Argh! My Gentoo was building up a lot of cruft, because I'm always poking at it and playing with it. I decided to reinstall it, and in the process I was going to conceptually separate my "desktop" and "workstation". So, I installed Ubuntu. No more little problems, I said to myself. I'm willing to give up flexibility for a clean and easy user experience. Well, I'm starting to miss that flexibility.
Ubuntu comes default with a retarded music player called Rhythmbox. I suppose I shouldn't call it retarded. Perhaps I'm just not getting the drift of what it's supposed to be used for. But it's the only music player Ubuntu comes out of the box with, and you can't even open a music file with it. You have to import whole folders into your "library" and then just play them all. I can't figure out how to create a playlist of only the songs I want to listen to at the moment. I can install xmms. It opens and does its slick scrolling text thing. But the moment I try to play something it freezes. And that's it. I installed RealPlayer, but it refuses to even open. Running it from the command line gives no textual output. No error messages or anything. I can't play video. Well, I can play video, but without sound. /dev/dsp is busy, it says. I have a /dev/dsp, but it's got that highlighting that I don't know the meaning of but in the case of softlinks means the target file or directory doesn't exist. And I can only play video because I jumped through extraordinary hoops to get mplayer installed. Mplayer is not in any of the repositories that come with Ubuntu. I uncommented all lines in sources.list. VLC, Totem, ffplay, and xine all refused to play my movie files, usually giving: "X Error: BadAlloc (insufficient resources for operation)". Kaffeine plays the audio of some files, but not the video. In Mplayer I have to set my video driver to x11. None of the others work, but they did in Gentoo. I can't watch movies!! And Firefox! Firefox and Mozilla will freeze on me when loading certain URLs. A link someone emailed to this list, another link several days ago, and nps.gov. I cannot frickin' see nps.gov in Mozilla or Firefox. All other browsers irk me. It irks me that I can't set the network proxy in any of the Gnome browsers (Epiphany, Galeon) unless I want to set it Gnome-wide. The Synaptic package manager is nice, but confusing. Synaptic is to package management what Rhythmbox is to music playing. They're both big and clunky. I don't like apt on the command line. apt-get? apt-cache? What? Which option? How do I frickin' get a simple list of the programs I have installed? Not every single package installed on the system. Let dependencies be dependencies and just show me my apps. Gentoo's Portage just mops the floor with any other package manager I have ever used. I want wider support for binaries in Portage and I want a better GUI, but I'll take what I can get. I guess this is all to say that my experience switching desktop distros has not been what I had hoped it would be. I'm still going to use Ubuntu for a while, but I think that when I go to reinstall Gentoo (for playing) I'm going to install a separate Gentoo for my desktop. I'll just cross my fingers and try my darnedest to not do anything that will collect small errors. I'll install only the apps that I need, want, and use. Maybe I'll even plan it all out beforehand. Any new programs will be installed on the for-play distro, so that I know what's involved, how to config it, and so on. I would say, "and see if it works", but I've never had that problem in Gentoo, for some reason. The only foreseeable problem is that I would want to run both at once. I run a lot of network services that I want available all the time, and shutting them off sucks. I wish I owned a copy of VMWare. Ideally, my desktop and my for-play installations would be physically separate machines, but that's not happening anytime soon. Anybody have any experience with Vidalinux/VLOS? -todd -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
