if i could get KDE to look and behave like this

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wXxe9...eature=related

Then i would like it, i will have to put some time aside sometime and have a play.

I did have Mint Cinnamon installed, and I absolutely loved it. I switched back to Ubuntu Unity for a couple of reasons; firstly I had some crashes and freezes that caused me some problems, and secondly I rather missed using Unity. Some things are definitely much quicker on Unity. I'm keeping an eye on Cinnamon though and will definitely install it in the future. My problem is I like all the DE's!


I didn't watch all the video, but that is the KDE Plasma desktop, and it's very easy to set up on any KDE install. Lovely innit? It's the KDE equivalent of Gnome 3, Unity etc. I set it up when I had Chakra installed and really enjoyed it. The nice thing about KDE is they've taken on the new mobile paradigm, but they haven't thrown out the original desktop setup.

Maybe I've been too harsh. They do seem to be putting a lot of work into KDE, and that has to be a good thing. I'll keep it around a while longer and see how I feel in a few days.

That looks like an OS on steroids

In this ever-changing Linux world in which I live in...

Enjoyed KDE on Netrunner so much, I thought today sod it, I'm going to install Kubuntu 12.04. So that's what I did, and I absolutely love it! Netrunner is very nice and has a lot to offer someone new to Linux, but it also includes a boat load of stuff I never use, so thought it better to create my own install and preferences from the default Kubuntu. Very, very happy to be back on KDE after many years. Feels like home, as if the other ones are just playing at it. KDE just does everything without any fuss, but it can take a bit of delving into the settings to uncover the best of it. Happily I've pretty much got it set up how I like it, and I reckon I'm settled.

Yeah right...

You're a worry.

There's something new I had to turn off in 12.04, but most would probably like it. It's called 'unclutter' and it hides the on screen pointer after a very short idle time. Great idea, except the time doesn't seem to be adjustable and it has the effect of also hiding chromium's pop up status bar before a url can be read. So it had to go.

Just edit /etc/default/unclutter (as root) to disable it.

I like my desktop without all that swish animation stuff, so I just turn off a few things like scroll wheel virtual desktop switching and screen corner effects (they just annoy me when I trigger them accidentally) and turn animation speed up to very fast.

I like layering opaque desktop widgets. Can look really good on the right background. And last, but not least; I'm quite stunned by the apparent capabilities of some visualisation software I built from source from a Git repo today. It's called Vovoid VSXu and has server, player, and artiste components. Even the GUI of the latter does everything in OpenGL which makes a beautiful and intuitive composition environment. And then there's the demo. You can watch it here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ktkS7A5CZ8g

But it's not (quite) the same as creating it with your own hardware. Takes a bit of messing to compile it, but it's well worth it I think:

http://www.vsxu.com/development/compiling-from-source

Luna, the girl in the video, is your helper in the artiste program.

Hey Linux users! I've got a couple of questions (might be a bit long though!):

1. I've got an old laptop from late 2004 which is currently running Windows XP and my mum's currently using it as I have a Macbook as my main laptop. She got a new laptop now so this old machine will be used as a Linux box. It has a 60GB hard drive, 1GB RAM and an Intel Centrino chip (which I can't remember the speed of). Which Linux distros would run the best on this?

2. Is it possible to reformat the hard drive and remove Windows completely when installing a Linux distro? I want to remove Windows from the laptop altogether to leave as much space as possible for Linux distros.

3. How do you set it up to dual boot two Linux distros?

You can tell I'm a complete novice when it comes to Linux Any help will be appreciated!

1. Any Linux would probably run on it. They all use the same kernel after all, but a lightweight distro would boot quicker and you wouldn't sacrifice much if you used one. I prefer Kubuntu, which isn't lightweight, as I know it fairly well and it's highly configurable. I put it on a friend's laptop recently and we are both pretty impressed with it. I don't change distro much, unlike some here who would be able to make suggestions of a lighter one.

2. Yes, the installation procedure should give you the option to erase everything and use the entire drive, but if you can figure your way round the manual partitioning option, then you could make a partition for the other OS ready for dual booting. You'd need three partitions really, but if you go with the first way I mentioned you can probably reduce the size of the main partition later...

3. When you install the second Linux, any good modern installer will find the previous install and ask how to proceed. Easy if you already have a spare partition, but either way the last thing the installer does is run a thing called Grub which detects all the runnable operating systems on all the fixed drives and generates a boot option screen, which you'll see each time you boot the lappy.

All Linux distros like a bit of hard drive space for swapping chunks of memory out somewhere when it's very busy. It'll probably want 2GB in your case, which is fine.

Hope it helps.

Probably should mention that you should have it on the charger during any installation. There will be a lot of updating after and during a successful install, so best keep it plugged in the network as well. Your keyboard is probably 'UK plus extended Win keys' or some such description.

I would check out LinuxMint as a beginner cnbcwatcher. Its pretty noob friendly as far as linux goes.

Thanks archiver. I was thinking of Ubuntu and Linux Mint at first and then eventually try other distros. Kubuntu might be worth looking at too. I'll definitely reformat the hard drive when installing the first distro as the hard drive isn't the biggest and removing Windows altogether would give me a lot more space on it. Is Grub part of every distro?

The laptop is always plugged in as the battery is f'ed up. It doesn't last more than about an hour on battery and it only had 3-4 hours battery life when I got it first back in late 2004. How times have changed since then! I might start on it later next week or the week after next as I've to set up mum's new laptop and dad's new iPad, amongst other things. She can use the old laptop while I'm getting the new one ready for her. Once the new laptop is set up the old one is going to be used for Linux. It has a standard Windows keyboard.

That and it might work better on the old computer I'm going to be using it on.

The good thing about it being older is that everything is pretty likely to just work. The necessary configuration tweaks were all worked out long ago and you'll hopefully benefit from that. For those reasons it's rarely worth trying older versions of Linux.

Grub gets installed (which means writing to the MBR if you've heard of such a thing) even if it's the first install to a blank disc, but doesn't show up if there's no choice to be made. If the one you choose to try asks if it's OK to write the MBR - you do.

I think you'll enjoy doing it and be as impressed as most seem to be these days. There's usually someone here if you get stuck with anything.

Couple of differences to remember - Install any software you want using the package manager program the OS provides for that purpose. It's called Muon in Kubuntu and Synaptic in others, but always use it rather than download anything you find on the www, because that way you get the version you need and any dependencies it requires.

It's unlikely you can improve on the hardware drivers you'll be using, by downloading others and trying to install them. It's very easy to get misled by out of date information out there, so trust the updates. They cover the whole thing from kernel and driver modules to applications and libraries (dlls).

I'm sure there was something else. :sleep:

The concept of "it just works" is not unfamiliar to me It'll be fun playing around with a new OS. I've never used any Linux distro apart from using Ubuntu briefly on a friend's laptop. She had it because her laptop came with Windows Vista and she hated it (doesn't everyone?) so she put Linux on it. According to her XP was the last good version of Windows. I think I'm going to have fun turning an old XP laptop into a Linux box

The "just works" aspect (if it indeed does) is a little more impressive than what you may be referring to. Apple achieve it by having control of the hardware on which it runs (and by adopting well established free kernel code and some of its developers). What you are about to install is the product of millions of mostly unpaid hours of work, dedicated to producing something which will work on all known i386/amd64 hardware. That it usually does just that continues to amaze and impress me and I salute the developers, one and all.

Well it's not always perfect for people. It works well for me, but it still has its moments! The best you can do is approach it with an open mind. I would definitely say that for a home user, anything with the words "buntu" in the name should do you well!

I'm still on Kubuntu and absolutely adoring KDE4. Really, its just so nice and vibrant after Gnome. But we'll see. It's not without a couple of bugs. I've had it lock up on me twice so far. Nothing serious, and I could log out with ALT-SysRq-K, but it was a bit disconcerting. If there's one thing that can put me off a distro, it's crashes. But I was in the middle of faffing about so I'll let it pass for now. If it gets regular, I'll be off again.


Yes I know. I change distro nearly as much as I change my undercrackers. At least every other week...

As you say you are a complete newbie to Linux, i would say download a few different ones and run them as a live cd\dvd.

its not perfect and some updates could be missing, and it will be slower than a full install. But it will give you a feel for the different looks of the Distros.

http://www.psychocats.net/ubuntu/unityplasma

Gives the difference from Gnome to KDE.
These tend to be what you could call full fat OSes lots of effects and programs etc pre installed.

There are skinnier ones available, Xfce and Lmde

Thats even more of a worry

Ps they are in the process of releasing KDE updates.
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...tem&px=MTEyODI
So hopefully that will improve things for you.

Exactly. That's the great thing about Linux - it's all open source I think I'm gonna enjoy it. I do love my Macbook though and it's my main computer. The Linux box is an old Windows XP laptop (my old one) that'll no longer be in use.


I'm going to download several distros. I might install Ubuntu first as I know that one because my friend used it. First though I've to remove Windows from the laptop. Then I'll install maybe Ubuntu and download some other distros and run them from a live CD (or do I need to be still running Windows on it to do that?). If there's any I like I might install them as a second OS on the hard drive. Once Windows is gone I'll have loads of hard drive space free I'll definitely be posting in here with questions and updates on how I'm getting on.

You dont ned to remove windows, just save anything you need.. docs pics music etc.
As Ubuntu will ask during the install if you want to use the whole hard drive (other options are available) But if you select use whole hard drive it will wipe windows of the drive for you.

Once windows has gone and you have Ubuntu installed you can still use a live cd of another linux os whilst not affecting youre Ubuntu install. ps you can run the live cds without any OS on youre hard drive
Some will even run from a usb stick and store youre settings on it, clever Linux

Thanks. I want to remove Windows from the laptop as I need all the hard drive space I can get (I only have 60GB which isn't really a lot these days but it was loads in 2004). If I downloaded the latest Ubuntu online and burned it on CD is it possible to boot from the CD?

Yes you can boot from a live CD. Just make sure that you burn the downloaded .ISO file as an ISO image.

I'm not sure how to do that in mac, but in Windows 7 it's an option in the right click menu - "Burn Image" or wtte.
In XP you would need (free) third party software such as ISO Recorder to do the same job.

N.B You may have to change the boot order in the BIOS, to put the CD drive ahead of the HDD, in order for it to boot from CD.

A typical Ubuntu install will take up around 3GB space. That's with all the default applications installed, so 60GB is a wealth of space.

Not Linux, but you could also give Haiku a try. Like Linux it can run from a live CD and is extremely light-weight and fast. A Haiku install will only take up about 600MB of disk space, but it is severely lacking in applications. If you only need a web browser though, it might be suitable. Rather than using the current alpha download the latest nightly instead as there's been a lot of work done since the alpha was released.

Haiku's an open-source recreation of BeOS, and before Apple bought NeXT to create Mac OS X they considered buying Be Inc to base their next-gen OS on BeOS. Since you're a Mac user it might be interesting for you to see what OS X could have been had they taken a different path.

You should give Puppy Linux a try.

Slacko 5.3.3 is the latest state-of-the-art official Puppy so you could try that, but the version "Wary 5.3" is the current official one for older and lower spec hardware.

On older computers I found that Ubloatu and its derivatives didn't really run any faster that XP.

With Puppy you can boot from a Live CD and it runs at full speed right away. Loads into RAM so no fetching of data from the CD.

Create a save-file of half a gig at first shutdown and store files inside that or outside of it in any partition.

Test like this for as long as you want or you have gparted on board which easily re-formats the hard-drive (removing smelly old Windows) and you can then do a full install or often even better is what is called a Frugal Install to the partition.

Once you have created the Live CD and booted from it it is just a case of clicking and following the instructions to get to your chosen set-up.

Thanks. I'll Google and see how I can make it in Mac and what software I need (if any). My dad has Windows 7 so I can always ask him to do it for me on his laptop. As for the boot order, the laptop I'm gonna be installing Linux on asks me to press F12 or F10 (can't remember which) to boot from CD.


Haiku certainly sounds interesting. I'll definitely take a look at it. The Ubuntu installation sounds ideal for my laptop's small hard drive. As for applications I'll probably install Firefox, OpenOffice, GIMP and whatever else I find interesting or useful.