I've been ridiculously impressed with it so far - Cinnamon is basically a bunch of people saying "what the fuck internet?" about Gnome 3, and adapting it's good ideas into a user interface that makes sense (it's very Win 7 like, which is a good thing).
It's also Ubuntu-based, if you're familiar with that paradigm.
EDIT: In other news though, what the fuck ddclient. It is just about fucking impossible to make it behave sensibly on a Linux router (i.e. hey, if you fail to update on reconnect, maybe keep trying until you succeed?).
I'll also suggest Xubuntu. I didn't like Unity at all, but Xfce is pretty fantastic. I've also found Xubuntu to be faster and snappier overall than plain old Ubuntu. It's also stupidly simple to install if you go the Wubi route, but since you already have the partition setup this isn't necessarily a concern for you.
I've also heard great things about Mint, but I haven't tried it.
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augustwhere you come from is goneRegistered Userregular
I've been running Ubuntu 12.4 for the past couple of weeks, and I find it a vast improvement over my old Win 7 setup. I'm thinking of staying with a linux distro, but my only problem is gaming. I've been trying to use Wine and Playonlinux, but I can't seem to get either to work well. Is there any site that you could recommend that would have newbie friendly step by step for setting up different games?
The only distros where Wine's worked well for me have been Arch (my current), Crunchbang, Ubuntu and Mint. Arch has definitely been the best, and Ubuntu probably the second best, though that might be Crunchbang as well.
However, I think it might be less about the distro than it is about having a current version of wine and properly setting up your games. Even then, some games are just garbage for Linux; take for instance, much to my frustration, anything made by Zeboid (sp?) games. It's like they've purposely developed their games to be impossible to run on Linux. Even with games that work, I wouldn't expect it to be a flawless experience, though some games are nearly so.
Games that I've recently got running pretty well: Dragon Age: Origins, Fallout 1, 2 and New Vegas, Skyrim and Portal.
The general recipe for success, at least for me, has been a bit of a three step process.
(I'm not sure how familiar you are with Linux/Unix, so forgive me if any of this comes off as patronizing.)
Step One: Preparation
First thing's first, get Winetricks and install it.
Next, when you're ready to install a game (or something like Steam), you'll need to wrap your head around the concept of Wineprefixes. As far as I can tell, a wineprefix is basically like a different 'copy' of your Wine drive, all its settings, etc. I have all of my Steam games in one prefix, Dragon Age and Crysis (which doesn't work for me ) in another, etc. If you're running a 64-bit distro, and perhaps even if you're not, you'll also want to set the winearch variable to win32.
While within the same terminal window in which you've set the variables (that's important), do your Wine stuff. If you want to install Steam, 'winetricks steam'. There are plenty of other Windows system 'packages' to download, but they vary from game to game. Typically, the go-to place to find what you need for a game is the WineHQ entry for said game; the easiest way to get there is to google 'winehq GAME_YOU_WANT_TO_INSTALL'.
Then, of course, install the game using Wine.
After the install, you'll probably want to navigate to the program in question and run it to see if it works. I'll use Dragon Age as an example from my own collection: cd /home/seeks/.wine32/drive_c/Program\ Files/Dragon\ Age wine daoloader.exe
Again, you'll want to make sure you're still in the terminal where you've set those variables earlier. You can do a simple test by either doing 'echo $VAR' (i.e., echo $WINEPREFIX) or typing 'env' to see all of the environment variables set for that shell.
If it works, awesome. If not, cry and google the problem, and take another look at the WineHQ page for the game.
Step Three: Running the program consistently
There are a number of ways to do this I'm sure, but the easiest for me is to just set up a little shell script and execute that whenever I want to run the game. The reason for this is because A) I don't like having to re-navigate my way back to whatever obscure location it's installed to and To save myself the effort of having to manually re-set those environment variables every time.
You'll want to put your script into a directory that's in your path variable (echo $PATH). The easiest is probably /usr/bin, or if you've added your own bin directory to the path (see spoiler below), into there.
Adding your own directory (for example, /home/$USER/bin) to the PATH variable is pretty easy, actually. First, backup the .bashrc file in your home directory. Then, type 'echo $PATH' and copy whatever the output is. Now, edit the original .bashrc file, scroll to the bottom, and type: export PATH=<PASTE HERE>:/home/YOUR_USER_NAME/bin
You might want to spawn a new shell terminal after saving before you close the one you're 'working in'. Just in case you fucked up somehow, you'll want a working terminal to undo the damage. In the newly spawned terminal, do an 'echo $PATH' again, and it should be the same except with your new directory at the end. From now on, you can just place executable scripts in there without having to muck around with root privileges.
As for what's in the script, well, here's a copy of the one I use for Dragon Age:
#!/bin/bash
cd /home/seeks/.wine32/drive_c/Program\ Files/Dragon\ Age
export WINEPREFIX=/home/seeks/.wine32
export WINEARCH=win32
wine daoloader.exe
Change whatever you need to for yourself or your game, and don't forget to escape (backslash) those spaces.
Once you've put the script into a bin directory, mark it as executable with a 'chmod +x FILE'.
From now on, all you need to do to run the game is type that script's name from the command line. I'm sure you can also create graphical shortcuts to these scripts as well if you're the point-and-click type.
I use Mint. It was extremely easy to get into and pretty much every Ubuntu tutorial/troubleshooting guide works for it. It's installed on my laptop and desktop, and was on my old laptop too.
Has anyone used PinguyOS? It seems like a very good choice for someone just getting into Linux. I'm actually downloading it right now, since my sister wants to try Linux out and it does almost everything she wants.
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augustwhere you come from is goneRegistered Userregular
I never tried it for long outside of a VM but Crunchbang seemed pretty simple they even had the keyboard shortcuts on the wallpaper.
Openbox is not new user friendly.
I mean if you have to edit code in a text file in order to add newly installed programs to the menu, I'm going to say that's not new user friendly.
I'd agree with this. My recommending #! probably wasn't that great of an idea. I think to a certain extent I get caught up in a line of thought like "if you're saying you want to try Linux you must want to be doing at least *some* stuff manually so you have (or feel like you have) more control over and more interaction with the system." This is probably not the best way to approach "getting people to use Linux as a desktop OS." :rotate:
I think one of my HDDs died, it no longer mounts nor can I boot any of the various distros I have installed on it. Is there anything I can do to see if there is another problem rather than 'it's dead'. I've tried different SATA ports and don't have another computer handy to check it with. I got backups so no worries (other than having to pay for another ) if it's dead but I'd like to know for sure.
Re: #! guess I didn't spend enough time with it. To be fair I've had to mess around with .desktop files to add crap to Ubuntu's menus as well (Wine stuff mostly).
Dritz on
There I was, 3DS: 2621-2671-9899 (Ekera), Wii U: LostCrescendo
If your card is HD3xxx or older (maybe it's H2xxx), use the radeon drivers. Trying to manually install the 9.3 drivers will hose your system because it requires an ancient versions of xorg-xserver.
If your card is HD3xxx or older (maybe it's H2xxx), use the radeon drivers. Trying to manually install the 9.3 drivers will hose your system because it requires an ancient versions of xorg-xserver.
HD6950.
I got it up and running, but Cinnamon is sitting there using 50% CPU just to display itself and I'm thinking "this is ridiculous", since it's rendering things jerkily.
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Apothe0sisHave you ever questioned the nature of your reality?Registered Userregular
Quiet upsetting, since plugging in my raspberry pi my neither my receiver or tv control things via hdmi-CDC.
The first time I did this I unplugged the pi and everything went back to normal. The second time, not so much.
Annoying!
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Apothe0sisHave you ever questioned the nature of your reality?Registered Userregular
It appears the television is no longer recognising anynet devices or something as the basis for my issues. I should probably rewire everything and see if that helps/resets things...
In other news, I have inherited a number of appliances that were used for embedded vulnerability scanning when they went EOL. Their normal operation is based on a SquashFS thing (which was/is 3.0 and no longer supported by the Ubuntu file mounting thing so there's some stuff to sort out there...)
At this point I have no idea what their architecture was (I suspect it might be ARM, but who knows) hence my attempt to mount the SquashFS first to see what it's all about.
I'm not sure what to do with them...
m0n0wall device? general purpose network service server (dns, dhcp, ntp etc...)? Both? Calibre front end web ui thing... Something else?
I guess, until I know hardware specs it's hard to tell.
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Apothe0sisHave you ever questioned the nature of your reality?Registered Userregular
huh...
80386 architecture... Interesting.
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Apothe0sisHave you ever questioned the nature of your reality?Registered Userregular
Well today is a day for lots of stuff - my main server is running at a solid 1 for load averages, which is new. Nothing seems to be sticking out as problematic - not top, not iostat, not anything!
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proyebatGARY WAS HEREASH IS A LOSERRegistered Userregular
edited July 2012
Have you tried shutting down services temporarily and watching any changes in top?
apache,ntpd,samba,mysql,rtorrent? Anything else that common.
proyebat on
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DVGNo. 1 Honor StudentNether Institute, Evil AcademyRegistered Userregular
Anyone have experience installing Ubuntu on VirtualBox? I've tried on a Windows XP machine and a OS X Lion MBP and both are giving me the same behavior, after selecting install, it just drops down to a prompt and nothing ever happens
I've never had any issues installing ubuntu under virtualbox, but you either could try using the alternate iso instead, or try giving the kernel different boot parameters (such as nosplash or vga=something or other things)
End on
I wish that someway, somehow, that I could save every one of us
My single largest issue with Unity is that I can't get the pretty Expose view by ramming my mouse cursor into the upper left corner. The desktop switcher/picker is terribly clunky and clicky and draggy.
Mostly, I want to use it like Gnome 3 plus the press-alt-and-type-stuff awesome bar. Alternatively, I want the awesome bar in Gnome 3.
If you download compiz settings you can set a hot corner for the scale effect, which is basically expose.
So Valve put up a new blog about their Linux development (which finally made me buy that this might be happening for real) -- they're working on the client and L4D2 and targeting Ubuntu for the moment.
I guess it would depend on the DRM scheme? I gotta admit I don't actually understand much about how different programs run on different distros. For instance I know that I've been told not to use .deb packages built specifically for Ubuntu with other debian distros but I've always done it and I ain't gonna stop. Heck there's even alien (I think that is what it's called, haven't used it in awhile) to make .rpms work on Debian distributions and vice versa.
Hopefully even if it is just Ubuntu that only means that they only provide support for Ubuntu.
There I was, 3DS: 2621-2671-9899 (Ekera), Wii U: LostCrescendo
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AlectharAlan ShoreWe're not territorial about that sort of thing, are we?Registered Userregular
They've mentioned they're starting with Ubuntu and hoping to move on to other distros. My understanding is that they're bringing in as many talented and game-focused Linux folks as they can find, and I'm going to assume (hope?) that the group of people behind this project are committed to bringing Steam to other distros, or at least leaving that open so that people can drag it over if they like.
Well, the radeon driver on Linux Mint fixes everything for now. And happily my ZFS root, when not being mounted with sub-FS's everywhere, is working great and actually easy to setup. Next step: virtualizing my old Windows install in Xen with VGA passthrough.
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Just_Bri_ThanksSeething with ragefrom a handbasket.Registered User, ClubPAregular
Just pulled the trigger on Linux Mint. *crosses fingers*
...and when you are done with that; take a folding
chair to Creation and then suplex the Void.
Just pulled the trigger on Linux Mint. *crosses fingers*
Radeon driver.
I cannot stress this enough: you need to NOT install the fglrx driver.
The Live CD uses the radeon driver. It is good. Whatever get's installed blows up everything forever.
Of course if you don't have an ATI card then don't worry.
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Just_Bri_ThanksSeething with ragefrom a handbasket.Registered User, ClubPAregular
I don't, but I have other problems. I get Grub, and windows loads if I select that, so I am not hosed, BUT....
Selecting to start mint just gives me a blinky cursor. If I select the next option down, recovery or whatever I get a menu with some options that don't seem to accomplish anything in regards to the above blinky cursor.
...and when you are done with that; take a folding
chair to Creation and then suplex the Void.
I don't, but I have other problems. I get Grub, and windows loads if I select that, so I am not hosed, BUT....
Selecting to start mint just gives me a blinky cursor. If I select the next option down, recovery or whatever I get a menu with some options that don't seem to accomplish anything in regards to the above blinky cursor.
Try Ctrl+Alt+F1 - it's likely that X is failing to start, but you should be able to login to the console.
I had the same problem when I installed initially (and filed a rather tetchy bug report noting that it was some BS).
If you can login then it's likely you need to install some type of X driver for your graphics card.
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Just_Bri_ThanksSeething with ragefrom a handbasket.Registered User, ClubPAregular
The Ctrl Alt F1 did nothing.
I can select recovery in Grub, and then exit recovery at the next menu and get to a desktop. Updating software now and hoping that fixes it.
...and when you are done with that; take a folding
chair to Creation and then suplex the Void.
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Just_Bri_ThanksSeething with ragefrom a handbasket.Registered User, ClubPAregular
OK, so I was able to update my software by entering and then exiting recovery so as to boot to the desktop, but now I get a login prompt which is immediately interrupted by an X has failed to start error screen. Exiting out of the screen returns me to the login, which I can do and gives me a command prompt.
Now what?
...and when you are done with that; take a folding
chair to Creation and then suplex the Void.
This isn't great advice, but it might be worth a shot anyway if all else fails (and you still want Mint for some reason).
1) Remove all display drivers from your system after backing up your xorg.conf file (/etc/X11/xorg.conf)
2) Install proprietary drivers from the manufacturer (you'll have to download them first, obviously)
2-ALT) Look around for that radeon driver like elictricitylikesme was talking about and install that.
3) Restart, pray
As for what display drivers you've got installed, I couldn't say. It'll depend on what manufacturer you're using and the distro. Try 'aptitude search mesa' and see what pops up. You might not want to uninstall Mesa itself, but whatever other Mesa display drivers you've got installed, uninstall them. I think 'apt-get remove' works, but I'm not sure what the exact command is. Make sure to just uninstall it, and don't 'fully purge' it from your system in case you need to reinstall.
If you're using ATI, you should be prepared for less than amazing performance, at least in my experience. It was mostly okay, but SDL applications got way slower for some reason.
Posts
Alternately, depending on how hard-core you wanna go, Arch.
Some folks also really like Crunchbang.
Basically, my approach since Unity came out has been "anything other than standard Ubuntu."
Like, put my linux in the blender cause I is toothless.
I am not shamed by this statement.
chair to Creation and then suplex the Void.
Big lean toward Xubuntu because there is a TON of documentation for doing X, Y or Z with Ubuntu and that'll apply to Xubuntu as well.
I've been ridiculously impressed with it so far - Cinnamon is basically a bunch of people saying "what the fuck internet?" about Gnome 3, and adapting it's good ideas into a user interface that makes sense (it's very Win 7 like, which is a good thing).
It's also Ubuntu-based, if you're familiar with that paradigm.
EDIT: In other news though, what the fuck ddclient. It is just about fucking impossible to make it behave sensibly on a Linux router (i.e. hey, if you fail to update on reconnect, maybe keep trying until you succeed?).
I've also heard great things about Mint, but I haven't tried it.
This is a good choice.
#! is great but NOT as a first time distro.
The only distros where Wine's worked well for me have been Arch (my current), Crunchbang, Ubuntu and Mint. Arch has definitely been the best, and Ubuntu probably the second best, though that might be Crunchbang as well.
However, I think it might be less about the distro than it is about having a current version of wine and properly setting up your games. Even then, some games are just garbage for Linux; take for instance, much to my frustration, anything made by Zeboid (sp?) games. It's like they've purposely developed their games to be impossible to run on Linux. Even with games that work, I wouldn't expect it to be a flawless experience, though some games are nearly so.
Games that I've recently got running pretty well: Dragon Age: Origins, Fallout 1, 2 and New Vegas, Skyrim and Portal.
The general recipe for success, at least for me, has been a bit of a three step process.
(I'm not sure how familiar you are with Linux/Unix, so forgive me if any of this comes off as patronizing.)
Step One: Preparation
First thing's first, get Winetricks and install it.
Next, when you're ready to install a game (or something like Steam), you'll need to wrap your head around the concept of Wineprefixes. As far as I can tell, a wineprefix is basically like a different 'copy' of your Wine drive, all its settings, etc. I have all of my Steam games in one prefix, Dragon Age and Crysis (which doesn't work for me
Step Two: Installation
While within the same terminal window in which you've set the variables (that's important), do your Wine stuff. If you want to install Steam, 'winetricks steam'. There are plenty of other Windows system 'packages' to download, but they vary from game to game. Typically, the go-to place to find what you need for a game is the WineHQ entry for said game; the easiest way to get there is to google 'winehq GAME_YOU_WANT_TO_INSTALL'.
Then, of course, install the game using Wine.
After the install, you'll probably want to navigate to the program in question and run it to see if it works. I'll use Dragon Age as an example from my own collection:
cd /home/seeks/.wine32/drive_c/Program\ Files/Dragon\ Age
wine daoloader.exe
Again, you'll want to make sure you're still in the terminal where you've set those variables earlier. You can do a simple test by either doing 'echo $VAR' (i.e., echo $WINEPREFIX) or typing 'env' to see all of the environment variables set for that shell.
If it works, awesome. If not, cry and google the problem, and take another look at the WineHQ page for the game.
Step Three: Running the program consistently
There are a number of ways to do this I'm sure, but the easiest for me is to just set up a little shell script and execute that whenever I want to run the game. The reason for this is because A) I don't like having to re-navigate my way back to whatever obscure location it's installed to and
You'll want to put your script into a directory that's in your path variable (echo $PATH). The easiest is probably /usr/bin, or if you've added your own bin directory to the path (see spoiler below), into there.
export PATH=<PASTE HERE>:/home/YOUR_USER_NAME/bin
You might want to spawn a new shell terminal after saving before you close the one you're 'working in'. Just in case you fucked up somehow, you'll want a working terminal to undo the damage. In the newly spawned terminal, do an 'echo $PATH' again, and it should be the same except with your new directory at the end. From now on, you can just place executable scripts in there without having to muck around with root privileges.
As for what's in the script, well, here's a copy of the one I use for Dragon Age:
Change whatever you need to for yourself or your game, and don't forget to escape (backslash) those spaces.
Once you've put the script into a bin directory, mark it as executable with a 'chmod +x FILE'.
From now on, all you need to do to run the game is type that script's name from the command line. I'm sure you can also create graphical shortcuts to these scripts as well if you're the point-and-click type.
TL;DR: Watch this guy's video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=242CHuMMegc
I use Mint. It was extremely easy to get into and pretty much every Ubuntu tutorial/troubleshooting guide works for it. It's installed on my laptop and desktop, and was on my old laptop too.
Has anyone used PinguyOS? It seems like a very good choice for someone just getting into Linux. I'm actually downloading it right now, since my sister wants to try Linux out and it does almost everything she wants.
Openbox is not new user friendly.
I mean if you have to edit code in a text file in order to add newly installed programs to the menu, I'm going to say that's not new user friendly.
chair to Creation and then suplex the Void.
I'd agree with this. My recommending #! probably wasn't that great of an idea. I think to a certain extent I get caught up in a line of thought like "if you're saying you want to try Linux you must want to be doing at least *some* stuff manually so you have (or feel like you have) more control over and more interaction with the system." This is probably not the best way to approach "getting people to use Linux as a desktop OS." :rotate:
Re: #! guess I didn't spend enough time with it. To be fair I've had to mess around with .desktop files to add crap to Ubuntu's menus as well (Wine stuff mostly).
How come the Live CD of things always runs my graphics perfectly, and then when I install the whole thing explodes?
Who is preparing these things and making decisions about which drivers will be installed? Because it's incredibly disappointing.
If your card is HD3xxx or older (maybe it's H2xxx), use the radeon drivers. Trying to manually install the 9.3 drivers will hose your system because it requires an ancient versions of xorg-xserver.
HD6950.
I got it up and running, but Cinnamon is sitting there using 50% CPU just to display itself and I'm thinking "this is ridiculous", since it's rendering things jerkily.
The first time I did this I unplugged the pi and everything went back to normal. The second time, not so much.
Annoying!
In other news, I have inherited a number of appliances that were used for embedded vulnerability scanning when they went EOL. Their normal operation is based on a SquashFS thing (which was/is 3.0 and no longer supported by the Ubuntu file mounting thing so there's some stuff to sort out there...)
At this point I have no idea what their architecture was (I suspect it might be ARM, but who knows) hence my attempt to mount the SquashFS first to see what it's all about.
I'm not sure what to do with them...
m0n0wall device? general purpose network service server (dns, dhcp, ntp etc...)? Both? Calibre front end web ui thing... Something else?
I guess, until I know hardware specs it's hard to tell.
80386 architecture... Interesting.
apache,ntpd,samba,mysql,rtorrent? Anything else that common.
If you download compiz settings you can set a hot corner for the scale effect, which is basically expose.
The only thing which changed has been the addition of ntp.
But I disabled that first.
My computer is just a jerk... Maybe.
Hopefully even if it is just Ubuntu that only means that they only provide support for Ubuntu.
Battle.net
chair to Creation and then suplex the Void.
Radeon driver.
I cannot stress this enough: you need to NOT install the fglrx driver.
The Live CD uses the radeon driver. It is good. Whatever get's installed blows up everything forever.
Of course if you don't have an ATI card then don't worry.
Selecting to start mint just gives me a blinky cursor. If I select the next option down, recovery or whatever I get a menu with some options that don't seem to accomplish anything in regards to the above blinky cursor.
chair to Creation and then suplex the Void.
Try Ctrl+Alt+F1 - it's likely that X is failing to start, but you should be able to login to the console.
I had the same problem when I installed initially (and filed a rather tetchy bug report noting that it was some BS).
If you can login then it's likely you need to install some type of X driver for your graphics card.
I can select recovery in Grub, and then exit recovery at the next menu and get to a desktop. Updating software now and hoping that fixes it.
chair to Creation and then suplex the Void.
Now what?
chair to Creation and then suplex the Void.
1) Remove all display drivers from your system after backing up your xorg.conf file (/etc/X11/xorg.conf)
2) Install proprietary drivers from the manufacturer (you'll have to download them first, obviously)
2-ALT) Look around for that radeon driver like elictricitylikesme was talking about and install that.
3) Restart, pray
As for what display drivers you've got installed, I couldn't say. It'll depend on what manufacturer you're using and the distro. Try 'aptitude search mesa' and see what pops up. You might not want to uninstall Mesa itself, but whatever other Mesa display drivers you've got installed, uninstall them. I think 'apt-get remove' works, but I'm not sure what the exact command is. Make sure to just uninstall it, and don't 'fully purge' it from your system in case you need to reinstall.
If you're using ATI, you should be prepared for less than amazing performance, at least in my experience. It was mostly okay, but SDL applications got way slower for some reason.