Riding the Narwhal
May. 9th, 2011 12:07 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
liam_on_linuxSo this afternoon I got a reminder to upgrade. Just before I went out for the afternoon, I thought, "WTF," and said yes.
When I came home, it was all done - no questions or prompts, unlike my notebook, which needed a lot of hand-holding. It was sitting at the "remove obsolete packages" stage. I did so and rebooted.
It hadn't updated GRUB. Dead box.
A 32-bit Natty LiveCD didn't boot, either.
Tried a 2nd time, still no. Dumped me into single-user mode.
Managed to reboot into Win7 - I've seldom been so grateful for it - and downloaded & burned the 64-bit LiveCD.
This wouldn't boot either. So since I was in single-user mode anyway, I fscked my drives.
Rebooted, and now it worked and got me to the "install or try" screen. "Try" worked, eventually, after 10-15min of nothing much and occasional disk activity.
Removed, purged and reinstalled GRUB2.
This worked fine.
And it booted, and I'm in Unity. I rather like it. It's even migrated all my "quicklaunch" icons from my GNOME panel into the UNAD™. Natty indeed!
I have a big screen, ish, so the UNAD is permanently visible unless a window comes near, in which case it hides. This is fine, and a bit amusing.
And then I discovered another nice wrinkle... Pidgin integrates with the status-bar thing, rather than the upgrade foisting Empathy on me. Even more impressed! I'd long ago removed Empathy. It's respected that, but I didn't expect Pidgin to work with the menu-bar-status-indicator thing - but it does, flawlessly.
It had added buttons for the other bits of LibreOffice than Writer, the only bit I really use, and the Software Centre (which I rarely use) and Ubuntu One (which I never ever use). Removed them & my UNAD now fits the left monitor nicely.
I have a menu bar on both monitors, complete with indicators etc., so if I have 1 app on each screen, both sets of menus are accessible. It's an interesting solution to the question of what to do with 2 screens - not the one I was expecting but I quite like it.
I've only had half an hour to play with it so far, but I like it. It's fast as hell, too. That I wasn't expecting. Feels significantly snappier than GNOME 2 did, to my considerable surprise.
Oh, and although my IBM Model M keyboard has no "Windows" keys, the keyboard preferences applet has let me remap "Caps Lock" to "Super", so I can use the whizzy shortcut keys.
I am impressed, and quite liking this, so far.
When I came home, it was all done - no questions or prompts, unlike my notebook, which needed a lot of hand-holding. It was sitting at the "remove obsolete packages" stage. I did so and rebooted.
It hadn't updated GRUB. Dead box.
A 32-bit Natty LiveCD didn't boot, either.
Tried a 2nd time, still no. Dumped me into single-user mode.
Managed to reboot into Win7 - I've seldom been so grateful for it - and downloaded & burned the 64-bit LiveCD.
This wouldn't boot either. So since I was in single-user mode anyway, I fscked my drives.
Rebooted, and now it worked and got me to the "install or try" screen. "Try" worked, eventually, after 10-15min of nothing much and occasional disk activity.
Removed, purged and reinstalled GRUB2.
This worked fine.
And it booted, and I'm in Unity. I rather like it. It's even migrated all my "quicklaunch" icons from my GNOME panel into the UNAD™. Natty indeed!
I have a big screen, ish, so the UNAD is permanently visible unless a window comes near, in which case it hides. This is fine, and a bit amusing.
And then I discovered another nice wrinkle... Pidgin integrates with the status-bar thing, rather than the upgrade foisting Empathy on me. Even more impressed! I'd long ago removed Empathy. It's respected that, but I didn't expect Pidgin to work with the menu-bar-status-indicator thing - but it does, flawlessly.
It had added buttons for the other bits of LibreOffice than Writer, the only bit I really use, and the Software Centre (which I rarely use) and Ubuntu One (which I never ever use). Removed them & my UNAD now fits the left monitor nicely.
I have a menu bar on both monitors, complete with indicators etc., so if I have 1 app on each screen, both sets of menus are accessible. It's an interesting solution to the question of what to do with 2 screens - not the one I was expecting but I quite like it.
I've only had half an hour to play with it so far, but I like it. It's fast as hell, too. That I wasn't expecting. Feels significantly snappier than GNOME 2 did, to my considerable surprise.
Oh, and although my IBM Model M keyboard has no "Windows" keys, the keyboard preferences applet has let me remap "Caps Lock" to "Super", so I can use the whizzy shortcut keys.
I am impressed, and quite liking this, so far.
