Fun for you surely?

You could say that .. although i'm slightly less obsessive about getting things to work nowadays. if it installs and runs relatively easily then we can go from there, but if not then it's no real hassle - i'll just reload my image copy and i'll be back up and running in around half an hour.

It meant reinstalling Mint after Sabayon cattled my laptop.

It screwed up for me as well. The installer did seem to install the graphics drivers from the get-go which was handy, but Gnome started in fallback mode.

Fannied around with an apparent method to resolve it for about 10 minutes and rebooted to a black screen so just binned it. It's one of those distros that, for some reason, leaves the disk in a state where my hard disk manager sees it as 3 virtual drives, so it means I have to boot up my windows installation disk to delete the partitions manually then reboot back to my hard disk manager to restore my shadow copy.

It's a pity because Sabayon is very attractive and quite highly regarded. Gnome 3 is a massive pita.

Tell me about it. The two main games i'm playing at the moment (PES 2011 and Assassins' Creed Brotherhood) both apparently work under Wine so i'd have no issues with switching over if i could just find a bloody Gnome 3 distro that worked !

What can I say? I've had no problems at all with Gnome 3 in any guise.

I'll be amazed if PES is working via WINE. Keep your Windows around for PC gaming, that's my advice, unless you are like me and enjoy the great indie games that often get Linux ports.

TBH, although I see you like torturing yourself, I'd find a Linux that works irrespective of desktop and stick with it. Mint is fine with Gnome 2.32.2. and manages perfectly well without Unity etc. Long may it continue.

No i bloody don't


Nothing really has the 'wow' factor for me though. Gnome 3 does it for me totally, but none of the other regular distros really grabbed me enough to make me want to stick with them.

Mandriva was almost there but not quite

Thats already been talked about in this thread, and others. Mint is great but they seem a little lost at the moment. Not sure what they will do when Gnome 2 support stops?

Let's hope Clem and co. can sort it out. Mint has been so good that I'd hate to go back to Ubuntu or (gulp) Windows.

I think it's only a couple of weeks before the full release of Fedora 16 so i'll hang around and give that a whirl I s'pose

Going back to openSUSE with Gnome 3 soon myself, probably tomorrow. I like Ubuntu, a lot, but there's still a couple of bugs that seem to hang around that I don't like. Had an issue with an encrypted swap partition that caused some problems, a couple of programs that use openGL seem to crash and shut themselves down, Compiz seems to use a lot of resources, and there's a lot of stuff that seems to be using memory that I just don't need such as Ubuntu One syncing.

It's not a crap release by any stretch. It's very very good. But I think I may have been spoilt with openSUSE and I still very much prefer Gnome 3 over Unity. I realised that today.

I'm thinking of trying opensuse. I installed bodhi 121 yesterday looks great but very unstable. First the Synaptic Package Manager broke now the Enlightenment desktop's gone down. Just installed it again for the third time in 2 days if it goes wrong again it's either opensuse or mint.
I've had no problems with ubuntu 11.10 though on my other pc. though.

Upgraded to Ubuntu 11.10 last night. Apart from the fact that it has re-instated Unity as the desktop it seems to have hidden the power off / shutdown icon.

Managed to find a shutdown icon by heading to the switch user screen but even though it offers a menu with "shutdown" in it, it does absolutely nothing.

So, right now I'm doing a hard power off to shut down. Is there a way to get it back in Unity, or is it just another reason to revert to Gnome? A quick Google suggests quite a few people are reporting this.

Also found that the advertised Gwibber icons are almost all just a bland document icon instead.

Well, what a mess.

I found the power off / shutdown icon. It's located off the screen to the right. Even if I adjust the screen settings it stays invisible. But at least it is clickable.

So, I switched back to Gnome. It's wiped all my settings of course.

So, I switched to Ubuntu 2d to see what it's like. There's no shutdown icon on there at all so now it's stuck. I can't log out to switch desktops.

Amusingly, the guest login desktop is absolutely fine though. I can switch the desktop at will on that.

As I said Gwibber is missing most of it icons. Again, widely reported on the net.

Just fired up Evolution Mail. Apparently a migration was required. So now I have two of every folder. The original and a localhost section. Sent an email. Got a horrible error relating to it not finding some folder or other. So i've migrated from a working email to a broken one. Nice.

So, Desktop, Social Network and Email are fubar.

Ubuntu 11.10. Epic Fail.

Having a day where nothing I try seems to work. I can't even get Lucid to update tonight from a fresh install:


Last edited by Tadpole : 19-10-2011 at 22:01

I randomly decided to try OpenSuse 12.1 beta. Installed and ran and, much to my surprise, had Gnome 3 as it's default shell.

Woohoo I thought. Installed the ATI drivers through YaSt. Rebooted and .. nothing. Green screen, 'busy' icon and nothing - no menu.

Rebooted, re-installed and re-installed ATI drivers. Used aticonfig to force the 1440x900 resolution. Rebooted and .. nothing. Same green screen, same 'busy' icon and nothing - no menu.

MEH

Well if we're sharing experiences, after all my yap, chat, and craptalk, I'm staying with Ubuntu. Why? Because Clonezilla norked up my openSUSE image that's why! Restored it yesterday, and it seemed to have done it OK, but it buggered up GRUB irreparably. Usually you can fix GRUB quite easily, and openSUSE still uses GRUB1 rather than 2, so I thought I'd be able to sort it, but nope. I get GRUB Error 6, and nothing I do can fix it. Tried restoring it with various commands, tried rescue discs, nothing.

So re-installed Ubuntu 11.10 fresh using a proper final image rather than my daily build one, and all has gone well. Dunno if it's just me but not had the problems this time with Google Earth and various graphics glitches, though I will add both Chrome and Earth are a massive PITA to install on Ubuntu 11.10 64 bit.

So it's about a month till the new openSUSE comes out, at which point I will re-assess Ubuntu and see how I feel. Again.

I actually found something called 'atiupgrade' for Suse that, allegedly, made the whole installation procedure for the drivers easy and straightforward.

i bet you can't guess what happened

I reckon you'll probably just have to keep an eye on the status of the ATI drivers for a while. A lot of people are reporting issues with them at the moment, but apparently the next lot are supposed to be fixed up for Gnome 3. I know openSUSE and Fedora are due new releases in about a month with Gnome 3.2, so this could be worth keeping an eye on.

I will add that I am definitely starting to get the hang of Unity. Starting to bomb around it no problem now. It's really quite nice once you're in. I'm finding that I can access the menus better than I did in Gnome 3, where I used to mostly type an application's name in order to find it rather than use the menus in the shell. Unity's menus feel closer at hand, if you know what I mean.

My main concerns with Ubuntu are how does it continue when it is starting to move so far away from Gnome? Won't it become difficult to maintain in this way? They've already had to dump Evolution for Thunderbird because it won't work on Ubuntu. That's fine by me as I prefer Thunderbird, but what next? I dunno, but Ubuntu is definitely starting to feel a bit 'out there' on its own.

Apologies for deploying the playthings outside of the sandbox earlier.

Managed to get back to Unity desktop with a hard power reset, so I'll stay there for now. At least it has (a concealed) shutdown option.

Evolution has left me with duplicated mail folders but I cured the sending error by changing an option in my sent config. Presumably the upgrade migration decided to stuff the option. An attempt to make me use Thunderbird? But basically mail is working.

Tonight though, an automatic update has been attempted and failed. Many errors about package failures and I've done a partial upgrade apparently. So yet more flakiness from 11.10. It really is looking a bit of a pup.

I've not had these particular problems. I know that Ubuntu is moving away from Evolution, so yes expect Thunderbird as their main email application.

If you're after a shutdown button, best thing to do is go into the dash, then System, and you'll find it there. I don't know if you can do this in 2D Unity, but in 3D Unity you can just drag it across to your launcher bar as a quick handy shutdown icon. This is exactly the same as I used to have it with the AWN dock ages ago and works well.

As for updates I think the servers are getting hammered at the moment. I had problems getting some programs earlier for my recent fresh install. Be back to speed soon I would have thought.

A list of latest bug fixes.
http://www.winehq.org/announce/1.3.31

Just bought another new monitor lead but spent a few quid more on this one - it's a DVI to VGA lead with gold connectors (not that that would necessarily make a huge difference).

Anyway, the difference in quality is already hugely noticeable - the clarity and sharpness of the screen is amazing, especially for this ropey old generic flatscreen.

So might be worth having (yet) another punt on Fedora later on - the fact that it's a properly wired DVI to VGA lead and not using an adaptor might mean it correctly identifies it ?

Dunno. If i'm bored later, i'll give it a whizz