It didn't

(just got back..)

I did have one of those DVI dongles but when I sold my old ATI 4350 card, i included it in the box with that - probably should have kept it

Anyway, i'll leave it for now and if i can get a DVI dongle then i might give it a go.

Yes I get this too, though it's the same on Windows. I know in the Nvidia settings there's an option to get the EDID info and you can link to it in the xorg.config which solves some problems. This worked for me on my last monitor but not on this one. No matter, I've got a decent HDMI to DVI cable and the image is great.

I'd hope this is an error in the listing ..

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/DVI-I-Male...item3a5c12f369

Or you can get someone to whip you with a bike chain. It would be more fun than torturing yourself with Gnome 3.

Mandriva and Ubuntu work fine with the new drivers. If only i could be satisfied with just those .. heh

I would honestly say if the new Ubuntu is working for you, just stick with it. There's a ton of updates coming through that are fixing the bugs, and to be honest I think it's gonna be a very good final release. At least better than 10.10 and 11.04.

Well i've actually ordered a new monitor cable and a DVI adaptor now, so when they arrive i'll see what happens.

And I won't try all the distros again ... honest .. *cough*

Well I was really quite impressed with this. I posted a bug on the openSUSE forums yesterday. Nothing really, just a game problem. That night a developer posted up to say he done the fix and would be submitting it within minutes. I got the update today and it works. Fantastic eh? It's happened before with openSUSE. They do seem to have a quick turnaround on bugs. I dunno what they put in the devs water, but it's working!

ooeerr .. my new monitor cable and DVI adapter have both arrived at the same time

although having just recently bought assassin's creed:brotherhood for the PC, I doubt i'll be re-formatting any time soon !!

(although I could always take another image copy of the hard drive .. hhmmmm )

ok my fellow techies I now have a T-mobile dongle that refuses to connect to the internet despite all settings being correct that i'm aware of. T-mobile swear they do not support Linuz though I have evidence they do. Options? I managed to speak to one guy who had gotten it to work on Ubuntu which is very similar to what i'm using now - Mint. However a second call and I was simply told there was no support. Are there packages that i need to install or command lined to be used as I think i've done what I can via the GUI. A step by step guide would be helpful if possible

http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopi...81696&p=474646

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1628999

http://support.t-mobile.co.uk/discus...ox=linux%0D%0A

well this is interesting. only your Ubuntu Forum link actually displayed until I hit Quote reply. Anyway none of these options worked and i must confess i'm tired of seeing the red flashing error light on the dongle. usb-modeswitch has been installed already and everything has been updated as far as I can see

Well tried fedora 15 with new monitor cable and DVI adapter. installed, ran updates, rebooted and installed ati drivers.

rebooted and .. gnome3 failed to load.

tried opensuse. installed, ran updates, rebooted and installed ati drivers.

rebooted and .. gnome3 failed to load.

i imagine ubuntu, and probably mandriva, would work since they worked with the old cable but, at the moment, i'm not really interested in either one.

Decided to re-install the newest Ubuntu. Grabbed a testing iso, just to play with for a while before the final comes out. It's clear they've fixed a lot of problems. No crashes or buggyness. So far it seems solid and very very nice. This is going to be a really great one, and I can't wait to stick the final one on this PC. Gonna play with this right up until the 13th when it comes out.

Really great. Keep an eye on it.

Assuming one uses Linux seriously, instead of just having a quick look-see, is there a way of transferring installed apps, files and settings between versions of, say, Ubuntu?

Or between versions of other distros?

Or between different distros?

What is best practice?

I use Linux exclusively at home and work, if that's what you mean by "seriously." Ubuntu is upgradeable on the fly, meaning that when a new version comes out, the update manager (which provides you with security and bug-fix updates every so often anyway) will notify you that, say, version 11.10 has been released. You can choose to upgrade, or not, but if you do, it'll upgrade your OS and software but keep your documents and settings intact. You can even carry on working while it updates, and then just reboot into the new version when it tells you.

This will work between different versions of Ubuntu, but different distributions have different ways of working. A lot of people who hop between distros will generally keep their documents and data on a separate HD partition, or on an external drive.

Jason's posts are a terrible ad for Linux if anyone new to the system visits this thread. It has to be said that the vast majority of users don't experience nearly the same level of issues that he has. Most of these problems come from endless distro-hopping; I'm surprised he hasn't wiped a hole in his HD yet. The advice I'd give to a newcomer is find a distro that works for you, and stick with it, if you want to do real work and not just play.

Thanks for that. I'm more or less settled on Ubuntu, after considering whether to stick with Pinguy. I decided not in the end.

I quite enjoy Jason's posts. I don't see them as a 'bad ad', merely the musings of an inveterate tinkerer.

I think you're probably right to stick with Ubuntu. I'll possibly get jumped on for this, but I think staying with the few big distros (Ubuntu, Fedora, OpenSUSE, Debian, Arch etc) is the way forward.

It's just a question of support - with Ubuntu and its huge community and corporate backing, you're pretty much guaranteed continued updates and support for the life of the OS. If you go with a distro maintained by one guy, and he goes and starts a new job, has kids, gets hit by a bus or something and can't spend hours maintaining, say, PinguyOS anymore, you're screwed. Linux history is littered with defunct distros.

Another advantage is that if you have a problem, and you Google it, chances are that someone else has had the same problem and fixed it in the past. Searching for, say, "T-Mobile dongle Ubuntu" is going to bring you more fruitful results than "T-Mobile dongle Pinguy".

While much of this is true and something that has occurred to me many times over the years, there is no doubt that "single-man" distros such as PCLinuxOS, Mint, Pinguy and others often have more care for the end user than the big names. While I think the Ubuntu team is approachable enough for regular users, distros like openSUSE and Fedora are less friendly to newcomers. Compare their forums to the PCLinuxOS and Mint forums and you can see for yourself. Woe betide you if you wander in not knowing how to use it!

So you're right that anything can happen and there are a lot of now defunct distros, but I still think that often they provide a better overall experience than the bigger names.

In other news still having fun with Ubuntu. Found a couple of issues that I've reported, and hopefully they'll be fixed as they're quite high in priority right now. Nothing too major. I have been impressed that they are also supplying Gnome 3's shell too, so you can simply log out if you're done with Unity, select Gnome, and log back in to the Gnome 3 shell. It works well too, though I don't find it as nicely integrated as the openSUSE one for example for some reason. Still, it's there and it works well.

I'll see how this progresses.

Thankyou, and yes you're right. It's really nothing more than tinkering to give me something to do. If I had to literally re-install from scratch each time I probably wouldn't bother, but since I obtained a free (and legal) copy of Paragon Hard Disk manager 2010, I can just take a complete image of the drive and mess around with various distros to see what happens.

But on the other side of the coin it does hack me off a teeny bit that you have to jump through so many hoops to get off the ground with some of these distros. Maybe that's why Ubuntu is so popular because it makes it all relatively easy?

Don't get me wrong, if I really wanted to get stuck in and get it all sorted and working I probably could - I think i remember a teeny bit from my 12 years of I.T. work

But at the moment i'm quite content to pretty much throw something at the wall and see if it sticks ...

"Being hit by a bus" etc.

I recently posted some alternatives to Karen's Replicator (Windows) for someone with problems in the PCA forums.

I commented that Karenware is great but seems a bit old and not updated recently.

Someone posted back that she died earlier this year. Very sad. She helped many with her Freeware.
(Karen S Kenworthy if you want further info. karenware.com gives no mention of her passing.)

Possibly, but then I do think you've had a particularly tough time of it. I haven't had anything like your problems with Linux, and I don't have 12 years of I.T experience behind me. If I'd gone through what you have, I'd have binned the idea a long time ago.

I think it's fair to say though, as I mentioned above, some of them don't exactly go out of their way to make things easy. Things like knowing which repositories to add can be a little cryptic to newcomers. That said, I don't think any of them nowadays are especially difficult to use. I've put this pre-release Ubuntu 11.10 on today, and I have to say it's not especially any easier to use than the openSUSE that preceded it.

To be honest, the fact is computers are funny things no matter what software you use.

I've been tinkering about with Linux over the last month or so.

The reason is, I still run XP and will do till 2014, when security updates are no longer produced, but I don't want to have to buy a new soundcard (no drivers above XP) and video, audio editing software (runs on XP) and a new OS.

So I'll dual boot Linux/Win XP, with the XP half nowhere near the internet!

The Linux distro that I find easiest to use at the moment is Mint as it has that vague Windows look.

I currently run Mint from a 2GB SD card, so I've got 3 years to play about and try and master all those Terminal commands!

I'm also playing about with Wine for those essential Windows programs (e.g. Digiguide) that have no Linux counterparts.

Looks as though all my storage drives are going to have to be NTFS as Linux reads/writes to that better than Windows does to ext.

Whats the reason you stick to Windows XP, hardware I assume?
I know its a community project, but have you looked at ReactOS.
I run one laptop and a desktop with Windows 7, and one acts as my Virtual machine with both vmware and virtualbox running Mac OSX and Ubuntu and one other test VM that I play with distros on.
I also run Ubuntu 11.04 on a T21 laptop that has 512mb of memory. I use this connected to my large Samsung TV for running online content, iplayer, youtube etc. It runs beautifully and quite fast for such an old machine. It has updated faultlessly through previous ubuntu releases and I recently tried the beta 11.10 on it and it runs very well. So, will be installing the GM of that on the 13th.
Ive had no video, wireless card etc driver issues with it on linux.

Ubuntu has a good number of backup tools, GUI and cmd that work well. Also Ubuntu One is their cloud for storing/sharing all your day to files.

I use digiguide, but do have a win7 OS. Must admit that is one of the only other pieces of software I would miss from Win OS, as Ive yet to find an alternative. But it runs fine with Wine I have seen in their forums.

Correct.

I have an audiophile (ish) soundcard - Marian Marc 4 Digi which I use for digitising vinyl and other bits and bobs.

I still use Cool Edit Pro 2.1 (which does work with Win 7), but sadly for the occasional video editing that I do MediastudioPro 7 does not.

The onboard sound works fine with Linux (as does everything else). So day to day stuff is going to work fine.

Looks interesting.

Might be the way forward for many who don't feel the need to upgrade to Win 7/8.


Thanks.