Ubuntu, why it is crap

[itsbruce]

I've used Gparted to created and re-size the partitions which was easy to use. But then when I tried to use the partitions, I don't have the permission to read or write!

Can you not just add yourself to the disk group     this way root is still the owner but you have access.

Code: [Select]

sudo  adduser yourname  disk

OK, given the nature of this thread, I should mention that there'll be a GUI tool for user/group management.  But it's an incorrect tip, this one.  Adding yourself to the disk group would enable you to format and repartition disks, but it would not give you any special ability to mount filesystems.  You normally need to be the superuser to mount filesystems, unless the user option has been enabled for the mount, in which case any user will be able to mount it.  Note that this doesn't automatically mean that the user will be able to write to the filesystem (unless it's a legacy fs like FAT which doesn't support ACLs);  if the ACLs on the filesystem don't give the user read or write access, they wont' have it (note: this true of Windows as well, except that most home users log in as an administrator, so they don't notice).

True.  Windows PC have always lagged behind. 

Although Windows 7 is a lot better, as mine takes less than 25 seconds.

How useful is it at that point, though?  Starting with XP, Windows introduced a behaviour of logging you in as soon as enough had been done to show you your desktop; it would often still, at this point, still be configuring network resources and starting up programs in the background, so that the PC might not actually be useful for another couple of minutes.

[Greenbank]

Mac has those top left. I've only had a mac a couple of months and already windows is starting to piss me off. This could get expensive as I just noticed new iMacs. Damn you Steve Jobs.

Traditionally, I'd read and send a few emails on the MacBook while my work XP laptop grunted into life like some kind of zombie on decaf.

Of course, I can now send emails on the iPad while the MacBook boots. I look forward to the day when the emails send themselves while I sleep.

It’s almost like the 1980s, when computers started almost instantly.  I have never had a Windows PC boot in a reasonable time.

True.  Windows PC have always lagged behind. 

Although Windows 7 is a lot better, as mine takes less than 25 seconds.

Do people still shutdown their machines every night and boot them up every morning? Blimey.

My desktop PC and laptop 'boot' in mere seconds since I put them in 'sleep' mode overnight.

They get rebooted once a month or so when patches that require a reboot are applied.

I don't waste time waiting for the apps to start up either since I leave them running when putting the computer in sleep mode.

[ian]

Although Windows 7 is a lot better, as mine takes less than 25 seconds.

Do people still shutdown their machines every night and boot them up every morning? Blimey.

My desktop PC and laptop 'boot' in mere seconds since I put them in 'sleep' mode overnight.

They get rebooted once a month or so when patches that require a reboot are applied.

I don't waste time waiting for the apps to start up either since I leave them running when putting the computer in sleep mode.

I hibernate my XP machine, it has a boot process measured on a geological timescale, but it only remains stable for about five hibernation cycles and then needs to be shut down and given counselling (plus by that time its accumulated enough critical security patches to be in panicked screaming mode for a reboot).

I sleep the Macs, but usually put them to bed properly at night, mostly because I watched War Games when I was little and I know what happens if you leave computers unattended. They may just be pretending to be asleep. Plus they boot from cold in a minute or so. Sleep seems to work on the Mac, pretty much instant on. Stand by in XP usually seems to involve a minute of someone sawing through the hard disk followed by wireless and VPN roulette - will it or won't it. I never got suspend / hibernate options to work properly on a Ubuntu machine - but that's understandable given the dependence on hardware, which is why it's so damn good on the Apple.

I do like the way that sometimes when I sleep the XP machine by closing the lid a program plaintively cries something along the lines of "Excel is preventing this machine going into stand by". Brilliant, an on-screen error message on a closed laptop. Whereupon it'll go ahead and use all the battery power to heat up my bag to somewhere near that of the Sun's chromosphere. Top tip, next time you are stuck and exposed on a frozen ice planet, don't eviscerate a Ton-Ton, just curl up around a faux-hibernating Dell laptop.

[inc]

 it's an incorrect tip, this one.  Adding yourself to the disk group would enable you to format and repartition disks, but it would not give you any special ability to mount filesystems.  You normally need to be the superuser to mount filesystems, unless the user option has been enabled for the mount, in which case any user will be able to mount it.  Note that this doesn't automatically mean that the user will be able to write to the filesystem (unless it's a legacy fs like FAT which doesn't support ACLs); 

I have just removed myself from the "disk" group and lost access to a partition. I changed the permissions using a GUI ( Dolphin as root) and have regained access. the file system is ext4 so it seems to work either way.

For additional partitions wouldn't you just  auto mount them by adding them to the fstab,  with a gui of course  no cl trickery needed

[ian]

Personally, I am happy to pay for a desktop OS, as I spend too long sitting in front of a computer I want something that works cleanly and smoothly. The modest investment pays off in lack of swearing and keyboard abuse.

That's fine by me, Windows is probably the best OS for a lot of people although most Linux users have also paid for Windows because it comes pre installed on most machines. I am not really interested what OS people use but it is depressing when someone fails to install Linux then declares it is crap without giving it a chance I doubt many have had to do a clean install of Windows, which takes hours  to install an OS with virtually no applications.

To be fair, I do use Ubuntu on my netbook, and Mandriva on the ingredient-spattered recipe-puter in the kitchen, along with XP on my work laptop, and OSX on the bulk of the many computers that lurk around my overly computerised house. And I did set up the Win7 machines for the extended family. So I think I have a reasonable overview of the pros and cons of each.

Personally, I think Ubuntu is fine. It's not an issue of the power or functionality of the OS - it's usability that needs to be improved. Too much is still invested in the command line and GUI tools are inconsistently deployed, and often poorly designed. If Ubuntu (or another distro) really wants to pitch as an alternative to OSX and Win7, then it needs to keep this in mind.

[simonp]

Mac has those top left. I've only had a mac a couple of months and already windows is starting to piss me off. This could get expensive as I just noticed new iMacs. Damn you Steve Jobs.

Traditionally, I'd read and send a few emails on the MacBook while my work XP laptop grunted into life like some kind of zombie on decaf.

Of course, I can now send emails on the iPad while the MacBook boots. I look forward to the day when the emails send themselves while I sleep.

It’s almost like the 1980s, when computers started almost instantly.  I have never had a Windows PC boot in a reasonable time.

True.  Windows PC have always lagged behind. 

Although Windows 7 is a lot better, as mine takes less than 25 seconds.

Do people still shutdown their machines every night and boot them up every morning? Blimey.

My desktop PC and laptop 'boot' in mere seconds since I put them in 'sleep' mode overnight.

They get rebooted once a month or so when patches that require a reboot are applied.

I don't waste time waiting for the apps to start up either since I leave them running when putting the computer in sleep mode.

I wish my work laptop coped well with sleeping.  It's a mess.  It takes >25s to come out of sleep when I dock it at work, and the second screen is inoperable.

mac handles it beautifully by comparison.

[Greenbank]

My old T60 used to be a bit of a pain, sometimes more than a minute to come out of sleep, but that was all down to a hardware problem. The new W510 works a treat, is awake within seconds and handles the detection of the dock and two attached screens as expected.

[Adam]

True.  Windows PC have always lagged behind. 

Although Windows 7 is a lot better, as mine takes less than 25 seconds.

How useful is it at that point, though?  Starting with XP, Windows introduced a behaviour of logging you in as soon as enough had been done to show you your desktop; it would often still, at this point, still be configuring network resources and starting up programs in the background, so that the PC might not actually be useful for another couple of minutes.

Everything's loaded and ready to run.   

[BrianI]

Interestingly I'm going to drop down from Ubuntu 11.04 to 10.04 LTS version.. (I had upgraded xubuntu 10.10 to xubuntu 11.04, then installed kubuntu desktop on top of it, didn't like it,  then installed ubuntu desktop on top of that! Now it's all gone a bit whacky  So I think i nice fresh install of plain ubuntu 10.04 LTS will be better than trying the latest and greatest!  Hopefully going to be developing my own photography website, so I'd rather have a nice stable machine!

 

[Biggsy]

Although Windows 7 is a lot better, as mine takes less than 25 seconds.

How useful is it at that point, though?  Starting with XP, Windows introduced a behaviour of logging you in as soon as enough had been done to show you your desktop; it would often still, at this point, still be configuring network resources and starting up programs in the background, so that the PC might not actually be useful for another couple of minutes.

You may have some/a lot of unnecessary processes at start-up if it's taking a couple of minutes.  Trim those down and do some other tweaks and you can get it down to a few seconds.

[Adam]

Here's another example of the issue why, as I mentioned above, Ubuntu is fine installed as it is, but nowhere near as polished as Windows when you want to actually add something.

My notebook doesn't have the latest version of Java installed.  In view of the length and complexity of the instructions, I haven't cut & pasted them, but the procedure to be followed is shown here. 

Certainly not user friendly.

[itsbruce]

Here's another example of the issue why, as I mentioned above, Ubuntu is fine installed as it is, but nowhere near as polished as Windows when you want to actually add something.

My notebook doesn't have the latest version of Java installed.  In view of the length and complexity of the instructions, I haven't cut & pasted them, but the procedure to be followed is shown here. 

Certainly not user friendly.

But also not necessary for many of the more popular distributions.  On Debian, for example, you'll find that somebody has repackaged it already and all those manual steps are now automated, with only the bit where you have to agree to the terms and conditions requiring user input.

[sas]

My notebook doesn't have the latest version of Java installed.  In view of the length and complexity of the instructions, I haven't cut & pasted them, but the procedure to be followed is shown here. 

Certainly not user friendly.

But also not necessary for many of the more popular distributions.  On Debian, for example, you'll find that somebody has repackaged it already and all those manual steps are now automated, with only the bit where you have to agree to the terms and conditions requiring user input.

Ubuntu (and presumably Debian) has the openjdk implementation of Java in it's repositories so you don't even need to agree to a license agreement, and the added benefit is that it'll automatically be updated.

[inc]

Here's another example of the issue why, as I mentioned above, Ubuntu is fine installed as it is, but nowhere near as polished as Windows when you want to actually add something.

My notebook doesn't have the latest version of Java installed.  In view of the length and complexity of the instructions, I haven't cut & pasted them, but the procedure to be followed is shown here. 

Certainly not user friendly.

Why would you want to install java outside of the APT package management system. How is   "apt-get install sun-java6-bin"  difficult. Even better  apt-get install default-jre which will install the open version. These are both easily found using the search facility in synaptic.

[itsbruce]

My notebook doesn't have the latest version of Java installed.  In view of the length and complexity of the instructions, I haven't cut & pasted them, but the procedure to be followed is shown here. 

Certainly not user friendly.

But also not necessary for many of the more popular distributions.  On Debian, for example, you'll find that somebody has repackaged it already and all those manual steps are now automated, with only the bit where you have to agree to the terms and conditions requiring user input.

Ubuntu (and presumably Debian) has the openjdk implementation of Java in it's repositories so you don't even need to agree to a license agreement, and the added benefit is that it'll automatically be updated.

If you had previously installed a Debian-packaged version of the Sun jdk and the licensing conditions have not changed, that will be true.  If either of those is not true, you'll have to agree to the license.

[sas]

Ubuntu (and presumably Debian) has the openjdk implementation of Java in it's repositories so you don't even need to agree to a license agreement, and the added benefit is that it'll automatically be updated.

If you had previously installed a Debian-packaged version of the Sun jdk and the licensing conditions have not changed, that will be true.  If either of those is not true, you'll have to agree to the license.

Getting off topic... but my understanding is that the default Java implementation in Ubuntu and Fedora (OpenJDK? IcedTea? even I'm confused!) isn't the same as the one released by Sun. My hard disk died last week so I had to do a clean reinstall, and it definitely didn't require a special license agreement. Of course if you go out of the way to choose the Sun version then you would have to.

As far as a typical user is concerned they could just go to add/remove software, search for Java, and the OpenJDK version should come up.

[Gattopardo]

Well I updated Lubuntu and now it no longer show a visible screen.

POS software, I expected better.  especially as I didn't go to the latest.

Now I'm stuck

[Gattopardo]

Right after several restarts it now no longer showing a white screen.


WTF is that about?

[pcolbeck]

Right after several restarts it now no longer showing a white screen.


WTF is that about?

Nvidea driver issue. It's hitting lots of Linux distributions. SuSE does the same thing. You need to set "nomodep" on boot until you install the propriotary Nvidea drivers. It's a problem with the driver in X.org. Ubuntu has an option on install to set nomodep.

[itsbruce]

It's the Insane Clown Posse release.

[Gattopardo]

Right after several restarts it now no longer showing a white screen.


WTF is that about?

Nvidea driver issue. It's hitting lots of Linux distributions. SuSE does the same thing. You need to set "nomodep" on boot until you install the propriotary Nvidea drivers. It's a problem with the driver in X.org. Ubuntu has an option on install to set nomodep.

How do I do that?

So why would it work after a few restarts?

[pcolbeck]

Its a hardware detection thing. Maybe it picked up the right settings on one of the reboots or maybe it was downloading the driver in the background. I never used Lubuntu so I am not sure.

I normal Ubuntu when you get the first screen where you can choose to Install or run from CD there is a boot options menu (F6 of the top of my head) and in there one of the options is nomodep.

Once installed and on the first boot as soon as it displays the logo you hit any key and it lets you edit the grub options to add nomdep for that boot.

Once your logged in you just go into the System Options and there is an icon to load additional drivers that lets you load teh proprietary Nvidea drivers. Once they are loaded, reboot and no more problems.

[Gattopardo]

So thats easy then

Lubuntu is just another front end. 

Right second issue, the disc things its full.  So it wont log on.  Any ideas of the comands that would work when loging in to the root from the repair install?

[pcolbeck]

Delete some stuff

[Gattopardo]

Now you are being as pedantic, just like the bloody computer. 

I don't know why it things its full cos its not.  Or shouldn't be.

I'd like it to see whats in the root and see what I can dispose of but the commands listed didn't work.