I never really used vista or windows for that matter. I decided to bite the bullet and give vista a try for 30 days.
Day 1
I have a friend who gave me Vista Ultimate DVD. He said this will give you 30 days until you have to activate it. Perfect I don't even have to buy windows to try it out. I took the dvd and put it in my test computer and sat down and got ready for 30 days of vista. Installation seemed pretty easy if you know how to click a t.v. remote then you can install vista. I had some free space on my hard drive so I installed vista on that. I had Fedora 8 on this computer and when I rebooted my grub boot manager was gone. Funny I know that linux add other oses to a boot menu but not vista? Microsoft has to know by now that they aren't the only ones who have a os do they? SO I booted into linux with a live dvd and reinstalled grub. Grub found vista and added it to the menu. When I rebooted the good old grub menu appeared so I choose vista held my breath and pressed enter. To my eyes all I saw was a annoying green bard that showed something while vista was loading. Now it took a little longer to boot vista then it did for Fedora but thats after I heavily customized it so fedora would have taken alot longer to load then vista. After setting up a user and Administrator password I was ready to go. It did testing and told me my system was 1.0 on the windows experience Index. What? this computer is pretty new it should be more then that I thought. To find out poking around that it was my Intel video card. Went to the Intel downloaded the driver and I tried to install it. When I double clicked on the icon to install my new driver it gave a "This Program Needs Your Permission to Continue" I though this was strange. In linux I just install a program as root and get no nagging but maybe this is how vista does things. SO I clicked the Button and installed the new Intel drivers. After a it prompt me that I need to reboot I rebooted the system. Again with the good old grub menu I go down the list and select vista. Booted up and went to retest my system with my new intel driver. Again it asks me "Windows Needs your permission to continue". Why is it asking me to test my system its not like its a damn security risk or something. Oh well I took a deep breath and clicked ok. In what seemed like forever it finished my testing. I know was a 3.1 on the index. Thank god not to fix other windows issues.
First things first I opened internet explorer (which now looks a lot like firefox) and went to firefox.com download firefox. It finished and I closed Internet Explorer and double clicked the FireFox installer. Again I was prompted for my permission to load the program. Ok this is getting to be a little to much. If this is going to nag me to death like a second wife I don't want anything to do with this os. I clicked ok and it installed. So I need to go get some protection because I don't want to get infected while sleeping with windows. I downloaded avg and installed it. oh surprise, surprise another damn nagging window asking me if it is ok to load the program I downloaded and install it. Ok Mr. Vista why would I want to get you permission on something I double clicked on. I want to install it I'm not changing my mind. So I clicked ok and installed avg. Now for some spyware protection so I went to spybot's site and downloaded it and yes got another nagging screen. God this already seems like I am married to the computer. Hell the way things are going we skipped the honeymoon and went in the nagging me for everything I do stage. Installed spybot and updated it. and lord of heaven and hell behold I have spy ware. How in the hell do I get spyware from going to spybot and avg? I had 30 traced of some damn Trojan. I see it nagged me to death to install spybot but it did nothing to the pos trojan that it told ok to install? Now I feel like this is a true marriage now only is the damn thing lying to me but its cheating on me behind my back and letting trojans come in and install themselves. Great just Great. Hell this is the first day I can't wait for devoice.
I can't take this nagging anymore o I did a little googling and found a way to take off the nagging. Trust me it took 5 nagging screens just to turn it off. But after a reboot the nagging was gone. Thank god. So I deiced to run another spybot check again I had 5 backdoor spyware installed. how in the hell did I get that for being on the net for 5 min? Now I didn't look at porn(yet) or any site that would give me a std. Well so far Vista isn't more secure. So I cleaned up and take a break.
After the 8 Beers I went back and shut down I can't take anymore for today.
So things are going pretty well for me, but one thing that is annoying me is that I have a 7 button mouse and only seem to be able to use 3 of the buttons (right and left click and scroll wheel). I am not sure how I go about setting commands to the other buttons, but a forward and back for web browsing, and a hot-key for the bash would both be very helpful.
was playing around with Gimp earlier and I've noticed that since adding the 1GB of ram that gimp is practically fast !, so once again if any of you are experiencing slow response from your linux distro then upgrade your RAM !
Well hung !
I started up Openoffice calc today to make some updates to a spreadsheet I'm working on, I made a few edits when suddenly everything just hung completely (except for the mouse, that worked), i had a few things running in the background (3 terminals, xchat, pidgin, firefox with 8 tabs). The capslock key did not show the capslock LED (always a good test) and ctrl_alt_backspace did not restart X, pressing the power button did not gracefully shut the computer down either so i held it and did a dirty shutdown.
After that, I powered on again and one lost inode was deleted during the reboot.
Once I logged in to KDE again, I started up openoffice calc again and tried to re-edit my file, openoffice in turn told me that the file was locked and I had the option of recovering the document, i chose to do this and it loaded up the document, however the changes i was making to the doc were all but gone, luckily it wasn't a weeks worth of work (more like 5 minutes).
Now that I was working again I tried the internet, but no wireless. No ip address, hmm, as root in cli i issued my iwconfig commands again followed by dhclient and a few seconds later i had internet. To hopefully resolve this on every boot i added those two lines to /etc/rc.d/rc.local (executes scripts in there on every boot).
Compiz is working now !
I changed DM back from KDE to Gnome, and then decided I wanted to try compiz again. I enabled Compiz (using the Configure your computer icon) and then through trial and error found a fix for my lack of window-decorators (as I now know they are called).
If you click on System, Administration and then select the Compiz Fusion Icon, it will load that icon into your system tray (blue box with a white arrow..). I then right-clicked on that box and chose Select Window Decorator, it was set to GTK and I set it to Emerald. Lo and behold, borders around my windows !!
Great, I found out how to get the window-decorator's showing up on all my windows (which was essentially making Compiz unusable for me before I figured this out).
then change directory into the newly extracted folder
cd avant-window-navigator-0.2.1
followed by ./configure
which told me the following error
Quote:checking for headers required to compile python extensions... not foundconfigure: error: could not find Python headers
So back to synaptic, I searched for libpython2.4-dev and installed it, now I got a new error
Quote:checking for PYGTK... configure: error: Package requirements (pygtk-2.0 >= 2.8.0) were not met:
No package 'pygtk-2.0' found
Consider adjusting the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable if you
installed software in a non-standard prefix.
Alternatively, you may set the environment variables PYGTK_CFLAGS
and PYGTK_LIBS to avoid the need to call pkg-config.
See the pkg-config man page for more details.
I googled a bit and found a reference to the same error above (more or less, it was on an Ubuntu system), and the suggested solution in that case was to install python-gtk2-dev so I searched synaptic for that and got no results. Using my head I simply searched for pygtk and could see that a package called pygtk2.0-devel was not installed, I selected it and chose to apply, that popped up an error in one of the 25 required packages, but as I had been using apt-get in another cli I decided to 'reload' my synaptic cache. Now it installed the pygtk2.0-devel and its 25 dependancies with no fuss and indeed ./configure got further !
and then stopped with another error
Quote:checking for AWN... configure: error: Package requirements ( glib-2.0 gobject-2.0 gtk+-2.0 gdk-2.0 libwnck-1.0 gnome-desktop-2.0 libgnome-2.0 gnome-vfs-2.0 gconf-2.0 x11 xproto dbus-glib-1 libglade-2.0 xdamage xcomposite xrender) were not met:
No package 'libwnck-1.0' found
No package 'gnome-desktop-2.0' found
No package 'libgnome-2.0' found
No package 'gnome-vfs-2.0' found
No package 'gconf-2.0' found
No package 'dbus-glib-1' found
No package 'libglade-2.0' found
Consider adjusting the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable if you
installed software in a non-standard prefix.
Alternatively, you may set the environment variables AWN_CFLAGS
and AWN_LIBS to avoid the need to call pkg-config.
See the pkg-config man page for more details.
ok then, that's quite a bunch of packages to install
i currently have red hat linux 9 installed on one of my computers and im having trouble installing any other operating systems. i want to have windows xp and unbuntu linux on this computer but when i boot from the instalation cd, they go into the menu and when i choose to install it freezes or doesnt do anything. ive tried using a windows vista cd and a windows 98 cd and it still doesnt work. but when i put in my red hat 9 cd it goes and i can reinstall it. i have even tried reformating the hardrive on another computer but when i tried to install windows or ubuntu, it still didnt work but i could still reinstall red hat 9. can anybody help me?
I'm also new to Linux and I'm running Ubuntu 7.10 (with all the automatic updates). So far I'm very happy with it and everything works fine. I'm not into all the details and don't know how to write all the codes (I'm thankful for the graphic interface). On my quest to personalize the computer I checked out the screenshot section here.
I think it was Anyweb who posted the pictures. Thank you for that! There's a weather application in the right corner and I was wondering what kind of application that is and where I can find it. Is it difficult to install? Also, what's the application with the X-shaped icon? What other widgets or application can you guys recommend?
I hope I posted this in the right section. If not then I'm sorry and ask the Admins to move this post to the correct place or delete it. Thanks for your help and suggestions! Cheers,
sorry for not doing any updates on this over the weekend, but I was just using the distro instead of writing about it, and to be honest now that I've installed gnome I've been very happy with it, it's just working very nicely. The firewall crashing incident is down to a bug on the firewall most likely and I havnt done any more testing with that, other than to completely clear the firewall's cache.
After using PCLinuxOS now for over a week I am definetly getting to like it, it took some time but i am adjusting to it and liking it, and that's a good thing.
I'm stilll waiting on my order of RAM for this laptop, once it arrives i'll start using the computer intensively to see if performance improves as right now it's a bit sluggish on 256mb of ram (caching to swap).
![[Image: theshot.jpg]](http://dylix.mine.nu/corkster/theshot.jpg)
