ITWombat

"Take two bottles into the shower? Not me. I need half a dozen "

So what happened to the broomstick?

I think the quotes are only requirde for a window title. It could be that the command processor thinks that the bginfo command is the title and has thrown a syntax error because it can't find what it thinks is a command.

You need to set-up a external connector,

So a certain pair of sisters never materialised, eh? They must have been out taking advantage of all that cheap car insurance

Are you after the dubious honour of the first locked thread of 2008?

Well here is the answer. It appears that a recent update to the Adobe flash plugin has run into a fault in the Ubuntu package authentication mechanism. The revised package was pulled for having bugs of its own particularly for Konqueror users. I ended up using a bodge involving pasting libflashplayer.so library into firefox's plugin folder. Unfortunately opening page with flash conent pushes up firefox's CPU usage and makes the browser unresponsive. I've also noticed something rather odd. If I scroll the page, the firefox window greys out as if the Ubuntu is about to into suspend/shutdown. Aargh!!

Yeah, I am a bit miffed that I can't do ALT+Tab and that the special keys menu only appears to be visible in the windowed (i.e. not full screen) view. It makes working on multiple documents such a chore.

I have installed the Flash plugin but every time I go to a website with Flash content (such as EduGeek) I am still prompted to install additional plugins.

The local electricity board must love you

OK but are the above update times normal or was I just unlucky/being-a-newb

While it is a good idea to become familiar with the command line in the long term, it might be overkill here if the OP just needs a quick and dirty demo server. For the kind of load they'd be running a GUI wouldn't be that much of an overhead. Anyway, you'd still have gnome-terminal for all the fiddly bits. You could also try alonebfg's Ubuntu Server with Webmin, which me a good compromise

Thanks Cyber. I will give it a whirl.

Oh dear. This is the kind of thing Microsoft would do

Something strange has happened. The normal Ubuntu splash screen with oscillating slider has disappeared. Instead I get a glowing but otherwise dead screen for about a minute. The screen then goes very dark before the normal Ubuntu drum roll is heard and the logon screen finally appears. Other than that the OS appears to be fine. Have I done something wrong in Grub?

On a number of distros I have tried LogMein remote control won't work with JRE 6. I get a Java related authentication error. It appears to work on Ubuntu 7.10 but not PCLOS2007 or Mepis 7. What could account for the difference? Is it because Gutsy forced me to install a fresh copy of JRE6 update 3?

@CyberNerd 20 minutes? Partition cloning doesn't count. I'm talking about a full clean install and update. It took me over an hour to install and update Gutsy Gibbon. @localzuk 3 hours is excesve for just XP Pro SP2 + 90 updates on a clean install. In fact even with Office 2003 it would still be half that on a good broadband link, especially if you apply Office SP3 from a local source. I don't deny it takes a long time to create a full production build of Windows (for locally hosted apps anyway). I was just expecting better perforamce from a major distro. @Ric_ I understand where you're getting at but it is a poor excuse. Why must OOo require a complete reinstall just for an update. Modularity has been the norm for software for over two decades.

There have been mutterings on the web that Kubuntu and other official derivatives haven't received the same development effort and therefore aren't as up to date as the normal Gnome-based Ubuntu. Does that mean that users who prefer KDE should download it after installing the normal Ubuntu?

I had some time on my hands recently and thought why not install Fedora 8. It was on the DVD of a Linux magazine which means I wouldn't have to use up precious broadband quota on the download. The install was easy enough. Apart from the partitioning scheme and selecting KDE as an additional desktop, I kept the defaults for other options. First log on session was OK. There was a balloon tool tip thing on the menubar saying that there were 160 odd updates to download. OK, fair enough, better be safe than sorry. Two hours later it was still downloading the updates. In that amount of time I could have installed and fully patched XP Pro or downloaded an ISO of another distro twice. The actual install of the updates was also quite tedious. It had been going about another half an hour before I accidently pulled out the plug :oops: Now am I being unreasonable to expect that a recently released distro should be fully updated within an hour of a hard disk install? My 2nd hand PC may be a few years old but I don't think a 2.8 Pentium 4 with half a gig of RAM is particularly underpowered. Anyway, it seems that the power outage during the update borked a gnome-python dependancy and I can't seem to apply the other 35 updates even if I deselect the python files. Had it been another distro I would've probably just reinstalled the entire OS again but I am not going to wait that long for the updates. As I luck would have it, I have found another cover-mount DVD with Ubuntu 7.10 on it. I think I'll try that instead. I was hoping to use Fedora to find out if life with RPM was really that hellish or whether SELinux was really the Linux equivalent of UAC on Vista. Perhaps that will have to wait for another day.

Which is rather perverse as one of the scares involved DVLA data lost by a foreign outsourced subcontractor (American not Indian).

Yes. BAT or CMD because the script contains commands as you would type at the command prompt. CMD scripts allow extra features to the batch script language introduced with Windows NT.

Do a forum search for "message of the day"

In VBS you would have to check all the files of a folder to see if the extension was txt or log Something like: For Each File in Folder.Files if UCASE(File.Extension) = "TXT" or UCASE(File.Extension)="LOG" File.delete endif Next It'd probably easier to do it as a batch file.

You could also try the free trial of DriverMagic to cut out the guess work

Thanks to our friends at the Linux PCI ID Repository things become a little clearer. It would appear that you have: TV Decoder Card (Multimedia Controller): Phillips Semiconductor Modem (Simple PCI Communicator): Agere (was Lucent Technologies) V.92 56K WinModem Wireless Adapter (Network Controller): Intersil Corporation ISL3886 [Prism Javelin/Prism Xbow) Is this a laptop by any chance?