Computer operating systems

[CitroJim]

That's good Ben

I must do the same as I have a laptop that connects to either/or regularly...

[Ben82]

Well, weighing the pros and cons of upgrading every 6ish months vs staying with a LTS release.. I thought upgrading to utopic would be like upgrading Windows 8 to 8.1, where I would return to the desktop with everything working like it was prior to the upgrade.
I was very wrong and quite likely should have stayed with trusty.

The upgrader locked up the PC when it gave the option for what grub should do with the uefi bootloader. So ended having to turn it off and on again. That left X in an unusable state. I dropped to a console and did a sudo apt-get dist-upgrade, this told me to run a dpkg command as it was in an inconsistent state. Ran the usual round of apt-get commands to make sure everything was up to date, and rebooted.
Success...ish. Considering 14.10 is supposed to have better support for hybrid graphics, it took me a lot longer to get it sorted (hours in fact). It disables all 3rd party repositories, and you have to re-enable them yourself after the upgrade.

And had to reinstall a bunch of stuff to get it back to how I liked it :/

Do start to wonder whether something like Arch is a better fit for me, I like having the latest and greatest of pretty much everything... Rather than having a distro that when upgrading decides it's better to downgrade your applications to the ones they want so you have to upgrade again after you upgrade the distro.

I like the OS and don't have much of a desire to switch back to Windows as my daily driver. Arch does have Unity available too so would potentially tide me by until I find DE that I like the design of does everything I expect. Pantheon might be nice but I don't think that has matured enough yet.

[CitroJim]

Have a look at Fedora Ben...

[Ben82]

Have a look at Fedora Ben...

I'll take a look at both Fedora and Arch in more detail... I do like yum, and that the fedora upgrade tool is called "fedup" Partly partial towards arch as it'll broaden my horizon so to speak. As I have used yum based distros for many years now, it might be nice to test the waters a bit with a completely new (but familiar) system

[Ben82]

Well I finally decided on Arch... did install Unity on it, which I went in knowing it looked like a bit of a hack so expected issues. In the end I've switched to Gnome-Shell with Cairo Dock. Looks like the issues I had with Gnome Shell are actually caused by some of Unity's stuff. So will be seeing if I can strip unity out unless I find anything glaringly wrong with GS that I don't like.

So far, I like Arch a lot. pacman is pretty good as a package manager, but yaourt takes it to the next level. Generally things are usually in the standard Arch repositories or the AUR (Arch User Repository). yaourt combines the two into one simple tool with the same syntax as pacman. And really my main gripes with Arch have seemingly been caused by Unity.

Still getting used to not thinking I need to hunt out the latest version of things, which is really nice

For now Arch is a keeper for me. will have to see how things go when new versions of gnome come out etc.

[CitroJim]

Excellent, pleased to hear you have found a distro you're happy with Ben

At least with Linux we have a choice, which is more that the Windows users have...

I'm liking OPenBSD for server-side work and I've just got OpenVPN working a treat in readines for the resilient forum solution I'm developing...

All the components are now coming together nicely, MySQL database replication and a VPN tunnel to link the two database servers in physically very separate locations.

[Ben82]

Had my first minor weird issue with Arch... keyboard and mouse would randomly would freeze, seems to be something up with the latest kernel ( https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/44276" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false; ). Downgrading the kernel was easier than I thought.

I have also installed it on my old laptop too, going to need to check the lexia VM still works on that laptop at some point though.
Strangely on the old laptop I find Chromium not very responsive (scrolling is really jerky etc), but firefox is fine. Not too bothered as it's not a highly used laptop.

[RichardW]

Any recommendations for current laptops that will run both Win and Linux? The old HP has died again, and I'm not inclined to repair it again, so need a new one. Prefer to continue with Ubuntu, but will have to dual boot for Win to run Diagbox. I understand that modern laptops are a bit fussy on running stuff other than Windoze...

[myglaren]

I have an Asus running Linux Mint - for some strange reason it doesn't like Ubuntu. Works for a couple of months the trips over itself.
Had two laptops (Toshiba) that ran Ubuntu perfectly.
Also have two older ones on Mint.
Grandson has a Zoostorm running Ubuntu that works very well.

Put Ubuntu on a new Toshiba about three months ago to replace Windows 8.1 and the guy (workmate) is over the moon with it. Performs far better than Windows did.

[CitroJim]

Like you Steve, I've a fairly recent Tosh Satellite running Ubuntu very sweetly... I have an even more modern Tosh currently running Win8 and I may, when I have a few spare moment try dual-booting it with either Ubuntu or Fedora.. I need to dual boot as I have an occasional need of a Windows machine now to service my phones and my bike computer..

My main laptop running Fedora is very old in laptop terms but works well. It was one of the first production laptops to originally have Windows 7 on it...

[xantia_v6]

I have an even more modern Tosh currently running Win8 and I may, when I have a few spare moment try dual-booting it with either Ubuntu or Fedora.. I need to dual boot as I have an occasional need of a Windows machine now to service my phones and my bike computer..

Before installing Linux, do the free update to windows 10, to get the on-line licence updated. That will then allow you to reinstall win 10 at a later date, even as a clean install.

[CitroJim]

I have an even more modern Tosh currently running Win8 and I may, when I have a few spare moment try dual-booting it with either Ubuntu or Fedora.. I need to dual boot as I have an occasional need of a Windows machine now to service my phones and my bike computer..

Before installing Linux, do the free update to windows 10, to get the on-line licence updated. That will then allow you to reinstall win 10 at a later date, even as a clean install.

I'm wanting to do that Mike but Microsoft seem reluctant to allow me access to the update.. Seems they are rolling it out on some sort of schedule and my machine is a way down the list it seems..

Any way I can speed up the process?

[RichardW]

Is Diagbox likely to run under Win 10???

[Stickyfinger]

Is Diagbox likely to run under Win 10???

I have been wondering that as well. I was assuming I will have to keep a 32bit disk to run it.

[xantia_v6]

Before installing Linux, do the free update to windows 10, to get the on-line licence updated. That will then allow you to reinstall win 10 at a later date, even as a clean install.

I'm wanting to do that Mike but Microsoft seem reluctant to allow me access to the update.. Seems they are rolling it out on some sort of schedule and my machine is a way down the list it seems..

Any way I can speed up the process?

I didn't need to force it, as one machine was new, and started the upgrade on first boot, and the other got its update slot while I was procrastinating (the update has downloaded, but I have not installed yet).

The technique for forcing an update now seems to be as described at:
http://www.techtimes.com/articles/72714 ... update.htm

On the (new) machine that I updated, after the update had completed (and I had checked the licence details), I reformatted the disk to get rid of all the windows 8 recovery junk, and repartitioned with space for Linux, then did a clean install of windows 10 from a downloaded iso.

The updated licence was detected OK and all went well, after manually installing a few manufacturer-specific device drivers which generic windows does not include.