Selfsufficientish.com

So is the name changing to Thurston Fritter?

Call me what you all like! I could be about to turn my back on Mr Gates almost completely!

Just need to try and get wubi to work now.

quick innit!

Martin it is quick - even off the CD. I had no lights on my laptop (power/disk/WiFi). I can live without them though.

I wonder why wubi stalled? I am going to uninstall and try again.

Ok Ok! I have been reading up on partitioning but need my pc to earn money tomorrow and therefore darnt do anything tonight... I think I will print out the relevant pages tomorrow and have a bash at the weekend.

But...

I could not see my NAS drive which is hooked to our wireless router. I could see it in firefox by typing in the IP address. Mounting the drive in windows was easy, but I cannot find any guides or instructions on the ubuntu site/forum.

It would be fundamental to have the NAS drive mounted. All our music is on there! I have also started keeping my photos and back ups on it too.

Any ideas?

'fraid not - best to search the Ubuntu help files! - don't get put off by it, you'll love it when you get it fully up and running, it's so much better than Windoze

Finally managed to get a working version of Ubuntu installed. I can't go whole hog yet because my BT ISP doesn't recognise it, so I've got it working in parallel with Vista. As the only worthwhile application which came with it was Open Office, I can't really judge it until I've managed to dowload things like GIMP and the DTP package that I can't remember the name of. I'll report back.

Simple to use????? Rubbish. I can't use a direct internet connection, so I'm having to download any applications I want via Vista - but that's no problem. Now, open Kubuntu and try to get 'em to work. NOTHING works! I've crawled through the help files ("It's easy to install applications in Ubuntu" Ho Ho.) and I've been all over the net looking for advice. Applications downloaded as deb files should install with a click of the mouse - they don't. Tarballs need to be compiled, but that software didn't come with the distribution, so it has to be downloaded via Vista and - guess what? - it won't install. Oh, an apology - one deb file was recognised but wouldn't install because my system doesn't meet the dependency requirements. This despite the fact that the program in question claims it has no extra dependencies.

Kubuntu may be the bees knees if you have an ISP who can handle Linux. At the moment, though, I'm almost at the stage of giving it the Royal Order of the Boot. Just a few more attempts, and then ...

EDIT: Nearly forgot ... I had the bright idea of putting all of the dowloaded files onto a CD and then logging that on as a source. THis is allowable. I burned the CD using the application which came with Kubuntu. Everything looked good. Back to the software installer, tell it there's a new CD and ... failure message - cannot scan CD. Oh Bugger!!!!

I finally got one single application to install - at least the system said it had installed. Problem now is that the same system doesn't seem to know where the application is and, search though I have, I can't find it either. I've discovered the "proper" method of getting stuff to work without the direct internet connection, and it's a horrific and tortuous process.

Conclusion: it's got 24 hours more to convince me it's worth having. If I haven't found a sensible way of doing things without the internet by then (and since when was Linux so internet-dependent?) I shall be able to give up and laugh ironically next time I read anything which speaks of the simplicity and ease of the system. As a stand-alone system (and I never ever thought I'd say this) Windows stands head and shoulders above Linux in terms of ease of use.