Many of the initial quirks of Ubuntu are covered at ubuntuguide.org. Much of that info helps for other debian variants also. I agree that it's a pain to use a distro that needs tweaking just to get basic functionality. But it was worth it for me in the end with my laptop. Dovber Shapiro
On Sat, 20 Aug 2005 11:29:25 -0700 Todd Walton <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > 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 -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
