Ubuntu 12.04

[MKG]

For those of you who are Ubuntuheads and are thinking of upgrading to 12.04, here's my advice - wait.

I'm in the process of upgrading right now, and it's taken the better part of a day so far (with still a couple of hours to go). Everyone and their uncle is hitting that server at the moment.

Mike

EDIT: In fact, I'd advise at this moment not to do it - I have a problem or two now that the upgrade has finished - ones I wasn't expecting at all. I'll spend the next couple of hours screaming at the screen and let you know what's happening.

[magicguitarman]

What problems have you got? 12.04 Studio is fine so far, although the servers where a nightmare!

[MKG]

I've got a very temperamental sidebar. It's OK if I set it to permanent display (which I don't want) but it has a mind of its own otherwise. Most of the time, it's very shy and won't appear when I move the mouse cursor to the extreme left. Sensitivity setting seems to do nothing to help.

Mike

[magicguitarman]

I can't really help there, not only do I keep mine fully visible, I also can't replicated the problem at this end!

Good luck!

[southeast-isher]

I'm waving goodbye to Windows and going with Ubuntu.

[merlin]

what is Ubuntu?

[wulf]

One of the many available versions of the Linux Operating System. Microsoft's Windows and Apples Mac OS are the other main contenders but you can't legally download and share either of those two.

Wulf

[merlin]

Well thanks for that, I shall have a look

[southeast-isher]

I'm loving Ubuntu 12.10 so far.

[the.fee.fairy]

I upgraded and then kept having boot problems, so I downgraded again. Not sure what the problem was - maybe my laptop's just too old to handle it, or not fast enough or something.

I'm sticking with 11.10 until I get a new laptop I think.

[southeast-isher]

Ubuntu is great. It's my favourite operating system.

[MKG]

Well, times do change.

I'm now using Ubuntu 14.04. But really, I am and I'm not ...

I never really liked Ubuntu's default desktop, so I began to overlay it with a "front end" called Cinnamon, which makes finding and launching the program you want easy. The problem was that every time I upgraded my Ubuntu, I had to reinstall Cinnamon and it's a pain in the backside to get right. Then I realised that there's such a thing as Linux Mint - a Linux distribution which is based upon Ubuntu and includes Cinnamon as a default in one of its versions. So now I'm running Linux Mint 17, which uses Ubuntu 14.04 as its base.

Cinnamon seems to be second nature to me, which is probably a function of my age - it's reminiscent of things I became used to in the distant past when PCs were simpler things which did what you wanted them to do with no argument. Anyway, I like it.

[Marc]

I'd love to use Linux but only a very early version will install on my old laptop. Then as I have to use a dongle to access the web I can't get that to work with the old version of Ubuntu

[MKG]

Hi Marc

There are modern versions of Linux designed specifically for small machines.

http://www.howtogeek.com/172987/revive- ... computers/

I've got an old IBM Thinkpad running a small Ubuntu system, and it's quite happy with that. A lot of modern Linux systems will recognise a dongle immediately but, even if that doesn't happen, there are ways to convince the system that you have one (something to do with it being recognised as a mass-storage device instead of a dongle).

On the other hand, if your system is working satisfactorily as it is, I'd let it get on with it

Mike

[Marc]

Thanks Mike, I'll look at that. My old lappy is sill running XP and with a small SSD it's working well at the moment. I do have another that I'll try again with Linux