I CAN HAS DESKTOP PLZ

[athelind]

So, I worked myself through all five stages of the Kubler-Ross model and achieved a nice, serene state of Acceptance.

And then, earlier this e'en, hinoki replaced the power supply in my shiny blue brick with andreal's discarded unit.

Lo, it works again!

Ubuntu's reinstalled; dragon mascot or no, I'm not going to try Kubuntu again until I have a better feel for configuring X the hard way, with config files and command lines and blood sacrifice.

Things are MOSTLY working smoothly at this stage, though Firefox is pulling one of those stupid "You need to install this plug-in/This plug-in is already installed/You need to restart Firefox/You need to install the SAME PLUG-IN" things. It should settle out somehow, though, thinking about it, my grandson's machine has run into the same problem.

Grrr, when stuff that Used To Work refuses to work, that means there's probably some sneaky little problem hiding somewhere.

Tomorrow, I have some quality time scheduled with Package Manager. Gnite!

Comments

[kfops.livejournal.com]

If Ubuntu configures X correctly for you, you also have a couple options. You can install Kubuntu along side it (it's just extra libraries, I think the link was around here somewhere). You can also try and locate your xorg.conf file, which contains all your X-Windows configuration information (resolution, mouse, etc), copy it to a floppy or the like, and then copy it back after Kubuntu install.

The xorg.conf file is usually hiding in your /etc/X11 directory, though it may move around depending on the distribution.

Oh, and don't think this was a blatant disregard of your "I'm not going to try Kubuntu again..." comment. Well, I guess it sort've is!

[athelind.livejournal.com]

Oh, and don't think this was a blatant disregard of your "I'm not going to try Kubuntu again..." comment. Well, I guess it sort've is!

No, quite to the contrary: it's helping me get "a better feel for configuring X the hard way".

The other cranky bit with Kubuntu was getting it to open my 80-gig drive. It's MOUNTED, it just won't give me ACCESS.

[kfops.livejournal.com]

Well, if it can mount the drive then that's half the battle there. The first guess off the top of my head is that it's mounted with permissions that won't allow a normal user to access it. I'm brilliant, aren't I?

I had a similar issue with the drives I share with my Windows partition, so I had to go into fstab and change the permissions. You might want to post the line you have in your /etc/fstab and see if it sheds some light on anything.

My Linux partitions are all mounted with:
/dev/hda5 / ext3 defaults 1 1

but I had to force a user ID and group ID for my mounting options:
/dev/hdb6 /win_data vfat uid=1000,gid=100,rw 1 0

You can determine your user ID and group ID by typing "id" at the command prompt. Of course, that'll only work for you as the specific user, but it's a start. You might be able to replace it with something like gid=users or somesuch (never tested, never researched), but I got lazy as I'm the sole user...

[athelind.livejournal.com]

Okay, um, you lost me somewhere before "fstab".

I don't know where any of this stuff IS.

[tombfyre.livejournal.com]

Ahh, good to hear it was only a power supply issue. ^^ 'tis what I figured it was. Hopefully you can get the software bugs sorted out as well.