Impromptu drunken posting night!!!

[featherynscale]

Notes from an install:

Windows XP is still evil. I attempted an upgrade and basically just blew up my entire system, oh yes, children.

I has Linux now. Also, vodka.

Nothing can stop me now. Bwa. Ha ha.

Comments

I need a Penguin Icon, I could have used it for hockey too...

[lexpendragon.livejournal.com]

Linux? What flavor? Any toppings?

I've got a double scoop of OpenSuse, with KDE drizzled over it, and Compiz sprinkles on Duke.

Re: I need a Penguin Icon, I could have used it for hockey too...

[featherynscale.livejournal.com]

Ubuntu 8.someodd. :) I'm currently using the KDE desktop. So far, I have installed nothing else of any significance, but I'm sure that will change.

Re: I need a Penguin Icon, I could have used it for hockey too...

[lexpendragon.livejournal.com]

I highly recommend SpinnyCube, or Compiz as everyone else calls it. It's a lot o fun, and multiple desktops are very useful.

Re: I need a Penguin Icon, I could have used it for hockey too...

[triadruid.livejournal.com]

Isn't that the one that was making your Flash all crazy? We do a lot of Flash games around here...

Also, do you sync with an iPod at all on Linux, or do you go through Wine for that, or some third thing?

Also also, icon in payment:

Re: I need a Penguin Icon, I could have used it for hockey too...

[lexpendragon.livejournal.com]

Not sure what it was payment for, but thanks! This rules!

Also, the problem seems to be when flash or anything else tries to take up full screen, because Compiz also takes up full screen, and they fight because of the poor drivers. If the flash game takes up your whole screen, it could get buggy. If you play it in a window, it doesn't.

As for synching, I couldn't say. I don't use an iPod, and any transfers to my mp3 players is purely a file transfer. Those work fine.

Google tells me that Ubuntu opens iPods fine.

Re: I need a Penguin Icon, I could have used it for hockey too...

[featherynscale.livejournal.com]

That is a terribly useful article. I feel pretty good about the prospects of getting that to work. :)

Thanks, 'Lex Support! :)

Re: I need a Penguin Icon, I could have used it for hockey too...

[triadruid.livejournal.com]

Ah, okay, good. I don't think anything we do wants Flash to have the fullscreen.

ipod

[rfunk.livejournal.com]

Heh, I just got an iPod Touch, and I went through a bit of pain getting wine to run iTunes (slowly), only to discover that the necessary USB/iPod support isn't in wine yet. duriyah's XP machine to the rescue. But after the iPod is initially activated (dunno if pre-Touch/iPhone models require that), both amarok and gtkpod can send music to the iPod. (Though the Touch and iPhone require slight hacking first, which is quite worthwhile anyway.)

Stay tuned for my iPod experience writeup (including the Linux part) soon.

Re: ipod

[triadruid.livejournal.com]

That sounds really bloody useful. I don't have an iPod, but would be interested to read that post anyway.

[greektoomey.livejournal.com]

Tell me you know that's a cellular automata glider from the Game of Life.

Re: I need a Penguin Icon, I could have used it for hockey too...

[popefelix.livejournal.com]

8.04 most likely. One of these days I'll upgrade.... :)

Re: I need a Penguin Icon, I could have used it for hockey too...

[triadruid.livejournal.com]

8.04 indeed. I'm liking what I see so far (KDE 3 and Mozilla 3.5, among other things), so I may upgrade as well soon.

It's been remarkably easy to get her help her get up and running, so far...

Re: I need a Penguin Icon, I could have used it for hockey too...

[featherynscale.livejournal.com]

It's been ludicrously easy so far. lexpendragon assures me that this blissful period will not last, because eventually, there will be a weird bug and everything will go KABLOOEY. Which reminds me, I should make a hard-copy backup of my files, now that I moved them off my storage drive and onto my main drive. I remember how you ate your system a couple times after initially getting it running...

Also, I'm appreciating your assistance. I don't know the names for things yet, and in this world, the name of a thing seems to have relatively little to do with what it actually *does*.

Eating my own system for breakfast

[triadruid.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I still haven't figured out why that was, but it's a primary reason I haven't upgraded to 8.x yet. I need to get a second HD in there, because I cannot imagine trying to burn all my files to CD-ROM...

Just let me know if I'm getting 'preachy' in my help; I have a lowered risk of that because I don't know much myself, but it's always a risk with this steep of a learning curve.

Re: Eating my own system for breakfast

[featherynscale.livejournal.com]

I'm not talking about burning all my files, just a few things. My checkbook accounts, for one. (Although I think I might have to get a new copy of Moneydance... or something. We should be able to get back on the same page with that now that my box should be able to talk to your box again.) Also, the Gaia stuff, and so on. Anything I might actually *need*. And maybe pictures, although most of those are on Flickr now.

Also, you should know by now that I tell you when I'm annoyed with you. ;) The other side of that is that if I am annoying you with my lack of vocabulary, you should say so.

Re: Eating my own system for breakfast

[triadruid.livejournal.com]

I just wanted to make sure you knew I was fine with you doing it BEFORE you get to the 'mad enough to blow out street lights' stage. :)

And no, lack of vocabulary doesn't harm me in any way. Taking over your trackball would be another area where you are free to smack me if you like. :)

Re: Eating my own system for breakfast

[featherynscale.livejournal.com]

I just wanted to make sure you knew I was fine with you doing it BEFORE you get to the 'mad enough to blow out street lights' stage.

Hey! I haven't blown up any electrical devices in... a long time. At least since November of 2006. Maybe November of 2005, even. I only know it was November because the device in question was Christmas lights, but it was still warm enough to go out in the street to blow up said lights.

Also, srsly. Don't touch my trackball without asking, if I'm sitting there using it. That's not actually a 'grabbing the steering wheel when someone else is driving' level violation, because nobody is actually in danger of being injured or killed, but in my brain, it's roughly equivalent.

Re: I need a Penguin Icon, I could have used it for hockey too...

[popefelix.livejournal.com]

So 8.04 defaults to KDE by default? I'm still on 7.xx, and it's got Gnome.

Re: I need a Penguin Icon, I could have used it for hockey too...

[featherynscale.livejournal.com]

No, it defaults to Gnome. I switched to KDE because that's what triadruid is running, and I figured it would be easier to pick up the vocabulary if I was speaking the same dialect as he does. On first blush, though, I like Gnome a little better, so I might go back to that when I get the hang of this one.

Re: I need a Penguin Icon, I could have used it for hockey too...

[popefelix.livejournal.com]

There's a lot of debate in the Linux community on the topic of "Gnome vs. KDE". Any more I'm very "six of one" about it. :)

Re: I need a Penguin Icon, I could have used it for hockey too...

[triadruid.livejournal.com]

I like the new Gnome a lot better than the last time I installed Linux (which was around 2001-2003, and Mandrake..7?). But I was a big KDE fan then, and enough things translated well that I didn't see the need for a whole new learning curve.

Re: I need a Penguin Icon, I could have used it for hockey too...

[featherynscale.livejournal.com]

It looks like I can make KDE do all the things that I so-briefly liked about Gnome, too, so it's probably no big deal.

I'm a bit mystified about the multiple desktops thing, though. What's the point of that?

Re: I need a Penguin Icon, I could have used it for hockey too...

[triadruid.livejournal.com]

I use it for workflow, when I use it at all. Graphics programs go in one window, Coding/calculations in another, games on a third. Saves time on Alt-Tabbing when you're working with a million windows, for one thing..

That seems to be what the Compiz thing that Lex keeps going on about. He might be able to shed more light on it...

Re: I need a Penguin Icon, I could have used it for hockey too...

[rfunk.livejournal.com]

Oh, THAT sort of multiple desktops.... oops.

I put my browser on one desktop, my mail on another, my command line and editor on another, and (sometimes) a file-management window on a fourth. Cuts down on the clutter on my screen at any one time. (Multiple monitors helps even more!)


Compiz basically gives you 3D window/desktop effects sorta like Vista. I'm pretty sure YouTube and Google Video have a bunch of demos online.

Multiple desktops

[rfunk.livejournal.com]

The point is that the system was designed as interchangable pieces from the ground up, with a 30+ year lineage of incremental changes and swapping out pieces for different ones. You have different groups of people working on different pieces, and often different groups of people work on similar functionality in different ways. Usually this ends up with one solution dominating the others (though the others rarely disappear entirely), but Gnome vs KDE is a case where two solutions fairly evenly dominate the others.

KDE predates Gnome by about a year; Gnome started because of some copyright licensing difficulties in KDE, resolved long ago but long after Gnome had become established. However, KDE itself was intended as a successor to a whole set of much simpler desktop environments (e.g. Motif, twm, fvwm). If the system hadn't been designed to allow choosing the desktop environment, it wouldn't have been able to evolve into what we have now.

Re: Multiple desktops

[featherynscale.livejournal.com]

Oh, no, sorry. I wasn't asking "Why is there Gnome and KDE?", I was asking, "Why, in KDE, do you have four desktops? What is the advantage to that?".

[revolution-grrl.livejournal.com]

XP is evil, indeed. I just got a second computer last night, used, and am seriously thinking I'll make it a UNIX machine.

[featherynscale.livejournal.com]

I was going to just upgrade 2000 to XP, so I could keep all my programs and settings and whatnot. Then, the install burped and wiped all that stuff. At that point, I figured I had nothing to lose, might as well go ahead and make the switch. That was before I started drinking, even.

[revolution-grrl.livejournal.com]

LOL

I've been wanting to do a UNIX machine for a while now. This new one seems like a good opportunity.