Ubuntu Linux Catch-All [10.04 "Lucid Lynx": Released!]

boogle wrote:
jakeleg wrote:
boogle wrote:
jakeleg wrote:
boogle wrote:

Hmmmm. My thinkpad from 3 ish years ago has a matte screen. Is it no longer an option on the lenovo site?

No it is, which is why I am considering the W510. I just wanted to see if their were other options people might recommend. System76 is also appealing since they put Ubuntu on the machines as the primary OS.

From my experience of having put on ubuntu fresh 3 times, Go for the thinkpad.
Build quality is what sells it, and there is a ton of support at thinkwiki.com.
I enjoy the matte screen.

Sort of what I am thinking as well. Unfortunately, the 'FHD" displays for this model are on a long backorder. Definitely want the nicer HD display so I may have to wait a few months until the Lenovo supply situation improves.

I know they have a large back to school discount around august if you end up waiting till then. I got like 400 off mine when I bought it.

I get a discount through work as well

Good deal. Go thinkpad. Mine is old and it's still quite the tank of awesomeness. I've dropped it from 8 feet straight to a corner and it only has one minor cosmetic crack.

So, Necrothread I guess.. (And I'm new to linux, windows8 told me I needed to look for a new OS, as I don't like Win8.)

I have decided to toy with Ubuntu 12.10. I'm installing it as well in a laptop my parents gave me. It had Windows Vista Pro (Which I can't explain why they had that, as the Laptop only had 1gigs, and needed 2 as per its requirement).

Upgrade the machine to 2gigs tho. It's a Dual-Core 2 2ghz Leveno 3000 something, with a 160gigs of HDD.

I tried pre-release(Build 8400) Windows8 on it (Before the release of Win8), and didn't like it. So I'm trying to see and look for a new OS. With Steam pushing toward this OS, I thought I should now try linux, as I wanted an UI, but knows how to work in a DOS/Terminal windows with simple instruction.

Wanted something to be able to run some windows application, like itunes. Heard about Wine, but wanted to know, could it work with VMWare, or a VirtualBox?

And what should I need?

Well, some Windows applications will work very nicely in virtualization. It really depends on what you're running. I would suspect that iTunes would probably not be an ideal candidate for virtualization, however, as it's pretty heavy on the I/O, specifically for music playback. This is the sort of thing that tends not to virtualize well; it's quite common to end up with scratchy/poppy sound, because of the huge amount of extra work the virtualization program has to do. Sound is not virtualized, it is emulated, which takes a lot of CPU time, and is very prone to being buggy.

It might work just fine; the only way to find out for sure is to try it.

However, with only 2 gigs, you're gonna have a hard time with virtualization. You can kinda-sorta do it, but carrying around two entire OSes in 2 gigs is going to slow both of them down, perhaps a great deal. You'd really want about four gigs, if that laptop will support that much RAM. (many older laptops won't, so don't be shocked if you're limited to just 2.)

WINE is a possibility, but I don't have a lot of experience with it. It's definitely not as resource-intensive as virtualization, and if it works, it should work just fine without needing any more memory. If that's the best you can do, then that's what I would experiment with, first.

Another approach, of course, is to find a native software package that does what you want. Do you have a reason for wanting iTunes specifically? If not, what specific features do you want in a player?

Well, my laptop, in itself, will be for entertainement and productivity stuff. (On the go mostly)

So, Prod, I'll go with Chromium for browsing, and OpenOffice for more Prod stuff. (Those are always stuff I'm using as a windows user.)

for Entertainement, a friend told me to try out if other players are able to read my itunes stuff, and seems VLC Media is able to. I saw once they had a Linux version. So I might go with that as well.

I know gaming won't be played a lot on it, if not at all. But I wanted a nice new way to play with this Laptop.

Edit : VLC seems to be able to run only the music, but not the videos.. oh oh.

Manach wrote:

Edit : VLC seems to be able to run only the music, but not the videos.. oh oh.

I think iTunes videos are still DRM-encumbered (iTunes music downloads haven't been for a long time), so unless you can circumvent the DRM somehow, you'll never be able to play those files outside of iTunes.

Also, it's kinda odd to see someone remarking that VLC has a Linux version It's an open-source project that started as a predominantly Linux-based app many many years ago, so I'm still a little surprised that people on Windows and OS X use it!

pneuman wrote:
Manach wrote:

Edit : VLC seems to be able to run only the music, but not the videos.. oh oh.

I think iTunes videos are still DRM-encumbered (iTunes music downloads haven't been for a long time), so unless you can circumvent the DRM somehow, you'll never be able to play those files outside of iTunes.

It's sad, I still pay for those videos, but, guess that's what it does, and one reason I wanted to run iTunes I guess.

Now, I wasn't able to install OpenOffice, I don't know how on linux, it's babbling about another kernel stuff. But I did notice there was LibreOffice by default with Ubuntu. Is it somewhat similar?

LiquidMantis wrote:

If you really want OpenOffice.

Well, mostly, my question is now, is LibreOffice similar?

If yes, I'll learn that software instead. I don't mind having program already installed, and offering the same service.

It is very similar. I've yet to find a reason to need OpenOffice instead of it, but I'm not a massive office document editor.

LibreOffice is a community fork after Oracle turned into a bunch of total jerks, and it's the happening place for free Office apps. It's the stupidest name, like, ever, but they've been doing a huge amount of work cleaning up the snarled codebase of OpenOffice, and in the last article I read, it was sounding like they were doing very well. I got the impression that it may actually turn into pretty nice software in an absolute sense, not just the Not Microsoft solution.

Also, it's kinda odd to see someone remarking that VLC has a Linux version

VLC is also the best player on the Mac, in my opinion. It handles just about everything. On Windows, I usually use the K-Lite Codec Pack with the bundled Media Player Classic. Nice software.

How is the name stupid? It's just the Spanish word for free. It makes sense to me.

Edwin wrote:

How is the name stupid? It's just the Spanish word for free. It makes sense to me.

Uhhh, because it's not English, duh

Edwin wrote:

How is the name stupid? It's just the Spanish word for free. It makes sense to me.

It's also a french word.

Well, gotta look into it a little more.

Thanks for all you answers to far

Edwin wrote:

How is the name stupid? It's just the Spanish word for free. It makes sense to me.

Yep, and it's been embraced by the open-source community because it's less ambiguous than the English "free". It makes it clear that open-source is about having freedom more so than having software at zero cost, or as Stallman would say, "free as in speech" rather than "free as in beer".

Well, now. I found the installation of app within the Ubuntu apps store was easy and quick installed. Which is nice.

I saw some small games as well there, or paid app, could it be similar to what the iTunes Store apps is doing?

Edwin wrote:

How is the name stupid? It's just the Spanish word for free. It makes sense to me.

It makes sense only if you have a large vocabulary. It's ugly, and hard to pronounce. A name you have to explain to people is not typically what you want.

Notice the instant assumption is that LibreOffice must be worse than OpenOffice, presumably based on nothing more than the name.

I disagree. It's newer and less known than Open Office, thus the questions.

Besides, libre is one of those commonly known Spanish words, like cerveza. Maybe it's not universally known, but the majority know what it means.

Malor wrote:
Edwin wrote:

How is the name stupid? It's just the Spanish word for free. It makes sense to me.

It makes sense only if you have a large vocabulary. It's ugly, and hard to pronounce. A name you have to explain to people is not typically what you want.

Notice the instant assumption is that LibreOffice must be worse than OpenOffice, presumably based on nothing more than the name.

Maybe we should hold people to a higher standard rather than dumb it down.

Kind of going off topic, and a bit OS agnostic, but this is why I prefer task oriented names for applications rather than clever names.

For example, WTF is Brasero? I know it's a CD burner, but try getting anyone to remember that when they're in a "So I've got these files I want to burn..." mode and they're fishing through a menu for the right tool for the job. Just label it as a CD burner, and maybe have the clever app name as a secondary thing, or have apps register their functionality and the main app menu (or start menu thingy) offer it that way.

This seems like something that should be basic UI stuff with making things approachable and not hiding behind convoluted codenames. Some OSes and distros approach it better than others.

Manach wrote:

Well, now. I found the installation of app within the Ubuntu apps store was easy and quick installed. Which is nice.

I saw some small games as well there, or paid app, could it be similar to what the iTunes Store apps is doing?

Libre c'est aussi un mot français! (Now, for another subject)

So, no answer for this section?

And as we'll, funny thing. Ubuntu update itself and now lost my wifi driver... It made that as well on the first update. Will it do that often? Now, I need to go with a good rj-45...

Ok, went full install with Ubuntu on the laptop. Seemed in dual boot, Ubuntu thought it was either the lite install from time to time, and then the full install from time to time.

Now, it seems stable, and like it. Tried connecting to an HDTV, and bang, it worked like a charm.

The last program I want on this OS is truly iTunes to be able to read my shows.

Beside that, I'll need to subscribe to the Steam's beta, as I realize my IM is
Steam...

Question : what's the minimum req for this OS? I'm thinking of getting old pcs to try out stuff.

System reqs are pretty low: 1 GHz Pentium 4 with 512 megabytes of RAM, 5GB free hdd space

Well-aged PCs might benefit from using the lighter variant, Xubuntu.

Crosspost, as this is about the OS itself, and the other is for Steam.

oh, and if someone could help me as well, I'm trying to install some humblebundle games I got over there, but since they aren't .deb files, I'll need to learn how to install them.
psoplayer wrote:

System reqs are pretty low: 1 GHz Pentium 4 with 512 megabytes of RAM, 5GB free hdd space

Well-aged PCs might benefit from using the lighter variant, Xubuntu.

I've had good results using Lubuntu on older machines.

LXDE is really the way to go for low resource machines. LXDE makes even Xfce look like a pig, and it's still a fairly comfortable "traditional desktop environment".

I dont know if it the OS or the battery, but I can't get pass the 2 hours usage, sometime, less than 1 hour and a half using wifi + chrome + rhythmbox.

Someone could suggest something about the battery life?

About iTunes, rhythmbox is handling my need for podcast, even getting podcast from iTunes directly, and easier, which is nice!

So, I just realize a lots of Gog use dosbox to run.

How can I run my old games on it? I have never played with that option.

Got the dosbox from the Ubuntu store already installed.

I imagine you'd need to use wine to run the installer if a linux version is unavailable, and then copy/recreate the config in the linux native version of dosbox.

Yeah, I think the vast majority of older games run fine on Wine. You might be able to get it going in DOSBOX, but you'll probably need to set up a lot of it yourself.

Actually, PlayOnLinux has a bunch of GOG.com games ready with install scripts.