I've been using Linux for nearly ten years, and on my main machine I have only used three distros in my time. First was Mandrake, then in 2006 I went and tried Ubuntu... then six months later I ended my journey with Debian, where I still am. However, I have an old laptop that I did try out a few other distros on some years ago, but it wasn't a machine I mainly used, so I was a bit more experimental with it. But, it has, for the last four years, Debian installed on it, so that's that. As you can see, I'm content in being distro stuck.

Went to my mums today to install their new OS on my old PC that I gave them. It's always a bit of a tricky one, as the hardware is pretty crusty these days (AMD Sempron 2200+, Nvidia 6200, 768Mb RAM) but they still need something pretty functional on the desktop where possible. They've had both Ubuntu and PCLinuxOS on it in the past, but the time had come to properly move them to something lighter than KDE4 or Gnome.

I decided on Xubuntu 11.04, as I kinda liked the look of it, it's light, and they get to stay in the Ubuntu family with it. I have to say, I've never used it or the XFCE desktop before, but it really wowed me today. For those people who are upset at the passing of Gnome 2, I would definitely say you need to take a serious look at Xubuntu. I think the "lightweight" tag does it an injustice, as it seems to me to be as fully formed as the old Gnome 2. It's just brilliant. Please don't let the idea of it being for older hardware put you off. I would be very happy to use it on my own desktop, no problem.

Only issue is you have to install Libre Office from the software centre, as it comes with AbiWord out of the box, but this isn't a problem at all. Other than that, it was trouble free, which was especially lovely after my poor experience with mainline Ubuntu.

So please do look into it. It really reminded me of when I first discovered Ubuntu years ago, and how it instantly refreshed my PC. It would seem to me that just as Unity and Gnome 3 sail into the distance on their higher spec, there's XFCE powering in, just in time to save the day!

I use Xfce on my Debian systems, and it's fairly light but doesn't feel lightweight. I agree with you: it's well worth checking out for those bored or put off by Gnome/KDE.

BTW, doesn't Xubuntu's (that was the Ubuntu distro that I used for six months some years ago before I went with Debian) Xfce link to quite a few Gnome libraries and dependencies, adding to the resources when in use? One thing I noticed when I went from Xubuntu to Debian with Xfce is how much even lighter it was. Then again, that was back in 2006, so things might have changed and got tighter with the dependencies.

I think it used to do quite a bit but I think less so nowadays. Like I say I've never really used it before, so I'm not all that up on it, but I didn't notice anything that seemed to be using Gnome or Gtk2, though I'm sure there's a bit of that somewhere in certain apps.

It just seems to have hit the right note, just as mainline Ubuntu is entering a new phase. It feels brilliant and natural, just like old Gnome. To me it's a no-brainer for those upset by Unity and the new direction.

Just a quick and handy tip for any Linux users who have any problems with full-screen flash on Youtube. There's a nifty little download called "Flash Replace" which when installed in Firefox runs an full-screen perfectly smooth without using flash. It's quite customisable too, so should please techno-geeks who like to play around with things.

Mark

That's kinda cool. I think the dev is the same guy (same name) of a chap on the Ubuntu Forums. Personally though, I just entered the WebM trial and have been really happy with that. I still get the occasional Flash video, but mostly it's the newer technology I'm seeing and it's been great so far.

Couldn't resist a little hopping....

Been using AriOS for a couple of days. Very impressed with the polish of it. It's a similar beast to Mint, lots of useful stuff installed on top of the basic ubuntu. Even firefox has been nicely configured with useful add-ons.

Yes, I seen AriOS 3 on Distrowatch and it does look very interesting. The screenshot shows and interesting take on the layout of the icons etc. It also says it's super stable on their website. For the first time ever my Ubuntu 11.04 has crashed a couple of times these last few days by kinda resetting back to the log-in screen by itself. This is something I have never experienced in a Linux distro before!

Mark

After waiting and hoping that Lenovo would release the ThinkPad x120e in Europe for a couple of months i went ahead and ordered a netbook at the beginning of the week (only for Lenovo to announce the ThinkPad x121e yesterday).

Since it's only going to be used for the occasional bit of writing and web browsing i went with the cheapest netbook i could find, the eMachines EM350, which was a reasonable £159.

The netbook arrived today and i tried a few live distros before sticking with Linux Mint Debian Edition.

Installation went fine (took about 45 minutes) and i edited /etc/apt/sources.list to track Debian stable before updating.

After updating i found that the Linux Mint packaged version of Firefox 5.0 wouldn't run (no doubt it's built for Debian testing), so i removed it and installed the Iceweasel 5.0 from the Debian Mozilla team.

Adding the backports repository let me replace OpenOffice.org with LibreOffice and after removing a few superfluous Mint packages i had a nice little system.

The wireless card is a BCM4313 802.11b/g/n & Bluetooth hybrid and the wireless part is supported by the open-source broadcom driver after installing "firmware-brcm80211" so ndiswrapper can be uninstalled. Unfortunately the Bluetooth aspect of the card doesn't seem to be supported under Linux.

The webcam works perfectly, but i hit a bug with the microphone. After reading this bug report i got some idea of what the problem was. Running "pavucontrol" and then dropping the balance of the left mic input to 0% while pushing the right mic input to 100% soon solved the problem.

The only things that don't work on this netbook are the Bluetooth and the SD card reader, and the SD card reader can be made to work by compiling a driver.

If anyone's looking for a very cheap netbook to run Linux on i can recommend the eMachines EM350.

The only negative i have about it is that it stutters a bit on playback of 720p content, but that's really to be expected on a machine of this spec.

Ooooh, there's a new-boy on the block called PinguyOS and its getting rave reviews. It seems to be getting better reviews than Linux Mint as far as a distro with all the bells and whistles for newbies goes.

Its first release was only in 2010 and already its doing a fine job. Has anybody tested it yet? If not, I'll install it asap and give you guys a run-down on how it works.

Mark

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...item&px=OTYzNw

Mint is finally making much needed improvements to there Debian based release.

http://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=1781

They are also linking a KDE release to Debian as well.

http://blog.linuxmint.com/

Looks like they are moving slowly but surely away from Ubuntu.

So, after reading reviews and trying out the Live CD I've finally bit the bullet and installed PinguyOS over my main PCs Ubuntu 11.04 installation. Wow! What a difference a finally tweaked OS makes, this OS is absolutely stunning!

Its all the best bits of Ubuntu 11.04 and Mint 11.04 all mixed together with a slick new theme and all the software and codecs you ever need. Every little bit of it has been thought out, and its damn fast and looks stunning.

What's more, it has Ubuntu Software Centre on there, and Mint System Updater, so it really has the best of both worlds, again all tweaked. Plus Firefox comes pre-installed with a ton of extensions that are actually useful!

I'm not usually one of distro-hoping, but believe me guys when I say that this Gnome 2 based distro is really something special (just look up some reviews on web and youtube!).

Mark

Scooby in shameless thread bumpage lol!

I thought you were really happy with Ubuntu. What happened?

I Thought Adobe was abandoning us Linux users

http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/flashplayer11.html

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...item&px=OTY3MA

For the first time ever my main system started crashing!!! Pinguy is Ubuntu and Mint super-tweaked and really impressive. I can still do all I did in Ubuntu, but even more quickly and impressivley!

Not really shamless bumping, its general Linux chat

Mark

Just come across this, I think it's funny how times are a changin'

http://video.linux.com/video/2127

lol. Very good! I enjoyed that video, and the times there are-a-changin'.

One quick note, I've been using Pinguy OS 11.04 now for a short while, installed it on main PC, Laptop and Acer One Netbook and it runs flawlessly on all systems. I've not seen a Linux distro look this good and work this good straight out of the box.

I need to get little Linux stickers to replace the Windows 7 stickers on my laptops!!! Now, that's a way to pimp your machine, lol.

Mark

Finally upgraded my OS from Mint 7 to Mint 11, as ever, a faultless install and everything seems to be running as it should.

http://kde.org/announcements/4.7/

Ubuntu One Cloud storage has been raised from 2GB to 5GB. This is brilliant news for free users like myself. Synchronized folders with Ubuntu One is seamless and extremely useful. They say they have one million users now. I'm surprised it isn't more though as it is such a seamless part of the OS.

Mark

seriously, why do distros other than ubuntu make it so f*****g hard to install and set up an nvidia card?

you install ubuntu, it detects the 7300LE, install the drivers, reboot and job done. no fannying around, no nothing.

you try something else and it's "Oh, we've removed the nvidia drivers from the install disk but you can just install them with the package manager blah blah blah..."

but then you download the latest driver script from nvidia and then you have to stop the x server.

so you have to find out the command to do that.

then you have to run the install script as root and hope it doesn't give you any errors.

then you reboot and find the x server hasn't restarted, so you have to restart that.

then you have to run nvidia-settings and, if you're lucky, it's got the resolution for your monitor (1440x900 in my case).

so you apply it, it works. you reboot and it hasn't saved.

so you run nvidia-settings as root and find it has suddenly forgotten that it actually had your resolution in the first place.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRGGGHHH !!

*bangs head against wall*

*breaks something*

Do these other distro makers do it deliberately? Do they design it so that it's difficult to set up the graphics card as sort of a pre-determining test to see if you're actually intelligent enough to use their distro?

I'm not an idiot (i think..) by any stretch and i've worked in IT long enough to have a decent idea of what i'm doing but when i'm 3 HOURS in to trying to set up this f*****g graphics card and still not getting anywhere i have to wonder ..

ARRRRGGGGHHHHHH !!!

I'm not looking for help or advice here, i'm just pissed off and needed a rant

and now, when i've finally figured out the nvidia card, got the drivers installed and saved so that it boots up correctly set, i get another super fun problem with the disk not ejecting.

or ejecting then grabbing it right back in again before it gets all the way out ..

i'm going out

I added Linux Mint to my virtual machines. It seems quite good. It has more applications installed and has flash already installed. Still got to try it out more.

Just installed Ubuntu 11 in a VM (first time user) and i'm deleting it soon i don't want to spend more than 10min leaning how to install flash 11 and the software center says flash 10 is 65mb I can't even open the termial.

Maybe by in another 10 years...