[geeks] While I'm at it, another Ubunut grouse

[Phil Stracchino]

velociraptor wrote:
> I run Xubuntu here, have done zip for customization other than adding
> emacs and a few other utilities, and the only thing running that is
> "gnomish" is gdm itself.  I could switch to xdm if I want, but it's
> not worth the hassle since my hardware is not that marginal (I prefer
> xfce).  I am running 9.04.

Yeah, having an actual working xubuntu install now (reinstalled the
Inspiron 4100 cleanly today, after upgrading it with the 60GB disk and
Mini-PCI wireless card I salvaged out of the dead Vaio we were given),
there's a lot of Gnome packages *installed*, but very little actually
running.  The machine's a lot more responsive now.

So I spoke too soon, and was unduly influenced by the first attempted
xubuntu install on the ancient Thinkpad 600E, which appears to have
suffered yet another hardware failure and I'm tired of fixing it...

> Of course, if you fire up Evolution (or other mish-mashes), all bets
> are off, since it's linked to the fscking gnome hilt.

Yeah.  Mostly what Cymru's using on it is Firebird, Thunderbird, Xchat,
and Kabikaboo (a writing-assistant tool in Python).

> It's easy enough to disable (I did that on 8.04 when I was toting
> around the laptop to the datacenter, b/c the wireless supplication
> didn't work right on this box).

It caused me considerable frustration on the first boot after
installation, which only partially booted and left me trying to fix the
system from the CLI with only partly-working networking on what I
eventually discovered was a ro filesystem.  It has mt gnashing my teeth
for a little while until I figured out what had failed and got it fixed,
and now seems to be behaving itself.

> Compared to trying to trim down something like RH or Fedora to get it
> onto marginal hardware, going the Xubuntu route is a great deal more
> straightforward.

Sure.  And as you noted, in the field of desktop OS users, we're the
one-percenters.


-- 
  Phil Stracchino, CDK#2     DoD#299792458     ICBM: 43.5607, -71.355
  alaric at caerllewys.net   alaric at metrocast.net   phil at co.ordinate.org
         Renaissance Man, Unix ronin, Perl hacker, Free Stater
                 It's not the years, it's the mileage.