General Computer Thread

Princess Alice · 2012-06-20 00:27:53

For Linuxy things.

I use Xubuntu myself. Usually I use its default Xfce desktop, but I installed Gnome Shell as well so sometimes I use that instead. I prefer Xfce's interface, but it doesn't seem quite as "polished" as Gnome's, somehow.

Tre · 2012-06-20 00:39:30

I like Greybird too and I use Xub, but no Gnome because this computer it's loaded on ran much slower with Gnome on Ubuntu Prime than with Xfce on Xub.

I'm dualbooting Xub with Windows 6.1. It's a nice combo.

Princess Alice · 2012-06-20 01:15:32

@Tre: What do you think of Thunar? It's not bad, but I don't like it quite as much as Nautilus...

Tre · 2012-06-20 01:32:21

In the last few days of my original Xub installation before I reloaded Windows and Xubuntu, I switched back to Nautilus from Thunar.

It was the "mark as executable" feature that I had to have back, though Thunar itself served me fairly well for the most part.

Just give me Nautilus and Cheese and I think I'll be good for Gnome products.

Princess Alice · 2012-06-20 01:39:23

Whoa, I didn't even know Nautilus had a "mark as executable" feature. I always just used chmod +x for that...

Thunar does have the "open terminal here" option, though, which is convenient.

Tre · 2012-06-20 01:41:53

I'm a bad Linux user. I barely use the command line at all. ;_;

Luckily that's nothing TeamViewer and my best bro ever can't fix.

Princess Alice · 2012-06-20 01:50:20

I barely know any command line stuff myself...I know the absolute basics (cd, ls, sudo, etc.) and a couple more specific commands (mainly apt-get) but that's about it.

Füschlatz · 2012-06-20 07:26:30

Dolphin also has an "open terminal here" option, which I love.

In fact, the vast majority of my Linux experience has involved KDE, and as far as I can remember I never needed to do anything with my files that Dolphin couldn't handle nicely enough.

Princess Alice · 2012-06-21 17:34:49

I kinda want to install Kubuntu. Is KDE any good?

Füschlatz · 2012-06-22 00:14:16

It's generally more user-friendly than GNOME, in my opinion, though it's a lot more resource-hungry too. I remember trying to make Kubuntu run properly on my old machine... absolute fucking nightmare.

lee4hmz · 2012-06-22 01:57:00

I remember installing KDE on my FreeBSD machine years ago because I wanted to play with a music application that required it. This was back when I was on dialup, so it tooook a while.

Princess Alice · 2012-06-22 02:02:09

I recall playing around with Kubuntu on this desktop once before...its interface blew GNOME 3's out of the water, but it had a generally more sluggish feel to it than GNOME for Xfce.

I'm wondering if that would bother me in the long term...

lee4hmz · 2012-06-24 14:29:29

Holy crap, the latest version of GNOME 3 in testing will run on an NVIDIA card with Nouveau without falling back to the GNOME 2.30 interface. Neat.

Corporal Forsythe · 2012-06-24 14:41:34

I'm one of those sickos who thinks the stock fvwm interface, in its magenta and grey-toned glory and all is the best GUI of all time and if they just had Painter and Comic Studio natively compiled for Linux64, I would install all of that and never look back.

lee4hmz · 2012-06-24 15:11:13

While I've gotten used to GNOME 3's quirkiness (as it's what I run on my i7 lappy), I do miss classic FVWM sometimes.

Icalasari · 2012-06-24 15:28:25

I'm still only dipping my toes in Ubuntu. I would just dive in, but games are an issue (As in, I like playing them)

Any advice there? As far as I know, Minecraft is my only computer game that would work on Ubuntu

Also, a few things on Ubuntu confuse me, but I can chalk that up to rarely using it and not getting a chance to get used to it

lee4hmz · 2012-06-25 11:31:19

Since we don't have a general computer geekery thread, and I don't want my post to get lost in the Heap or Updates, here goes:

I was running DOS on bare metal on my Sandy Bridge i7 laptop over the weekend. A 2012-vintage machine running an HDD image from, oh, 1995 or so. Windows 3.1 flies on it, even on a USB drive, and the touchpad even works properly because it's PS/2. (As far as DOS is concerned, USB and AHCI SATA are SCSI drives, so no 32-bit disk access. Not that it needs it...)

The only downside is that sound doesn't work, and will likely never work as I don't think Intel HDA includes Sound Blaster emulation.

Princess Alice · 2012-06-30 14:53:17

Actually, making this a general computer geekery thread might be a good idea...I did always worry "Linux" was too narrow a topic for a megathread.

Any objections to my renaming this "General Computer Thread"?

Füschlatz · 2012-06-30 22:46:17

None from me. And if this is happening, then...

What do you guys think of ASUS' Republic of Gamers line? Good or bad?

Tre · 2012-06-30 22:53:48

My geeky friend who builds computers (and no, he doesn't mind that I call him that) really likes that line. I think both of his current computers use motherboards by Asus.

Princess Alice · 2012-07-01 00:12:31

Thread title updated.

lee4hmz · 2012-07-01 01:37:04

Yay!

Now, for some meta-bitching: I'm reading PC Mag some more, and I noticed they dropped Stephen Manes, who was by far one of the funniest computer writers ever, and subbed in William Zachmann, who is a dull OS/2 2.0/Warp fanboi. UGH. WARP LOST, GUYS, DEAL WITH IT. (Then again, I'm currently still slogging through 1991. OS/2 2.0 wasn't even out yet, OS/2 not-Warp 3.0 (NT) was still in development, and there was still a lot of speculation about both of them at the time.)

Princess Alice · 2012-07-01 05:45:56

The talk of '90s computers in the main thread has me wanting to pull out the ancient IBM ThinkPad my uncle gave me. It has something like a 2GB hard drive, 64 MB of RAM, and Windows 98 SE.

If I can find the wireless adapter (yes, I've actually found a USB Wi-Fi adapter that supports this machine!) I might try to load this site on it and see how it turns up.

But sleeping time first.

lee4hmz · 2012-07-01 07:51:53

98 SE? You might be able to get an older version of Firefox to run on that, but anything more modern will be iffy.

Imipolex G · 2012-07-01 18:58:39

Today someone came in and said that he needed an external floppy drive*, because the computer he had would not take USB drives. Said computer was only two years old.

How is this possible

*which we do not have anymore

Obā-san · 2012-07-01 22:29:26

Imipolex G · 2012-07-01 22:30:27

Heh. I have a disembodied laptop keyboard I used to hang on my door

Salix Babylonika · 2012-07-01 22:30:37

best computer

Princess Alice · 2012-07-01 22:33:01

For some reason it amuses me that that thing apparently has multiple operating systems on it.

(The screen shown is GNU GRUB's boot selection screen)

Obā-san · 2012-07-01 22:34:21

It's Ubuntu and somthin' else I can't make out.

Tre · 2012-07-01 22:35:56

That box seems to be more valuable now than it was in its initial use.

burn!

Princess Alice · 2012-07-01 22:36:18

The top one is too bright to read, but I see three lines of "Ubuntu" and two lines of "memory test"

Obā-san · 2012-07-02 00:29:18

Linus Torvalds once found a segmentation fault in the universe.

Linus Torvalds can run kill -9 and kill Chuck Norris.

Linus Torvalds doesn’t die, he simply returns zero.

Linus Torvalds first written program had artificial intelligence.

Linus can divide by zero.

Linus Torvalds runs Linux on his wristwatch and toster.

Linus Torvalds doesn’t receive error messages.

There is no theory of probability, just a list of events that Linus Torvalds allows to occur.

Linus Torvalds does not sleep. He hacks.

Linus surfs the web using nothing but netcat.

Linus Torvalds can play 3D games in his head by interpreting the source code in real-time.

Linus made the red pill.

Linus Torvalds didn’t learn from the University of Helsinki, the University of Helsinki learned from Linus Torvalds.

Linus Torvalds once developed a programming language so good that it makes python look like punch cards.

Linus Torvalds doesn’t need to boot.

Linus is real, unless declared Integer.

Linus doesn’t push the flush toilet button. He simply says “make clean”.

Linus Torvalds has no dependencies.

Linus Torvalds takes one look at your desktop and knows which porn sites you visited. In the last ten years.

Linus Torvalds sleeps with nunchucks.

Linus can enrich himself simply by chowning your bank account. He does not do this because there is no challenge in it.

There are no man pages for Linus Torvalds, only god pages.

Linus Torvalds can do an infinite loop in five seconds… in his head.

Linus Torvalds doesn’t wear glasses anymore not because he had laser eye
surgery, but because he finally got his xorg.conf properly configured
in his head.

Linus Torvalds can use a nice level lower than -20.

Linus Torvalds doesn’t need to mount his drives.

Linus Torvalds doesn’t debug. His programs are always perfect.

Linus Torvalds can install Linux on a dead badger.

Linus Torvalds doesn’t need backups. He just uploads his files and lets the world mirror them.

Linus Torvalds is taking over the world. Microsoft is just a diversion
so that no one would suspect a mild mannered Finnish programmer.

Linus Torvalds already has Linux 3.0. He is just keeping it to himself to build suspense.

Linus Torvalds didn’t design Linux to run on the 386. Intel designed the 386 to run Linux.

People pray to Jesus, but Jesus prays to Linus Torvalds.

Linus need not worry about Microsoft patent crap, he simply do `sudo mv /tmp/ms /dev/null`.

Linus Torvalds is more powerful than root.

If you could read Linus Torvald’s mind, you’d find that his stream of conciousness is entirely in binary.

Linus scared A and B away, so they had to make C.

Linus only has 2 buttons on his keyboard ’1′ and ’0′

Linus’s kernel never panics.

Linus does not use the GCC, he _writes_ binaries.

RainbowMatt · 2012-07-03 00:37:10

I actually had to take my laptop apart like that one time to add memory. One of the memory slots ran literally directly under the laptop keyboard. :/

lee4hmz · 2012-07-03 03:23:04

Oh man, I was just reminded of one of the greatest advertising foibles in computer history: The time when Logitech ran an ad for the old MouseMan mouse with a naked baby in it. While in the midst of relieving itself.

Even in 1992 that was considered shocking, though apparently not so much that PC Mag's traffic department didn't veto it; it only got a few bemused responses in the letters column a few issues later. If it happened now, I'm sure several people would be serving long prison sentences, assuming someone didn't just beat them into a pulp Punisher-style.

Tre · 2012-07-03 04:47:21

:o

That isn't considered shocking now?

Like, I know, we've seen worse, but still, how did they even get that to run in print?

lee4hmz · 2012-07-03 13:42:12

No idea. "It was the 90s and we could" seems to be the reason, though certainly not a good one.

lee4hmz · 2012-07-03 21:16:13

And now I'm playing with a Dell that's so old, it has a "Designed for Windows NT/Windows 98" sticker on it. It's a 366 MHz Pentium II, and it looks like I put Debian and XFCE on it at some point.

Princess Alice · 2012-07-03 21:18:11

...how well does Debian/XFCE run on it?

lee4hmz · 2012-07-03 21:21:42

Pretty well so far, though I'm doing an update on it at the moment (the first it's gotten in over a year, if e2fsck is to be believed), so Web browsing and such will have to wait a few minutes.

Princess Alice · 2012-07-03 21:25:36

Sometimes I feel silly running Xfce on my full-fledged Pentium Dual Core laptop, as it's apparently intended to be light on resources for less powerful systems.

lee4hmz · 2012-07-03 21:28:06

Eh, I'm silly enough to run Windows 3.11 on my Sandy Bridge i7 lappy sometimes, so...

Spacey · 2012-07-03 21:28:42

why haven't i switched to linuxy things yet.

there is really no reason nott to

Imipolex G · 2012-07-03 21:34:54

Last time I used Linux was...1996

Behind the times

Princess Alice · 2012-07-03 23:13:01

I didn't use Linux in 1996, but I think it's safe to say it's come a long way since then.

Imipolex G · 2012-07-03 23:30:30

To be honest, I only used to boot it up because it included the shareware version of Doom.

lee4hmz · 2012-07-04 18:42:11

Oh, Gateway, this old ad is silly even for you guys. XD

Princess Alice · 2012-07-04 18:49:37

I love the disclaimer on the bottom of the second page explaining that the diner is real but the characters are Gateway employees.

Also, the cow-spotted computer boxes, I remember those! My mother bought a computer that came in one, and we had the box in the garage for like 10 years, heh.

lee4hmz · 2012-07-05 01:08:28

And this Compudyne ad just screams "The 90s are here, bitches, deal with it."

lee4hmz · 2012-07-05 01:16:18

Also...this is about the time you can see mentions of the Internet here and there, but no real understanding of the danger it posed to the status quo. Sort of like being able to see the storm, but thinking it'll move out to sea instead of, oh, hitting New York. It'll hit in 1995, and everyone will be assessing the aftermath for years to come.

Princess Alice · 2012-07-05 01:17:13

Ooh, preloaded with MS-DOS 5.0, Microsoft Windows 3.1, and some "Polaris" thing I've never heard of!

Also, PS/2 keyboard/mouse connector! One thing that always pissed me off about those was that, on cheap desktops, at least, the keyboard and mouse used identical plugs and ports but weren't interchangeable. Why make them look the same if you can't use them both for the same thing?

(As I understand it, though, laptops often had a port that could accept either one.)

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