Wednesday 7 December 2011

Unity my arse

I've a bit of a love/hate relationship with linux, been running a linux web PC/server for quite a while now, even done some proper training on it. You can modify and customise everything, normally stable, no worries from virus or malware, masses of free software and community support. Ubuntu does seem to be as advertised linux for human beings, setup and go and if all your hardware is covered it is pretty much as easy as windows but if you hit any snags then you have to resort to terminal and it goes pear shaped pretty quick. The 'nix does not run strong in this padawan. Setup ubuntu 11.10 on my laptop and everything worked from the start graphics, wifi, even hibernate works now, Unity looks good, very mac-esque, seems to have simplified it (ie removed all the techincal stuff). Decided to setup 11.10 on my home TV, everything went on no bother but res was stuck at 1024x768, had the same troubel in XP so update drivers then go to control panel and unhide unsupported res, no biggie. Thing is, as far as I can tell, the idea behind Unity is that it is supposed to work straight away and they don't want you tinkering with it, fine but if you're gonna have it that way get some drivers on for my JVC telly, meanwhile time to ctrl alt T and start haphazardly bashing away at the keys. Hmm, lets try drivers, with FGLRX on I can set the res to widescreen but it knocks out compiz and none of the snap stuff I'm used to from win7 works. Hmm remove fglrx, do some googling xrandr and cvt will sort it, yep sure enough everything works fine now. Reboot and what the hell happened? Back to 1024, ctrc failure messages and fugly icons. Damn xrandr changes aren't permanent, ok apparently I need to vi  /etc/gdm/Init/Default, nope doesn't exist, hmmm. More googling, then some more. Edit Xorg.conf, oh there isn't one. Go to usr/share/xll and bung in a config file there with your custom resolutions, nope, no difference. Install fglrx again and oh look my .conf file has kicked in now but still no compiz. Grrr. More late night googling looks like it might be gconf-editor that I need, it's taken me a long time to get that info tho, dunno if it's my google-fu ineptitude or that the info just isn't easy to find.

Not sure what the point of this post is, just a bit of a rantette I guess, any none linux users well done for reading this far sorry to bore you, do have a go at ubuntu it's nice honestly, on most normal PC/monitors it works fine. Linux users try not to hold me in complete contempt, I am trying :-)

2 comments:

Julbags said...

Quality rantage! As a fellow geek, I once did toy with the idea of using Linux at home instead of windows but then decided I just didn't want that level of customisation/ability to totally fubar the os at home. I spend my working day messing around with databases on various flavours of unix and linux and prefer to leave it there where I'm protected from doing any real damage by having no root access. I prefer the relative simplicity of windows, even if it is frustrating.

Donk said...

:-) glad somebody did read it. Dbase tinkerer eh? Fun!
I don't actually dislike windows, but I like the ease of use of macs (but not the price) for searching and playing tunes/films, unity looks like it might do the same, not actually got that far yet tho.


and I'm now not actually sure gconf-editor will do the resolution job afterall grrrr.