Ubuntu users - 11.04 - yes or no?

Ok the ubuntu users here will know I am talking about the unity desktop
so how do you like unity?
Personally I think canonical are making a big mistake. I quite like unity, I like novelty but i think that novelty will soon wear off and I think its a mistake to replace gnome with the unity desktop. It is going to alienate a lot of the core support out there, and people will either switch back to gnome or move to another distro i think. I believe they should continue with gnome and offer a package called UUnbuntu - or unity ubuntu rather like they offer kubuntu etc

what are your feelings on this?

 

not an *buntu user [debian] so can't really vote

but since no one's commented, i would note that generally you can replace desktop environments/window managers with one of your choice

however, i thought i saw somewhere that the unity thing is set in stone, as it were - is this true?

i'd be shopping around for a new distro if it were me

[prolly slackware, my perennial #2]

 

I think unity is set in stone, as you put it and depending on how good it is depends if i switch distro's or not

 

the "set in stone" alone would be the deal-breaker for me

where does a *buntu user go?

a little bird told me that lots of people like mint . . .

 

I have used mint but mint is left in a dilemma, as its based directly on ubuntu, so does mint become an ubuntu fork and stick with the gnome desktop or do they go down the unity route too?
Mint would be my choice of distro again if I leave ubuntu, but i prefer ubuntu as there are better repositories for it and while mint is not all that different to ubuntu I have found things that mess mint up which come from ubuntu repositories rather than mint ones

 

hope you like unity then . . .

 

well i guess we will all just have to wait and see whats around the next corner

 

hello bros, i attempted the upgrade to 11.04 and it turned out to be a major fail , it messed up the system for good so i decided to switch to debian instead. about unity, voices are it is terribly crappy but i didn't care since i was running Kubuntu and couldn't care less about gnome. usually failed upgrades aren't that terrible, in the past i incurred in such woes but the installer succeeded in restoring the old configuration, or in the worst case i succeeded in fixing things otherwise, but this time i couldn't even get the disks mounted right from the start and this was the end of my ubuntu experience (been using ubuntu since Feisty) . Debian is not even remotely as automated and friendly as Ubuntu but at least i understand exactly what is going on and how to reverse things.

about Ubuntu 11.04 and upgrading, my suggestion is to be cautious and avoid upgrading, if you really want it burn a dvd and install it instead of attempting the upgrade. rarely in many years i incurred in such an epic fail . maybe it is just my problem but you're warned.

 

I'm trying to install Ubuntu 11.04 on an external drive, attached with a USB. But when I try to install, it tells me that I have no root files and to fix it from the partitioning menu. I can't figure out what this is talking about, and I've looked all over the LiveCD thing and can find nothing for making root files.

I know, I'm a noob.

Can anyone tell me what the installer is talking about, and how to fix it? I've already tweaked my computer to boot from an external drive. I only need the OS.

 

basically it is asking you to make the so called disk partitioning. the very least you are asked to do is to use the built in disk partitioning utility (once we used fdisk) to create one primary root partition ( / ) and one swap partition (swap) but also you might want to make a /home , /boot and /var partitions. to understand this you must learn something about the linux file system . read this http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/understanding-unixlinux-file-system-part-i.html
the sense of partitions is that after this your physical drive is divided into 'slices' that the OS sees as independent disk units. i am not going to cover the entire topic which takes more than a page to explain. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disk_partitioning one good side of his is that if you have to reinstall the system and reformat the disk , you can avoid deleting all your personal data which are stored in your personal folder in the partition mounted under /home. this is also good for other things i am not going to explain for reasons of time.
then you need to format the partitions except swap with a filesystem of your choice, i'd suggest ext3 or better, ReiserFS .

but the more puzzling thing is, every distro today prompts you when it is time to enter the (usually graphical) disk partitioning utility and also offers a guided procedure to complete this step in the simplest way. i didnt do this because i installed Debian linux instead. more details later, now ive got t go.

be very careful, and avoid partitioning and formatting your main hard drive instead of the external unit you plan to use. i know very skilled and experienced users who destroyed hundreds of gigabytes of data in a moment of distraction. your first hard drive should be recognized as /dev/sda or /dev/hda. partitions are represented by numbers (sda1, sda2 etc) http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infoc....ssic.help.doc/f2c_linuxdevnaming_2hsag8.html


one last suggestion: backup all your important data before attempting this, unless you like living the dangerous way. it is mandatory giving this advice to the newbies.

 

My husband lost an entire 16-hour semester of school projects last Fall because he didn't backup his files. He almost flunked. I have several backups of all of my files.

Thankies, I'll try that. How big should be the root partition? My external is 160 gigs.

 

it depends. either you make only one large partition
(apart from the near mandatory swap which in the times of pCs with 64 Mb RAM was of a reccomended minimum size of 2 times your RAM, but now with the current memory sizes of 4 or 8 Gbytes it could be even too much,read further)
and in this case you use all the space left, or if you want to make a separate partition for your personal data to be mounted in the filesystem under /home then I'd suggest to make the partition to be mounted in root position ( / ) of a size large enough to install all the system software you may possibly think of and use all the rest (except of course swap space) for /home.
For example, I have a 250 Gbyte disk. I have one largely superfluos /boot partition of less than 500 megabytes , one /root of (about) 37 Gbyte and a /home of 195 Gb. I discovered that 37 Gbytes for root are too much. Currently the partition mounted under / is in use only for 15 %, with gnome, kde and tons of stuff installed, and hardly it will ever get to be half full. so I suppose you should be fine with :

-one swap partition (no mountpoint) at least equal to your ram size but not larger than 2 Gbytes
(if you really want it, you can also make it smaller if you have decent amounts of of RAM, say at least 4 Gb : my pc works alright with 512 megs, and it almost never gets used)

-one root partition ( mountpoint : / ) of about 20 Gbytes or more
-one home partition (mountpoint: /home) taking up all the rest, to store all of your data, media files, personal configuration files and so on.

optionally, you can make a small partition for /etc (all system wide config files go there) but since it never goes beyond a few megabytes in size, one can also backup in a compressed file all the content of that folder each now and then, and store it in the home folder or where do you like the most. just if you care.

in the far times of computers with tiny disks and RAM modules we also used to make a separate /var partition, because in that folder go all the system logs. a buggy application going wild could fill the entire disk with crap logs if not properly insulated, thus the tradition of trapping all the logs in a separate disk slice to avoid system malfunctions. today this issue seems archived, i have no separate partition mounted in /var and the folder currently holds 800 Mbytes of logs.


about swap, please note that there is much more to say, like swap files (instead of partitions) like windows, and swappiness, but it is a longer story... hope this helps AND i did not write anything excessively wrong.

 

If you wanna check out ubuntu from a windows system, try wubi, it's free, and you can keep your windows. It'll take care of the partition, and it'll give you a dual boot option. If you don't like it, you can remove it.

I've used Ubuntu on my home system exclusively for the past three years, definitely the way to go.

 

Currently running 11.04 (Natty Narwhal) in a wubi dual-boot on a 64-bit laptop. The Unity desktop was not a favorite of mine, so I switched back to the GNOME. There's an option at the bottom of the log-on screen where you can choose which desktop environment you prefer.

 

I've been curious to try Ubuntu. My whole family uses it. But I'm actually really comfortable with Win 7, I think it's a great OS and I haven't had much of the normal windows issues with it.
All the reviews I've seen for Ubuntu 11.10 have been disappointing, but I've decided to give it a shot anyway via the wubi method. My main concerns are the driver issues that I keep seeing in reviews and the fact that I'll have to install all my favorite programs again and take up HDD space.
It's downloading now, so I guess I'll see how it goes.

 

Well, I'm glad I got that curiosity out of my system.
It boots to black and I have to restart and load it with command prompts, it's impossible to find anything I'm looking for in the system layout, it refuses to update any drivers, and on top of it all it's agonizingly slow and will randomly return to root menus while I'm in the middle of doing something, or the app dock will pop out onto the screen and refuse to go away.

It's funny, I've heard such good things about Ubuntu. I can only assume my experience wasn't typical, but trying to use it was ridiculously painful.

 

not all ubuntu releases are utterly fucking wonderful. that's why i switched to debian. i am never going to take that 'unity' BS that makes me think of a winphone, nor accept the gnome way of arranging a desktop and programs and the unneeded complexity of KDE4. i am still a fan of KDE3 , a simple serious business-like and powerful DE with a familliar layout, with his own documented scripting language. it is not a mere frill, you can make your own scripts to interact with kde and his applications, make programs cooperate, automate functions etc. you can take a IRC program and make it work like a xdcc bot just by scripting.
try that with windows or macos...

i know that the linux and even the ubuntu linux experience may be painful at first but it pays off in the long time. at least you are never going to bother again about viruses, disk fragmentation, corrupted registry or software licenses. my advice, try some other major linux distro before giving up.

 

Hmm, debian with kde does look pretty nice.
I wish I had some blank dvds around here to try a live install.