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Linux Distro Noob thread of Linux noobs

V

Vanillalite

Ask me about the GAF Notebook
Andrex said:
I don't know what Canonical's doing but I'm scared.
Click to expand...

It's actually not a bad idea despite my recent idea for Canonical. The problem that many will have is wasn't that the whole point of Wayland in the 1st place? To fix all of the old shit from X?

I totally get needing something new, more nimble, and more scalable from mobile all up to servers. I'd just like something new to replace X to become widely accepted so it can get all of the service and support and eye balls and man hours.

PS: I blame a lot of this shit on Debian, but that's a whole different subject. I've been wanting to comment on that for a few months now.
 
C

ComputerMKII

Banned
Brettison said:
It's actually not a bad idea despite my recent idea for Canonical. The problem that many will have is wasn't that the whole point of Wayland in the 1st place? To fix all of the old shit from X?

I totally get needing something new, more nimble, and more scalable from mobile all up to servers. I'd just like something new to replace X to become widely accepted so it can get all of the service and support and eye balls and man hours.

PS: I blame a lot of this shit on Debian, but that's a whole different subject. I've been wanting to comment on that for a few months now.
Click to expand...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_invented_here
 
M

Massa

Member
Canonical doing what it does best, reinventing the wheel behind their closed development wall. If only they were ten times bigger as a company it would work just fine.

Brettison said:
PS: I blame a lot of this shit on Debian, but that's a whole different subject. I've been wanting to comment on that for a few months now.
Click to expand...

Blame for what?
 
C

clav

Member
Is Canonical doing this to please Valve or... what's the bigger picture?

Are just X drivers not good enough especially on other platforms like ARM?
 
Z

zoku88

Member
claviertekky said:
Is Canonical doing this to please Valve or... what's the bigger picture?

Are just X drivers not good enough especially on other platforms like ARM?
Click to expand...

Android doesn't use X. It uses Finger...something. I forget the name.

I guess what they are really saying is that Finger...something drivers and Mir drivers would be the same.

EDIT: I think the name I was looking for was SurfaceFlinger. Not sure if that is right, though.
 
P

Polari

Member
Canonical to everyone:

tumblr_m5rim2Dloe1qh1byio2_500.gif


Daniel Stone, Wayland developer working for Collabora nails it:

"I'm not worried about Wayland's future at all. I'm just irritated that this means more work for us, more work for upstream developers, more work for toolkits, more work for hardware vendors, and years of explaining that most of the page explaining that Mir had to be created because Wayland was a) hugely deficient, and b) unfixable, was total bullshit."
 
R

Risette

A Good Citizen
They have effectively sealed themselves off from the rest of the Free software world. They will shoulder porting and maintaining Qt, Gtk+, XUL, etc. to their system. They will shoulder porting applications to the integration points (most of which will be delivered in Qt apps). They will not be sharing desktop shell infrastructure with anyone else, and using their Free software on other platforms will become increasingly more difficult.
Click to expand...
Why are they doing this?
 
I

injurai

Banned
Polari said:
Canonical to everyone:
Click to expand...

everyone seems to think Canonical owes the world to be some leading beacon of Ubuntu, but they are on the bleeding edge of mass adoption and should continue to forge that path. Someone needs to fill those shoes and they are in a great position to do so.

I'm seeing more great distro options now than ever before, so much diversity to branch off into in order to fit your needs.
 
R

Risette

A Good Citizen
injurai said:
everyone seems to think Canonical owes the world to be some leading beacon of Ubuntu, but they are on the bleeding edge of mass adoption and should continue to forge that path. Someone needs to fill those shoes and they are in a great position to do so.

I'm seeing more great distro options now than ever before, so much diversity to branch off into in order to fit your needs.
Click to expand...
Mass adoption by who? How?

Ubuntu is still pretty much no-name to most computer users, and they're burning bridges with the community that supports them. Who's gonna spread the word to get the mass adoption train going? Is Canonical going to do it themselves? Are they going to hire astroturfers to replace all the genuine users they might've kept around?

This isn't how to do it.
 
S

Sqrt_minus_one

Member
Well I am sure it will become clearer why they are doing this in the next few weeks but at the moment seemse a whole lot of wasted effort. Wayland was due to go 1.0 this year I believe.
 
D

DTKT

Member
I have a Y480 with Windows 8 pre-loaded which means I have to deal with UEFI and Secure Boot.

Is there any way to dual boot Ubuntu or any other ubuntu based distros? I mean, I'm able to install Ubuntu on a partition, but the Windows Boot Loader doesn't cant find the grub loader and the grub can't find the Windows 8 boot loader.
 
T

TheNatural

My Member!
Just installed Ubuntu on my laptop along with Steam. Disappointed that so many Humble Bundle games that have Linux versions, don't have them on Steam yet.

I don't mind Unity, but it doesn't seem worth the resources it uses. Anyone know the best ways to conserve resources for games? Amnesia is running decently, but the shadows are weird and flickering. Changing to KDE or LXDE seems like a lot of recommendations I'm finding.
 
I

injurai

Banned
DTKT said:
I have a Y480 with Windows 8 pre-loaded which means I have to deal with UEFI and Secure Boot.

Is there any way to dual boot Ubuntu or any other ubuntu based distros? I mean, I'm able to install Ubuntu on a partition, but the Windows Boot Loader doesn't cant find the grub loader and the grub can't find the Windows 8 boot loader.
Click to expand...

If you wiped your GUID Partition table, may the gods have mercy on your soul.
 
K

-KRS-

Member
TheNatural said:
Just installed Ubuntu on my laptop along with Steam. Disappointed that so many Humble Bundle games that have Linux versions, don't have them on Steam yet.

I don't mind Unity, but it doesn't seem worth the resources it uses. Anyone know the best ways to conserve resources for games? Amnesia is running decently, but the shadows are weird and flickering. Changing to KDE or LXDE seems like a lot of recommendations I'm finding.
Click to expand...

LXDE is definitely the way to go for conserving resources but it's also really basic. It has most of the essential things though, so it's not like running fluxbox or something which requires a lot of hand-editing of config files.

KDE isn't really what I think of when I think of low-resource desktop environments. It's more of a fully featured desktop environment like Gnome. I don't know if it's more or less resource intensive than Unity though since I use neither of them myself.

There's also XFCE which is a bit more fully featured compared to LXDE but still very lightweight.
 
T

TheNatural

My Member!
synt4x said:
LXDE is definitely the way to go for conserving resources but it's also really basic. It has most of the essential things though, so it's not like running fluxbox or something which requires a lot of hand-editing of config files.

KDE isn't really what I think of when I think of low-resource desktop environments. It's more of a fully featured desktop environment like Gnome. I don't know if it's more or less resource intensive than Unity though since I use neither of them myself.

There's also XFCE which is a bit more fully featured compared to LXDE but still very lightweight.
Click to expand...

I installed Cinnamon, I'm going to try this since I saw many mention it in here.
 
K

-KRS-

Member
The issues you have could also depend on the GPU you have though, or the GPU drivers. Unfortunately AMD/ATI cards are not well supported on linux because historically ATI has not put in a lot of effort in their linux drivers. Nvidia isn't perfect either but they seem to at least put in a little bit of effort and release their linux drivers mostly in a timely fashon and with more or less the same features as the windows drivers. Hopefully this is something that improves with the Steambox coming and wayland taking over Xorg sometime. Although now Canonical's plans might delay that...
 
P

Polari

Member
TheNatural said:
Just installed Ubuntu on my laptop along with Steam. Disappointed that so many Humble Bundle games that have Linux versions, don't have them on Steam yet.

I don't mind Unity, but it doesn't seem worth the resources it uses. Anyone know the best ways to conserve resources for games? Amnesia is running decently, but the shadows are weird and flickering. Changing to KDE or LXDE seems like a lot of recommendations I'm finding.
Click to expand...

Lubuntu is the way to go if you want a lighter desktop. As for Amnesia, are you running on Intel drivers? The game is broken for me with problems similar to what you describe.
 
T

TheNatural

My Member!
Polari said:
Lubuntu is the way to go if you want a lighter desktop. As for Amnesia, are you running on Intel drivers? The game is broken for me with problems similar to what you describe.
Click to expand...

Yup, Intel HD 4000. It runs, but seems to be a shadows problem.

Thanks for the advice on the desktops. I'm trying Cinnamon, it seems pretty simple.
 
P

Polari

Member
TheNatural said:
Yup, Intel HD 4000. It runs, but seems to be a shadows problem.

Thanks for the advice on the desktops. I'm trying Cinnamon, it seems pretty simple.
Click to expand...

The game isn't supported on Intel hardware and I never got it to run without glitches... hopefully you'll have more luck than I did finding a fix.
 
T

TheNatural

My Member!
Polari said:
The game isn't supported on Intel hardware and I never got it to run without glitches... hopefully you'll have more luck than I did finding a fix.
Click to expand...

Oh wow, didn't know that. It's actually running fine for me the few minutes I ran it, it's just there is black texturing or whatever that flickers every once in a while on the screen.

Maybe I should create an official Linux gaming thread for these questions.
 
Z

zoku88

Member
injurai said:
everyone seems to think Canonical owes the world to be some leading beacon of Ubuntu, but they are on the bleeding edge of mass adoption and should continue to forge that path. Someone needs to fill those shoes and they are in a great position to do so.

I'm seeing more great distro options now than ever before, so much diversity to branch off into in order to fit your needs.
Click to expand...

If you want to know the problem people are having with this, just thinking of it from a developer point of view.

As a developer, are you going to
A) Make a Wayland client and forget about Ubuntu (or tell Ubuntu users to install/run a wayland server, also Unity won't run, I guess.)
B) Make a Mir client and forget about the other distros. (Since I'm sure it will require some libraries with Ubuntu specific patches...like always.)
C) Forget both Wayland and Mir and just write it for X.


I'm willing to guess, most people will just do C).
 
S

Slavik81

Member
To be clear, most developers will never notice. The common GUI toolkits already make X nearly invisible.

It's the toolkit developers and hardware developers who are going to be impacted. And their development pain will impact users.
 
Z

zoku88

Member
Slavik81 said:
To be clear, most developers will never notice. The common GUI toolkits already make X nearly invisible.

It's the toolkit developers and hardware developers who are going to be impacted. And their development pain will impact users.
Click to expand...

Yea, that's true.

Except for games, though. Because the engines need to keep the display server in mind, as well.

Looking at the chat log, it looks like Canonical are going to be the ones porting SDL to Mir, for example.
 
Z

zoku88

Member
Slavik81 said:
Why do games need to know the display server?
Click to expand...
I wouldn't really know.

They might just link to X related libraries.

Like uqm-hd binary, for example, links against libX11.so.6

Not sure about SDL, though. I know a wayland version of libSDL is being worked on.

EDIT: Not sure if related, but libGL might have some dependency on X, as well, which could be the reason why libSDL needs a wayland version.
 
P

peakish

Member
injurai said:
everyone seems to think Canonical owes the world to be some leading beacon of Ubuntu, but they are on the bleeding edge of mass adoption and should continue to forge that path. Someone needs to fill those shoes and they are in a great position to do so.

I'm seeing more great distro options now than ever before, so much diversity to branch off into in order to fit your needs.
Click to expand...
Now I'm no developer, but for me it seems like we have had enough problems with X alone - having two new, modern display servers seems like a lot of extra work to support and polish as opposed to just settling on one standard for co-development. One that Ubuntu seemed to be pushing for just a few years ago.

If they can make it work well, that will be fine for me, but even Unity took a few years to mature - will a display manager be stable for the next LTS?
 
I

injurai

Banned
Are there any cheap and portable ways to provide a screen/keyboard to a raspberry pi?

I guess I could power it off of a Laptop, but I have no idea how I would direct the screen/keyboard output to it. Maybe run a vnc server on the pi? or is their some sort of HDMI listen software that I could use on windows?
 
V

Vanillalite

Ask me about the GAF Notebook
injurai said:
Are there any cheap and portable ways to provide a screen/keyboard to a raspberry pi?

I guess I could power it off of a Laptop, but I have no idea how I would direct the screen/keyboard output to it. Maybe run a vnc server on the pi? or is their some sort of HDMI listen software that I could use on windows?
Click to expand...

Does the Pi have HDMI and USB? Just plug it in via a monitor and use the USB Slot to hook up a wireless mouse/keyboard. Logitech has those really tiny mini receivers and you only need one as both the mouse and keyboard can run off the same receiver. That way it only costs one usb port. Then just run your preferred distro off of the sd card.
 
I

injurai

Banned
Brettison said:
Does the Pi have HDMI and USB? Just plug it in via a monitor and use the USB Slot to hook up a wireless mouse/keyboard. Logitech has those really tiny mini receivers and you only need one as both the mouse and keyboard can run off the same receiver. That way it only costs one usb port. Then just run your preferred distro off of the sd card.
Click to expand...

okay well, m/k is fine to handle that way. Though It doesn't help if I want a portable monitor (playing around with it on campus instead of at home)

The best option really just seems to run a VNC server but I have no clue if that can run on arm architecture.
 
I

injurai

Banned
S

Slavik81

Member
zoku88 said:
Not sure if related, but libGL might have some dependency on X, as well, which could be the reason why libSDL needs a wayland version.
Click to expand...
Ah, yeah. This is why Weston uses OpenGL ES.

It's been a lomg time since I used SDL, but IIRC it makes your window. It doesn't use a toolkit (it basically is a minimal GUI toolkit itself). So it would need to add native support anyway.
 
S

Spy

Member
I have a good PC and I'd like to get into Linux for learning purposes. What would be best for me? I'm thinking Ubuntu or Fedora.
 
L

Leucrota

Member
Just installed Elementary OS Beta 1 on my dad's old laptop and I never thought I would see this thing so snappy.

Dualcore processer at 1.73 GHz with 1.0 GB of RAM, which Windows Vista could not run for squat. Seriously took about 10 minutes from pressing the power button to get to facebook.

With eOS, I feel like I am using a new laptop right off the shelf, not to mention Midori is super fast as a browser as well.
 
V

Vanillalite

Ask me about the GAF Notebook
PatMcAtee said:
Just installed Elementary OS Beta 1 on my dad's old laptop and I never thought I would see this thing so snappy.

Dualcore processer at 1.73 GHz with 1.0 GB of RAM, which Windows Vista could not run for squat. Seriously took about 10 minutes from pressing the power button to get to facebook.

With eOS, I feel like I am using a new laptop right off the shelf, not to mention Midori is super fast as a browser as well.
Click to expand...

Yeah they've done a good job honing down the speed with elementary. That being said while I like Midori it only lasted a day until I installed something else instead and used Midori as my backup.
 
P

peakish

Member
New update on Gnome 3.8: http://afaikblog.wordpress.com/2013/03/06/taking-gnome-3-to-the-next-level-again/

Better application browsing, my biggest pet peeve since 3.0!
apps-view.png

[...]
The second part of the new applications view is the “All” part, which includes a couple of predefined application folders. These folders contain some of the less interesting applications (such as accessories or system utilities) and helps to lower the number of applications that are in the top-level grid.
Click to expand...

Updated window view!
windows-view.png

[...]The other thing we have done is scaled the window thumbnails so they reflect the actual size of the windows themselves. [...]
Click to expand...

Finally the realisation of well implemented Search! Basically what the Shell has been leading up to since conception.
search.png

Search has long been one of GNOME 3′s strongest features. Pressing the super (aka windows) key and typing is an incredibly effective way to access applications and content. Since 3.6 it has also been possible for 3rd party applications to provide their own search results, and this is used by Files, Contacts, Boxes and Documents to allow you to access a range of content using a single search.

For 3.8 we have reworked GNOME 3′s integrated search functionality to make extensibility much more central. The new search results view looks great and is much better suited to aggregated results from multiple sources. We have also added a search section to Settings, which allows you to control which applications provide results, as well as the order that they appear in.

These changes are pretty important, in that they will allow applications to integrate with GNOME 3′s integrated search functionality. We’re expecting more and more applications to start using this, so that search becomes an increasingly powerful way to access content.
Click to expand...

Bonus: 56 bugs fixed under the Every Detail Matters project, pure polish.

Can't wait.
 
V

Vanillalite

Ask me about the GAF Notebook
Is that Andrex's Alt account or something for when he is banned? :p J/K

PS: For your haters out there you can all know I'm still running Crunchbang and have no urge to distro hop!
 
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