LinkBack URL
About LinkBacks
Reply With Quotesrochford (7th May 2010)
This is now where I end up installing Ubuntu, Xubuntu & Kubuntu & still can't make up my mind which one to stick with on my spare laptop.....
Ubuntu Themes:
Link: Nice themes for ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx) users
It's a Dell Optiplex 360, 2GB RAM Intel Core2Duo @ 2.5GHzOriginally Posted by SimpleSi
The boot would be quicker if I could get the bios sorted and type my password faster.
Not having a lot of joy with it.
Thought I'd try the netbook remix - I've got a Kohjinsha SA5 (low powered AMD Geode but quite a nice little machine with a touch screen so it works like a tablet but can be used with fingers; doesn't need a special stylus) but I can't get it to install. Starts OK but where I'd guess it's starting X I just get a sort of washed out screen (pale purple round the edge and a sort of ragged, rounded rectangle of a whitish colour in the middle). I'd guess I need to install it in text mode somehow but can't find an obvious option to do that.
Also tried it on a desktop. That installs OK but fails to find the wireless network card - same problem as I mentioned a while ago; it just detects the wrong card. I know I can fix that so I'll get back to it later but it's just a bit depressing to get nowhere at all with Ubuntu.
@srochford - I think you need to download the alternative installation CD, it's not available as an option on the normal live CD. Usually happen when something borks X or the graphics card is not/badly supported. So even if you get a text installer, you may still get a broken display.
srochford (7th May 2010)
Made up a USB boot pendrive with 10.04 netbook version on it and got it installed on my orig eeepc - wireless doesn't work - I'm updating it via LAN to see what happens.
Well got it working on an eeePC - looks very nice but they've still not managed to reduce the size of basic dialog boxes (Like the print one where there is acres of unused space but the print button is off the screen at the bottom.
So no good as a replacement for the orig Xandros
Just checked out OpenOffice and load/save/print dialogs are OK there - it just seems to be FF that's the problem - goign to investiage further
I Just upgraded yesterday from 9.10 with the alternate cd. Ran all updates last night. Using KDE , looks good, just a bit laggy on this old 2.8 P4with 2 GB RAM. Shoud perhaps change to the dual core 2.8 2GB RAM and install a graphics card.
Otherwise all seems to be fine, just had to update firefox. no problems at all with the upgrade.
Well, thanks to @twozeroalpha I've got it installed and can work in text mode. X still doesn't work but having done some googling I found out some changes that needed making to xorg.conf and X then started.
It gave an error message about a problem with the .conf file and offered to fix it - now it doesn't work again :-(
I kept a copy of the nearly working file so I'll have another look later but given @simplesi's comments about the size of dialog boxes I may be wasting my time.
Looks like I'll have to stick with Windows :-(
Probably just talking to myself now but that's OK. Just thought I'd say it's all working OK. Not quite sure how I did it because I didn't expect it to work! I booted into single user mode, copied the failsafe xorg.conf to xorg.conf and restarted. Magically, it came up in full colour and seems to be working fine.
Now, the reason I was trying Ubuntu out on this was to see what the tablet support is like. The answer seems to be that it's not there at all which is weird because I'm sure I had read that it did do tablet stuff. Does anyone know if you can turn on tablet features or am I wasting my time? (The touch screen is working as a mouse but I'd like to be able to draw, write etc like on a Windows tablet)
If it's not already install, get yourself a copy of gimp (sudo apt-get install gimp)
Then load it and go into Edit > Preferences
Click on "Input Devices" then Configure "Extended Input Devices"
Find the tablet screen in the drop down list (may be listed as something wierd) and set the mode from disabled, to screen. You should now be able to draw in gimp.
Worked for my Wacom tablet anyhow. Good luck.
If you get that working and want to write to input text give "cellwriter" a whirl.
Last edited by TwoZeroAlpha; 10th May 2010 at 09:06 AM.
srochford (18th May 2010)
Finally just got round to booting to ubuntu to do the upgrade.. And forgot the thing that annoys me the most about it.
Its the size of everything. The icons on the desktop are massive. I can one by one make them smaller, but that doesnt really help. The start menu takes up most of the screen when Ive expanded a few menu items.. Monitor is plugged into the laptop and is at 1280x1024 (I cant remember what resolution it is when its plugged into windows.)
Is there any way to shrink all these things down?
Another example, firefox only shows 5 open tabs, whereas on xp/7 I can get about 10..
I'm having no end of trouble even getting it to install. I'm trying to install Xubuntu on an older p4 system but after two keypresses it acts as if the 'A' key is stuck down and won't respond to anything but a hard reset.
Bit strange as no other version has this problem.
Usually you can just right click on the desktop, 'change desktop background' > 'fonts', and making the sizes smaller usually helps.
OK; thanks again to @twozeroalpha. I've used Gimp and it works well and cellwriter also works. My handwriting is rubbish so I think it'll need a lot more training and, in the end, I'm not sure it will do what I wanted :-( (Really wanted something like OneNote rather than a line by line entry system)
The other problem is that the machine is just very slow (and slower in Linux than Windows which doesn't help - I think there are AMD optimised drivers for Windows which aren't there for Linux)
Still, it's been fun playing and learning more new stuff :-)
There are currently 1 users browsing this thread. (0 members and 1 guests)
Posting Permissions
