gave up in despair before I even finished reading the first step.

As indicated in my last post, I upgraded basically the whole inside of my PC: new motherboard and processor, new memory, and an SSD. So last night I turned to

waxjism and said,

"Hey, you wanna upgrade the hardware in the media server and try to install one of those headless media server OSes on it together? It'll be fun! It'll be like a date!"

(It's her summer vacation right now.)

Our "media server" is actually just a spare PC built out of the still-working hand-me-down components of our PCs and it has always run a regular Ubuntu-based Linux. There's a keyboard, a monitor, and a mouse attached to the box, although we leave them off 90% of the time and use it over the LAN. I knew about headless OSes for servers of course, but I didn't really realize there were free Linux-based distros designed specifically for the sort of cobbled-together media server we've got, but to be controlled with a web interface so we could actually put this tired old monitor into storage.

I found out about the existence of these distros a couple of weeks ago by accident - I can't remember how. Memorably, the computer-building nerds refer to these as NASes, which stands for Network Attached Storage, and I can't get over that because... Nas already means something and he's one of the 10 greatest hip hop artists of all time, according to most listicle-making judges?

But anyway, we plugged all our media hdds and the old old old old power source into the motherboard just retired from my former PC and set about installing one of these distros. And we immediately ran into complications.

( Read more... )

So eventually, after breaking my install, opening browsers for issues related to the project on both our desktops and Raja the chromebook as well as my phone, booting up the old laptop just to check the USBs were in fact bootable, opening the media server's box twice and mine once, and watching two cats jump down from a shelf and land on Raja's keyboard, we gave up...

... after midnight, though, which made that a very long date. We succeeded in none of our aims, though we learned a fair amount about the confusing world of free NAS distros. We did have fun at the beginning, so it wasn't a failure, per se.

And today we walked to Jimm's PC Store and got a new basic model power source, and Wax insisted on getting a 60-gig SSD as well simply because she wanted to play with one. With these mods in place, we installed openmediavault successfully and got through the stages of setup with no wrinkles so far. Operation over the network is working okay too, and after a few missteps I got the Samba shares working and we're currently moving files around in preparation for some reformatting and creating persistent drive labels with a new bootable stick of gparted.

I thought that for once a distro upgrade had gone entirely seamlessly and I was settling in nicely to Ubuntu 18.04... until I discovered...

Ubuntu 18.04 cannot discover samba hosts.

"@Morbius1: Bionic Beaver can not discover samba hosts - netbios.

[...]Ubuntu 18.04 contains version 4.7.4 of the samba client libraries which brings with it a lot of improvements but it changes one parameter that will cause this forum nothing but grief. It changes the upper default smb dialect that the samba client uses to SMBv3.11 from the earlier default of NT1 (Samba speak for SMBv1).

Conceptually it should not make any difference to host browsing but what that does is disable host browsing (netbios host discovery). If you go to Files>Other Locations>Windows Network this will be the result:smb3-bug.png

The only way out of this is to edit /etc/samba/smb.conf and override the default by adding a line in the [global] section setting it back to the old default[...]."

It can still connect to them, if you know their names, but it can't see them, so you have to either, in the words of the dude above, edit the configuration file back to an old protocol or "connect to it explicitly by that name .. as in ... smb://hostname or use Connect to Server in Nautilus."

The problem only appears when connecting to Windows boxes or older versions of Ubuntu: if all the machines on the LAN were running 18.04 it would work seamlessly, I hear. (

waxjism hasn't got around to upgrading, and our media server is also still on 16.04.) (And I did the fix, but having to manually edit conf files before you can see your file shares no longer qualifies as 'seamless', obviously.)

Unlike the majority of the Ubuntu user population, I preferred the Gnome 3 desktop from the beginning. I'm really attached to it and have gone through a bunch of different distros trying to find one that works correctly in all the ways I care about. I couldn't get everything I needed to work with Debian.

Now

waxjism is running Ubuntu 16.04 LTS and I'm running Ubuntu Gnome 16.04 LTS, and the differences are more apparent:

+ Ubuntu Gnome:

Panel indicators show up in a single integrated menu for the most part in Gnome.

The Calendar widget displays events from my Google calendar.

There's a new, native calendar app that does the same, and is more convenient than the web interface or the previous Linux apps. (The new native world clock/clock/timer is useful too, if a bit rough around the edges, and there's a new to-do app which could display google tasks and provide an indicator applet, but is neat.)

The top panel is easily themed with CSS and a variety of extensions let you add applications and places menus and a number of useful toggles and indicators. You can't do anything about it in Unity but adjust the opacity, where you also can't do much about how hideously ugly and unthemeable the application launcher has always been and remains.

The application menus display seamlessly in the top panel and native gnome programs integrate title and menubar. The corresponding function under Unity looks stupid and takes extra screen real estate.

Gedit is my favorite editor and it's streamlined but just as functional now, which I love (an older version is packaged with Ubuntu Unity).

waxjism is having some kind of driver issue with Unity that makes some flash videos, depending on what the site is running (eg HBO Nordic and Viaplay - so: hockey - but not Netflix), crash the entire computer so it suddenly and without warning shuts down. I had this for a while about a year ago under Gnome 3 on Debian, but apparently not anymore. Wouldn't want to switch and suddenly have this problem start back up again, though.

+ Ubuntu Unity:

The standard Ubuntu & Gnome file manager - Nautilus - packaged in Ubuntu Gnome is so slow it's basically unusable. A lot of changes have happened under the hood with the new versions of Nautilus apparently? Whatever, it doesn't matter how much better it would work if it never finishes doing it. Alternative file manager Nemo, forked by and for Linux Mint, mostly works in Ubuntu Gnome, but for example, it doesn't handle symlinks to folders correctly under Ubuntu Gnome (a functionality that's been perfectly fine in every Linux I've tried since like 2007), it set up Samba but not without giving me some trouble, and it doesn't look right because it's designed for another distro that has its own themes (it works flawlessly in Mint, as far as I've ever noticed). - Meanwhile Nautilus is fine under Unity, although complaints about functionality that's been removed are still germane.

The greeter/login/lockscreen (LightDM) is better in Unity.

The quicklists, which add extra indicators and right click functionalities to running apps in the launcher under Unity, can be legitimately useful. There's nothing like that in the Gnome shell dock.

Terminal refuses to remember my preference to not display the menu bar under Ubuntu Gnome, another thing I've never had a problem with before.

We've been having trouble with the networked printer, so I put the laptop next to the printer and plugged it directly in to print.

Then I booted Windows...

...and a few minutes later at 4:30 my phone alarm went off with a check email reminder...

and 10 minutes after that it was 4:40 and Windows was still thinking. Chrome was blank, informing me that Gmail failed to load on the first try, and notification bubbles were informing me that the antivirus software had updated itself, that Windows had updated itself, and that to complete further 'critical' updates it wanted to restart. I reloaded Gmail, went to Google Drive, grabbed the top document in the list and clicked 'print'.

At 4:43, it still hadn't printed.

In contrast, when I wake up in the morning I hit the power button on my computer, go in the kitchen and put the kettle on and go to the bathroom, then pour the water in the teapot and put it by my computer to brew. In the time it takes the kettle to boil my computer has produced its login screen. I sign in and go back to the kitchen to make a bowl of oatmeal, and when I return in under 2 minutes, my desktop is all loaded and glowing peacefully. I click on Twitter and Firefox and they both open immediately, the latter with all 15ish of my saved tabs ready and waiting.

If I were using the Windows 7 laptop for my primary computer, I could hit the power button first thing and still not be past the "Welcome" screen when I got back with my oatmeal. And once I logged in, I'd have time to eat the whole bowl before I got to see my tabs.

I thought I might try something Debian-based, instead of Ubuntu-based, so I downloaded an iso of Crunchbang. The livecd looked workable, but then it wouldn't install. I mean, I haven't given up on it yet, but if it consistently says it can't install Grub I am going to have to.

Anyone else have extra trouble with Debian systems?

I know almost nothing about Grub. Grub is complicated and the task of learning more about it looks pretty intimidating from here.

Every now and then I think, "Surely all the major Ubuntu-based distributions will have a default music player stable enough to not constantly crash by now, right? I mean, the overall user experience in all the main flavors is so smooth and mostly crash-free in other areas, so maybe I can switch away from Quod Libet now, since everyone is always so slow to include widget and menu integration for it and it lacks a good compact display mode. Some of the other ones have really sweet-looking widgets and stuff."

So then I try one.

And okay, to be fair, Amarok under the newest KDE is no longer crashing constantly on my system, but the browser's complete lack of multi-pane sorting and the inconvenient playlist management was enough to drive me away anyway.

But Rhythmbox! STILL crashing more than once per day... on the system it came pre-installed in!

I've been using Quod Libet for at least 4 years under Unity, Gnome Shell, KDE, Xfce, and LXDE, and it's never crashed or sucked up all the memory.

Ugh.

My mom is a 56-year-old public school art teacher. She has numerous volunteer commitments and home projects, as well as a young lab-mix dog (and two cats!). She has her own computer at home (not shared with anyone except occasional houseguests) for casual use and basic tasks:

scanner and digital camera management with online Picasa integration

checking her Gmail once a month or so, without, however, ever clearing her inbox

Appearing on Twitter to reblog 2-4 social justice links and then leave again every few weeks

Occasional word processing, like simple letters

Reading my blog and my photoblog

Occasionally watching Youtube videos, at my or my sister's instigation

Frequent transfer of image and document files via USB to/from Windows computers she is required to use at work

So, unlike us, she doesn't need:

Any but the most basic video and music playback, for very infrequent use (e.g. no codecs or converters needed)

Gimp or any other drawing/image manipulation (although they are default components of modern Mint)

Twitter, chat, BitTorrent, or email clients

Google calendar integration or Samba filesharing

Several years ago I built her a simple system and installed Linux Mint on it, which I judged the most friendly Linux OS for her needs. Mint 10, based on Ubuntu Jaunty, was a long-term support release supported until April 2012. When I set up the system for her, I created a separate partition for her files and set it to auto-mount on system boot, creating a link. I explained that she should save her personal files that she wanted to keep on it so that they could be kept separate from the OS files for upgrading.

Well, I've been trying to encourage her to upgrade with increasing urgency for a year and a half now, but it didn't happen until yesterday, week 2 of her having her new tablet at home so we could use it for skyping through the process. We also installed Team Viewer, a desktop sharing program, and Wax (because I couldn't install it as quickly on my newer system) used it to create the install disk.

But when we got Team Viewer up, we found her desktop covered with files and folders. Wax dug into the computer and found out that:

The data partition I set up was empty and unused

All the files had been saved to her home directory and many to her desktop, with no organization. Folders with names like "New hair March 2012" (containing 3 files) were mixed with empty folders and folders like "architecture" and "[music album]".

At some point someone had installed Windows on the computer. She did not know about this, or didn't remember, and had no idea who could have done it. The partition was still there.

Fortunately I had made her home 20 GB, because she'd used 17 of it (contrast this to the empty data partition's 400 GB).

Ultimately, Wax simply preserved the home partition untouched, formatted the 400 GB partition, and then, after install, copied the old folders to the larger partition, providing numerous links to them from the desktop and file manager.

She can't touch-type and is confused by right-click menus, but she isn't a novice at computers: my parents have owned a computer since they were in college, first a Commodore 64 and later a Windows 3.0 machine. They used a dot-matrix printer for years and my mom was competent at DOS and an expert at the pre-desktop-OS word processor WordStar, which she used while working as a managing editor in a scientific journal for several years when I was a kid. Unfortunately, she's got a distractable personality and finds it difficult to follow computer-related directions exactly, so Team Viewer was a real life saver here. Trying to direct her what to do over Skype was difficult. Fortunately being yelled at didn't make her mad.

All in all, via Team Viewer on both systems and verbally on Skype in between, Wax and I were occupied ~ 5 hours last night with this. This system set up involved several restarts after boot, all but the first few of which Wax controlled via Team Viewer. But when I got up at noon (4 am their time), there were messages waiting for me from both parents via email, as well as by Twitter and Facebook, that my mom's computer "won't boot Linux". Apparently she "was editing" (what?) when it froze and she restarted via the power button, after which it they claim it froze in a black screen and wouldn't boot. I suspect it was just checking the disks, which can be time-consuming and modern Ubuntu-based systems use quiet boot by default, which means you can't see any sign that it's doing things. That can cause anxiety. But by then they'd gone to bed, so now I have another tech support session to look forward to. Hopefully it won't involve reinstalling.

Although looking at it in retrospect, given how little mom requires of her system, I think perhaps we should have gone with an Xfce desktop. It's more lightweight and I think more easily tweakable, and it's not like she needs widgets, applets, web apps, or any of the other things that make me reluctant to use the lightweight desktops. My personal biggest quibbles in Xfce are things like lack of built-in Samba support (unnecessary, in her case) and fewer file browser features (but she isn't aware of those anyway). On the other hand, generally you're more on your own if you have a problem in a lightweight desktop. The main edition of Mint has the most built-in support and direction, I think.

The great thing about Linux is that you can pick and choose and customize anything you want to, as long as you're willing to work at it. The problem is, sometimes the cost-benefit analysis doesn't work out once you know enough to understand how much work would be required. Another problem is that once you get attached to (and adapted to) a feature, it's sometimes a really big deal when it's taken away.

This has led, at least for me, to a kind of Goldilocks experience in the world of Linux, trying out different desktops, giving them time to start to sink in, and each time there's something wrong - sometimes an actual bug, sometimes just a feature from another desktop environment that I can't duplicate.

When Gnome 3 was first introduced I was fascinated by a lot of things about it. There were a lot of things that I liked, but at the end of the 11.04 cycle my install was crashing way too frequently, even after a clean install, so I decided to give Unity another go as the blogs were saying it had become much more stable since Natty, when Compiz was essentially non-functional on my machine.

I installed Ubuntu 12.04 Precise Pangolin. It was still ugly, the top bar was still black, but it was possible to render the top panel transparent and the launcher now respected the system icon theme, which, yes, was non-negotiable for me. As far as I remember, it contained no major bugs, but I wanted to upgrade when Quantal came out because the new features sounded cool.

And then the problems began.

Ubuntu 12.10 Quantal Quetzel: VLC was broken by an update shortly after install and it never worked again. The bug was reported at various spots online, so it was a common one, but it was never fixed. I tried several other media players and all were way less convient for screencapping. I got tired of it and had been increasingly fed up with Ubuntu's ongoing campaign to remove features from the install in order to 'streamline' everything so it can be identical to the eventual user experience on the future phone OS.

At this point 13.04 was not yet out, so to get a working VLC I had to go backwards. I installed Kubuntu 12.04. I was happy with the new KDE for the most part, but when I installed Caffeine - a popular applet that automatically keeps the monitor from going to sleep whenever a media player is open or a flash video is playing - it failed to work. It installed all right; it just wouldn't launch. I crawled all over the internet, but there was no replacement app for KDE. Various users more leet than me had put various hacks in place to replace Caffeine, but this was a disappointing lack.

I upgraded to Kubuntu 13.04 Raring Ringtail thinking it might fix that problem, but it didn't. I was quite happy with KDE otherwise - its customizability suited what I wanted almost exactly.¹ There's also an icon-only task manager - another of my OS requirements - similar to Dockbar X that can be installed to the main panel straight from the repositories. The functionality, though, is less robust than in Dockbar X, Unity launcher, or Cairo/AWN.

The main problem with 13.04, though, was Peer Guardian Linux. It had started crashing every time I booted the computer, requiring a manual restart. This only took thirty seconds or so, but it was quite irritating, especially since Google seemed to indicate it was a years-old bug that had been gotten rid of several cycles ago. I even reinstalled the same OS from scratch just in case, but the problem remained.

So I downloaded an image of PCLinuxOS on a whim, on the basis of a really positive review. Now, the reviewer was right, it DID work right out of the box. The problem was that I had completely failed to notice in my airheaded rush that it was not an Ubuntu-based system, and when I decided to install it to a smaller partition to play around with in the long-term, I didn't know that that would be a problem. Not knowing what the hell I was doing, or that there was anything I needed to check out first, I accidentally destroyed my previous grub entries in the install process and was unable to boot to my previous KDE install. I wasn't even able to back up my bookmarks and I wasn't able to recover them from the other OS or the liveCD I then tried. My need to have my bookmarks back was growing urgent and I didn't have the time to teach myself to install Opera manually in PCLinuxOS just to get at them, but the native format can't be read by other browsers. I tried to install Opera, then open it for the purpose of exporting the files, on the liveCD, but that didn't work either, so I had to install a new OS to the harddrive anyway to get my bookmarks. Therefore I decided to make it one that did not so far as I know suffer from any major problems, hence my choosing Ubuntu 13.04 Raring Ringtail.

I did that on... Tuesday I think. Yesterday afternoon I finally had (almost) everything set up to my liking.

By default Nautilus, the filebrowser, has lost tons of functionality. Not only is the split pane button missing, a pretty trivial feature but one I use a lot, several way more important things are missing, like ANY ACCESS WHATSOEVER TO THE TOOLBAR OR MENU ITEMS, or the ability to in any way alter the display in the sidebar. Like, I couldn't bookmark my own folders. There's a fix for that, though. I installed a patch found on Webupd8. ( There were a bunch of other things I did and some of them are not all a fog... )

My current Finnish course will end in March, but my Finnish isn't good enough to take any sort of further professional training courses, like the practical part of my school assistant classes, in Finnish. (It would probably be good enough to work in a shop or something.) And in general, although I feel good about my progress, I'm not satisfied (I mean, confident) with my skills yet. I need way more vocabulary and practice. When I had the work practice interview at a local daycare, I got the gist and the keywords but I had to completely give up on big swathes of phrases where I couldn't pick out enough recognizable bits to start parsing the grammar and guess at the meaning: people who are talking about real life things and not just smalltalk or shoptalk don't use the same sorts of simple, bite-sized sentences.

So I'll probably be applying to the next level Finnish class, which will mean a significant reduction in support from social services down to, I think, 300-something €/month. Right now I'm getting full unemployment with all the extra options 700-something €/month, as one does when engaged full-time in professional development mandated by the employment bureau; for the second level course you only get the regular government allowance of student support, but it's still 35 school hours a week which makes working at the same time difficult.

Wax is still going to secretarial school. After learning the Microsoft Office suite at the basic level - like she hasn't learned macros, which I can't help feeling would have been quite useful - they moved on to torturing them with Business Swedish, and the school made her study it even though Swedish is her native language. It went something like this:

WAX: But I already know Swedish because it's my native language.
TEACHER WHO IS NOT EVEN A NATIVE SWEDISH SPEAKER: Ah, but this isn't just ordinary Swedish, it's BUSINESS Swedish.

She was still made to take the exams, and in order to not have to take lengthy weekly vocabulary tests and sit through hours of painful instruction, she was ordered to write "an essay" on a topic of her choice, with no further guidelines. Obviously this should be easy, but it isn't because she's too angry about the whole thing.

So after finishing Business Swedish, they moved on to...

... Business English. Only, right, everyone in her class is competent to the basic Finnish high-school-graduate level.. except for one, so they actually started with conjugating "TO BE" and "TO DO".

Her unemployment/winter/this sucks depression has consequently spiraled to the level where she is almost entirely nocturnal and can't always force herself to suffer through her horribly painful homework assignments. Instead she is reading a lot of hockey fic and has even started reblogging things about hockey on Tumblr. I'm mostly worried about this because of fear that she might actually get further into sports. As long as it's just the players it's fine, but if she watches any actual sports on purpose, we will of course have to get a divorce.

But on the plus side, we have a lot of yarn around the house and Canonical has just announced they're releasing Ubuntu for phones next year, which is exciting because we were previously worried that Nokia's N9 might be the last Linux phone in existence, but neither of us could bear to use Apple, Windows, or Android. Sometime next month you should be able to install Ubuntu yourself on the Nexus Galaxy, though, which means by the time one of our phones breaks (they're currently 2 years old I think), the early adopter bugs should be ironed out. They say they hope to release the first manufacturer-partnered shipping-with-Ubuntu phones in 2014.

Ever since Ubuntu 11.04, the lack of the ability to configure many aspects of the new Unity interface has been pointed out and questioned widely.

Today, at the “Meet Ubuntu Desktop Designers” session in the Ubuntu Developer Summit being held in Orlando, Florida, members of the Canonical design team clarified that they never intended Unity to not be configurable; instead, it is very much on their radar.

According to them, the only reason why it didn’t make it to Ubuntu 11.04 or 11.10 was simply because “there were other, more important tasks to complete for those releases” and that they “never wanted to alienate power users or fans of customization from Unity”.

[OMG!Ubuntu: Ubuntu Desktop Designers: ‘Unity Should Be Configurable’]

I don't care what your intent was. You released it unconfigurable, and if you meant it to be configurable then you released it unfinished. That. was. stupid.

Don't release things that aren't finished (I won't even go into 'things that crash all the fucking time' which is what Compiz did in 11.4). It's not exactly rocket science!

If you're launching your operating system with a big party and a slideshow, I don't expect it to crash several times a day. Or for windows to randomly turn blank white half of the time when I maximize them. Or for everything to stop working as soon as I enable a new Compiz plugin. What are you, Microsoft?

Well, today was going to be Upgrade-the-OS day, but it took so long to install the new distro (Kubuntu Hardy) on Wax's computer that we never actually got around to mine (both at once, you say? Oh, no. Linux is great, but there's some trial and error involved and the worst thing that could happen would be having both computers down for the count simultaneously). Instead I tagged snapshots in my photo gallery, coming up with nine pages each of me and Wax and twelve pages of the cats (Perry already had his own subgallery - four pages; he's harder to photograph). Then I got ambitious and went back through ancient photographs, the ones that never even got uploaded anywhere, and found this visual record of what is certainly the coolest craft project I've embarked on in the past four years:

Profile

Cimorene

August 2025

S	M	T	W	T	F	S
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3	4	5	6	7	8	9
10	11	12	13	14	15	16
17	18	19	20	21	22	23
24	25	26	27	28	29	30
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Page Summary

cat divorce sleeping switch
Upgrading to Ubuntu 22.04
this doesn't even touch on the ubuntu campaign to remove desktop functionality
The thing a lot of retrofuturistic sf misses about living in the future
The Unwanted Error Message of: Reinstall EVERYTHING, Loser
lol omg, ubuntu let a release where you can't even open the software downloader out of beta
Yeah but is there like a fast and easy version... (no)
upgrading the media server
"bionic beaver" is a great distro name though.
Computer stuff: Linux: Ubuntu vs Ubuntu Gnome 16.04 LTS
I used the computer closest to the printer for convenience, forgetting that it boots like molasses.
Venturing out of the Ubuntu kiddie pool
a very specific ubuntu-based linux music player rant
Making a Computer Setup for Parents and other Computer Dependents
Wandering in the user-friendly linux OS desert
life things
we interrupt your schedule for this linux ranting
(no subject)

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multi-fannish American queer cat & bunny owner in Finland

Entries tagged with tech: linux

cat divorce sleeping switch

Upgrading to Ubuntu 22.04

Snap Firefox

New appearance settings

this doesn't even touch on the ubuntu campaign to remove desktop functionality

The thing a lot of retrofuturistic sf misses about living in the future

The Unwanted Error Message of: Reinstall EVERYTHING, Loser

lol omg, ubuntu let a release where you can't even open the software downloader out of beta

Yeah but is there like a fast and easy version... (no)

upgrading the media server

"bionic beaver" is a great distro name though.

Computer stuff: Linux: Ubuntu vs Ubuntu Gnome 16.04 LTS

I used the computer closest to the printer for convenience, forgetting that it boots like molasses.

Venturing out of the Ubuntu kiddie pool

a very specific ubuntu-based linux music player rant

Making a Computer Setup for Parents and other Computer Dependents

Wandering in the user-friendly linux OS desert

life things

we interrupt your schedule for this linux ranting

(no subject)