I have Ubuntu installed again! :D !

Once again, I have Ubuntu installed.

Before when I was trying to install Ubuntu , I couldn’t find my Gutsy disk and had to stick with Feisty (which worked horridly). But now that I’ve found it, I’m typing this from Fluxbox on Gutsy 🙂 .

I inserted the disk and was in 800×600 land. I figured I would fix it after I got Ubuntu installed. So, I ran the install, and for the first time ever, I have a seperate /home partition.

On the first reboot everything ran fine, I installed from the restricted drivers manager, all was well. Reboot time. I rebooted, and everything was terribly slow. I couldn’t figure out Compiz’s process name for upwards of 20 minutes. In the midst of that, I installed Fluxbox. I spent bunches of time editing  the init  file to go to the correct menu file, only to find out later that the whole time I was linking to the wrong one.

Well,  after  I got back into a working GNOME, I installed all the apps I  need .  Then , I  Made a new Fluxbox menu.  The first thing I noticed was how much easier it was not to nest [submenu] and [end] tags. Must ‘ve come from learning (X)HTML.

So here I am, all happy that my Linux install is working and Fluxbox is up. I’m off to get aliases set up. After spending so much time being unsatisfied with Linux and liking Windows more and more, I forgot how much I loved the customizability of Linux 🙂 . As I said earlier, I’m off to make aliases. It feels like I’m starting Linux all over again! So exciting!

Oh no!!! My Linux experience is screwed up!!

😥

I’m sad to say I’m typing this on Windows. And if I can’t get my Linux setup back, it might be a while of Windows.

Here’s how it happened :  After getting sick of the fact that openSUSE doesn’t have  as many software packages as I would like. So I went out searching for my Ubuntu Gutsy CD. Unfortunately, I could not find it so I had to use my Feisty CD (And I found it later, d’oh!).

Well the video drivers didn’t work to well. I noticed it was using the “restricted” drivers by default. All was well. That is, until I tried to play Nexuiz. Than the X-server crashed and I looked in the xorg.conf, it was using the driver “nv”. So I changed it to “nvidia” (It had said it was using the “restricted driver”.

Well after I tried to start xorg after that it said “no screens found” (How the hell would I be reading that if there were no screens found?), and I ran dpkg reconfigure xserver-xorg. It said it was using “vesa” (which doesn’t exactly count as a “restricted driver”). So to see if that was true, I tried to install the nvidia-glx-new driver. (I thought it was already installed, and apparently, it wasn’t).

So I tried to reconfigure xorg again and  set it to use the nvidia driver. So I tried  to start xorg again. Well that’s great, it doesn’t work still (no screens found again)]

So here I am. Since I found my Gutsy CD, I’m going to install it tonight

openSUSE…not as bad as I thought it would be

     OK so I’m writing this from openSUSE. Here’s why. I’ve been wanting to try it for a few weeks now. And since it seems like everyday my ubuntu system gets slower and slower….I decided to try it.

Now, I downloaded an install CD a while ago (no livecd). So about 1 AM today I started installing it. When it came to the install software part, I decided against GNOME and went with KDE. And, quite frankly, I’m glad I made that choice. Although it took about 2 hours to download all the updates and stuff (and KDE) that it needed, I went to bed. I woke up around 6 AM and it wasn’t done yet (?!?!?). So I just went back to bed anyway and slept in until about 11AM. When I returned, it was done.

When I first booted it up, it needed to do a little bit more configuration (mostly user configuration, passwords,etc). When that was over, it didn’t reboot, it booted straight to the system (wasn’t expecting that). The first thing I noticed was how slow it was going. But I figured,  hey, it’s the first bootup, of course its gonna go slow (which held true on the second reboot).

At first, I thought the sound didn’t work. But I tried playing a song with Amarok, it played, rather quietly. And then, I looked over, to my embarrasment, the sounds was turned down really low. By then, I was chatting with my friends on Kopete. But I soon realized Kopete sucks. So i installed Pidgin

RPM wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. But I still don’t know how to install from the command line. Oh well, I’ll read later about that. I’ve heard its slow, but I have to say, it’s faster than DPKG (or apt or whatever you want to call it). I initially thought of things like dependency hell, and slowness.

I have to say that the default theme is nice. Of course I spiffied it up a bit (screenshot link coming).

There is just one thing that scared me alot. The system is using all but 15MB of my RAM. I don’t know what’s taking it all up. But I notice that programs don’t start slow, and that I don’t have alot of swap usage. I find that strange. Perhaps Ksysguard is giving me false values

So after all of this, I’ve decided. I’m keeping openSUSE. I like it overall. And its sure a hell of a lot nicer KDE system than Kubuntu. I like RPM. I’ll have to look up on it some more. I do miss apt though. I need to learn the command line options for it. But I have to say, openSUSE is surprisingly fast. And after all, I’m a speed demon. I wonder what the speed would be like in Fluxbox. I’ll have to install it later. But I close that, openSUSE ain’t all that bad. I don’t know if I could’ve used it for my first Linux distro though.