New Hard drive for Netbook = failure

In my box of spare parts I came across a 2.5 inch 500 GB hard drive. My HP Mini 110 currently has a 320 HD, and I thought it would be fun to swap in a new one.

Currently it's running Point Linux, so I used the opportunity to check out a new Linux Distro. I settled on Rosa Fresh, a quirky distro out of Russia that takes my favorite GUI (KDE) and does something different with it. I spent Friday loading it and downloading updates. However once I closed the lid and opened it, I was staring at a black screen! The CPU fan was running, and the lights on the side, but no display. This became a reproducible problem where I had to shut the computer down and  restart. After that the cycle would repeat when I closed the lid.

Thinking the distro was too much for my poor little netbook, I switched to Peppermint OS, a lightweight distro. Spent Saturday installing Peppermint, only to discover the same "no display" problems! Pondered it overnight, and decided to go back to the original 320 HD. Swapped it out this morning, and it's having no problems coming out of  sleep mode.

Haven't decided yet whether to try another distro, or just leave Point Linux on it. 

Linux - Back to Kubuntu

For the last five to six months, my main desktop was running OpenSUSE 13.2, and overall I liked it. Over the past couple of months I notice that each time the kernel was updated, I had to manually go in and recompile the video drivers for my NVIDIA video card. At most it took about 5 minutes, so I wasn't all that bothered by it. However one day two weeks ago I got the usual command line prompt after a kernel upgrade. But this time the usual manual recompile trick didn't work. After working on it for a day, I decided to jump ship and try another distro. I'm a big fan of KDE, so I went with Kubuntu 15.04 first, which features the new Plasma 5 desktop. I really like the layout, but at this time there is no icon in the system tray for Dropbox, so you don't know if Dropbox is working or not. I played around with several other distros, until I finally settled on Kubuntu 14.04, with is a LTS (Long Term Support) release. It still features KDE4, and the Dropbox icon works perfectly. I came to the conclusion that stability and familiarity is more important for me on my main desktop then the latest bells and whistles. In comparison, OpenSUSE 13.2 is running on my Dell Vostro 1500 notebook, and I've yet to have a problem with it.

Alpha 2 released for flavors of Ubuntu

Yesterday (31 July) the Alpha 2 was released for most of the versions of Ubuntu. You wouldn't want to use this for any serious work, but they are good to load in a virtual machine or spare PC and help with bug fixes.

Ubuntu 14.04

I've been playing around with Ubuntu's Unity for a few weeks now, and I'm having a good time with it. All of my KDE programs still work, so I can choose whether to use the default Unity programs, or my preferred KDE programs.

One thing that I have found that does not work is Newsrover in WINE. The program will open, but I can never access it. If I decide to continue to use Unity, I may have to move it over to the notebook, which is still running KDE.

The default file manager is good, but I still prefer KDE's Dolphin because you can split the screen. Basically it's having two file managers open at once. Makes it very easy to compare files.

An earlier post complained that the weather app (as seen in the screen shot) wouldn't update itself. I'm pleased to discover that after rebooting the computer for a kernel upgrade, it now auto refreshes like I want it to.

Ubuntu vs Kubuntu

Normally I run Kubuntu (Ubuntu with the KDE on it), but recently I decided to give Unity a try, which is the default program for Ubuntu.

Because it's all Ubuntu underneath, I was able to install the Unity packages from within Kubuntu. After logging off and logging back on, I can now select which one I want to run, KDE or Unity.

One nice thing is that even running Unity, all of my favorite KDE programs are still installed and available! I also have access to all of my files.

I really like KDE, but I've discovered that I'm not much of a tinkerer with the software. I'll do an initial setup, then I'm pretty much happy to run with the defaults.

On Unity I like the launcher bar on the left hand side. I've got my 6-7 favorite applications locked to it.

The weather application "my-weather-indicater" has a lot of features I like, but the auto refresh doesn't work. I have to manually refresh it. No big deal, as it's easy to refresh from the top menu bar.

I'll run with this for a few weeks. I'm hoping to buy a new hard drive in a few weeks, and that will require a fresh install of Linux.

Kubuntu vs OpenSUSE

I've got Kubuntu 13.10 running on my main desktop, Notebook, and netbook. I'm a big fan of KDE, so I stick to the distros that feature KDE.

Now in the past I've read that OpenSUSE is supposed to be the best KDE distro out there. For a while I had 12.1 installed on my desktop, but ran into problems that I just didn't have time to solve.

Now OpenSUSE 13.1 is out, and from what I read in the reviews, it's supposed to be even better than 12.x! I'm seriously thinking about switching my netbook over to 13.1 and learn the distro from that computer.

The only thing that is slowing me down is that the netbook has no DVD drive, so I'll have to install via USB flashdrive. OpenSUSE has a great step by step instruction to set it up, so soon I'll do it.

Instead of trying to install the full 4.7 GB DVD, I've downloaded the live KDE CD, which should make installation easier. Plus since it's the netbook, I won't need all the bells and whistles of the full blown installation.