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He means Linux distributions don't generally include an RDP server in their repository. Which is true [...]

$ apt-cache search xrdp
xrdp - Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) server

ORLY? Let me know what crappy distro you're using, so I can make a point of avoiding it. Ubuntu sure ain't one: http://packages.ubuntu.com/search?keywords=xrdp

(Of course, we both agree that RDP isn't the right solution, but that's a secondary issue.)

.... you are new to Linux, and you need some help?

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Beginners/FAQ

gus

"Informative" mod is utterly wrong. If you had bothered to research what you are posting about (which would have been easy, as a Google query for "ubuntu phone" brings you right here), you would have known that Canonical is aiming for precisely the opposite of what MS tried. MS forces the phone interface on PC users, with the traditional Desktop being forced into Metro). Canonical wants to make it so that if you plug an external monitor/keyboard/mouse into your phone, your phone runs the appropriate PC UI for these devices (while continuing to run the phone UI on the phone in parallel)

I shouldn't have to research my operating system every year to make sure it hasn't changed it's core principles.

Which core principal did they change, or what exactly are they doing that violates one of them, and how does that violate the principal?

Remember "Canonical, the sponsor of the Ubuntu project, today announces that Ubuntu is now available pre-loaded on the new ASUS Eee PC series". Never shipped.

"Canonical and Dell have teamed up to offer an extensive range of Dell desktop and notebook configurations, certified and suitable for home use, business use or software development." No mention of such products on Dell's site. Do they just make this stuff up?

Bullshit. I've been using Linux for ten years and never once opened vim or modified a config file.

Then you were very lucky.

Modern distros all have Windows-like "control panel" programs. In short, buddy, I'm calling you a damned liar.

Two years ago I developed some software using CUDA on Ubuntu. This required the latest driver that's not available via the official Ubuntu support system, so I had to use the official one by Nvidia. This resulted in a broken Xorg every time the kernel was updated (automatically by the Ubuntu updater, which was about once every two weeks). I had to drop down into console to download the Nvidia driver (via lynx) and install it manually.

You don't even have a Linux box or you'd know that software installation takes about two clicks of a mouse and you're done.

You sure? How do you think I can do mouse clicks on a VPS?

W: Failed to fetch http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/karmic/main/binary-i386/Packages.gz 404 Not Found [IP: 91.189.92.177 80]

The system is too old, the packages don't exist on the server any more. I can't update to a never version, because the VPS hoster's only option of updating the system is by completely wiping it and installing a new system (which takes a while to configure).

Modern Distros still have some major rough edges. I cant even get ubuntu to stop turning off the monitor, and there is nowhere in the UI that even offers it. I tried 7 different vectors at the command line before i gave up. It shouldnt be that hard.

Not sure what a vector at the command line means but after 10 seconds of clicking through their help guide:

Click the icon at the very right of the menu bar and select System Settings.
Click Brightness and Lock.
Change the value in the Lock screen after drop-down list.

I believe what you are looking for is this.

No free professional help in every major city in the world

Your seriously arguing that there is no help for Linux...or that Apple support is free [hint: its not stupid], and they also break the laws in the EU/China for offering less support than is mandatory. http://www.ubuntu.com/support Personally though if you really need greater support pay for it its $105...but the vast majority don't.

Windows 7 onscreen keyboard is great...Linux alternatives, suck.

That's a fairly clear preference you've expressed.

If you genuinely want to use Linux, you can install the Plasma Active version of Kubuntu and have your predictive keyboard.

http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/kubuntu-active/releases/12.10/release/

Yes, but you can run Plasma Active on a desktop computer with a touchpad.

It's simple to try, just test with the USB version, then install if you like it. KUbuntu has a good remix.

http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/kubuntu-active/releases/12.10/release/

...but where is the Android integration in Ubuntu, Gnome and KDE?

Unless I'm misunderstanding you, you must be joking: http://www.ubuntu.com/devices/android

'Our goal is to build a powerful, True Linux Tablet, one free of Google and Android's restrictions, at a reasonable price,

Yeah, that onerous Apache license that stop you from doing.. uh.. what exactly?

Well, I mean at least hardware-wise they're free of the "restricted" $200 7" tablet that is instantly unlockable so you can put whatever you want on it, including Ubuntu...

Um, wat? How are Google's Nexus tablets "restricted"?

The folks behind PengPod are off to a slow start, with $769...

Wow, I could buy 7.69 of the non-available 1024x600 tablets with that!

... But on their download page they recommend the 32 bit: http://www.ubuntu.com/download/desktop See, "choose your flavour", 32 bit is default selected, with a "recommended" in parenthesis.

Actually that's not true (about what Ubuntu recommends). From https://help.ubuntu.com/community/32bit_and_64bit: "Unless you have specific reasons to choose 32-bit, we recommend 64-bit to utilise the full capacity of your hardware."

"After taking into account Windows RT, Microsoft Office, built-in apps, and Windows recovery tools, nearly 13 GB of the available space is eliminated from user accessible storage"

I have a 4GB usb device with the full system taking up 712kb storage ... Ubuntu usb-creator

What did you expect? Of course to be fair, if you install a *full* version of the average desktop linux ( or bsd ) distribution you get tons of stuff by default too. Most of it you dont want.

But still, for a tablet product they should have gone out of their way not to just toss crap onto it. Space is not cheap, like it is on a desktop.

Idiots.

Calling other people idiots doesn't make them so. As for your comparison with a Linux Desktop with a healthy selection of Apps I am running at 7GB after many months. I suspect a fresh install would require much less. Ubuntu for example https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation/SystemRequirements suggests 5GB.

Linux already has a huge software following in the ham radio/geek world. As does some commercial Windows and Mac software. The ability to digitise a ham signal with audio is nothing new it is just slower than molasses and not really practical for communication of anything of size at all. The high audio frequency spectrum is awash with interference over short wave and the only place you can modulate the sound adequately to do accurate digital is in the lower more stable frequencies. As a consequence the data speed is slow. High bandwidth data requires accurate signal at extremely high frequencies that do not skip or get blasted during the day by ionic interference.
The only advantage is shortwave skip and this is problematic as hell as the nature of the skip does not mean that you necessarily will be able to receive or communicate with all places on the globe all the time. But this is the selling attraction to real Hams ..you sometimes never know who you might wind up talking to!
DAH DIT DAH DIT DAH DAH DIT DAH

... (it's a shame that bootcamp doesn't support linux)....

I have not tried this but there appear to be instructions for installing ubuntu on macbooks.

1. How is a nexus 7 locked down? The bootloader is unlocked and you don't have to stick with android.

Exactly. You can, for instance, install Ubuntu on it. There are some issues, but the Nexus 7 is surely the most ARM-based tablet on the market right now.

No, they mean bisected.

That's a procedure by which you do a binary search to find which patch caused a problem.

I have seen this before -- good word, IF you are using old-fashioned mechanical drives. S.M.A.R.T has a couple of things about it -- I have heard that sometimes it tends to fib -- manufacturers do not want people to think that their drives are bad. The other big thing is that S.M.A.R.T. was invented BEFORE SSD drives became commercially viable.

I had a bad mechanical disk that started stalling and getting read errors and OS failed to boot. SMART percentages reported the drive fully healthy, only looking at the raw data values could I see that there were remapped sectors, etc. This is the data needs to be scrutinized for any changes.

For the interest of anyone, I booted from a ubuntu CD and used this method to image the disk:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/DataRecovery#Imaging_a_damaged_device.2C_filesystem_or_drive

It does one pass to get all the error free sectors first, then it will go back and retry on the sectors with errors. Then I opened the image in Test Disk to get my data.

Hi. Thanks for the suggestion.

That page's instructions didn't work for me, because I'm using Kubuntu, and that is for Ubuntu. I decided to search around a bit, since there might be more documentation written after I last looked. It turns out that there is some.
Lucid Lynx 10.04 and Maverick Meerkat 10.10 which is for Ubuntu, but it works for me.

Now I just need to get something to record via the internal microphone.

I highly doubt it since they're already in the beta stage, so major version changes are a no-no at this point. You can however get the latest kernel in the Kernel ppa.

There's a lot of reasons to switch distros. Everyone usually finds one that fits their way of thinking after two or three. People also find that the different distros work better at different tasks - you don't (generally) use Ubuntu for servers, for instance.

As far as what I run on "my" computer, it hasn't changed much: Slackware -> Debian unstable. I knew Slackware inside and out (back in the 3.x days) and now I know Debian very well (you have to, if you run unstable). I've hit a comfort zone, and I'm unlikely to change.

I switched from Slackware to Debian because Slackware was very, very far behind on switching from the libc5 C library to glibc (the second major change in Linux, the first being the switch to ELF executable format). A lot of software was being written that didn't work with the old libc5, and Pat (the maintainer of Slackware) was being stubborn on the point. He had his reasons, but I wanted new software, so I switched.

I tried Corel Linux back when it came out. That lasted about two days. It didn't live up to its promises, and when I found myself replacing the Corel repositories with Debian repositories, I knew it was in vain (BTW, doing apt-get update && apt-get upgrade from Corel to Debian is... interesting. It worked, after a lot of fixing, but I finally wiped and reinstalled Debian). It's just as well - there was only the one version of Corel Linux.

I've had to use Red Hat (not Enterprise, but old school Red Hat Linux) on a few occasions for work-related reasons. This was back in the RPM dependency hell days, and it turned me off of any distro that doesn't maintain a decently large package repository. I used Fedora Core 4 and found it to be just as bad. Same goes for Mandrake (before they became Mandriva - I had friends who ran that because it was "user friendly" - I did not find it so. It might be better now, of course.

I've used Gentoo for shits and giggles on a server I run. I was just curious about it. I've since replaced it with OpenBSD because a) I didn't have the time to learn to admin it properly and b) compiling every package in the system on an Intel Atom chip is painful. (I already knew how to admin OpenBSD.) I liked Gentoo and if I ever replaced Debian as my main distro, it would be to go to Gentoo. I just don't have the time to learn a new system anymore.

I've done LFS. I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to learn more about the underpinnings of Linux. It reminded me a lot of my Slackware days, back when you had to compile everything.

Ubuntu works, and I've run it on a few machines, but doesn't fit into my way of doing things. I like to customize my system a lot, and I like to log in as root when I'm doing admin stuff. You can do that with Ubuntu, but it's just easier with Debian.

Of course, there's the BSDs and Solaris as well, and these days I mostly do server stuff on OpenBSD (or FreeBSD if it's a fileserver). The BSDs make excellent servers and don't feel as "hacked together" as Linux does. I wouldn't use one as my main system, but if I had a technical job again I wouldn't mind a FreeBSD desktop.

So the rite of passage isn't to find the most obscure distro, but to find the distro that suits both you and your use case best. Experimentation never hurts, and you can learn a lot from running different distros.

As far as I can tell, apart from the Adobe version of the small 'i' looking less attractive and their comma being more vertical, they are identical.

The ubuntu font was introduced last year.

I hear that the Chinese won't stop you from SSHing to a system outside of the country. You can turn SSH into an ad-hoc VPN if you'd like:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SSH_VPN

They are offering support contracts: http://www.ubuntu.com/business/advantage

Or do you mean they are not promoting them enough?

They sell exactly that. http://www.ubuntu.com/business/advantage

Then they should do the one thing that actually turns a profit for free software vendors: subscriptions (for e.g. support, updates, etc.), targeting business users.

They do that already.

Well, here is some other stuff i picked up:

If the issue is the blank screen being identical to what you would see if prompted to login - but w/out the login window

what worked for me was to Tick "Lock screen when screensaver is active" in screensaver preferences dialog

This host was running Ubuntu (Bug #150109), but other things to try:

Option "ForceEnablePipeA" "true" # in your xorg.conf:devices section
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/X/Quirks#Force_Pipe_A_Quirk

try nomodeset (disable KMS) and/or vthandoff in grub

run below from a console:
compiz --replace --sm-disable --ignore-desktop-hints ccp

use xset to control DPMS
  sleep 1; xset s activate
      Or to turn the screensaver off:
  sleep 1; xset dpms force off

In a terminal (Applications-->Accessories-->Terminal), type: gconf-editor
Navigate to apps-->gnome-power-manager-->buttons and set lid_ac and/or lid_battery to "nothing" (without the quotes)

SEE: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-power-manager/+bug/416236

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/X/Troubleshooting/Freeze
http://linux.bigresource.com/Fedora-14-Black-screen-with-pointer-only-after-waking-2Nn2FdoSA.html

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xserver-xorg-video-intel/+bug/138256?comments=all

Hope this helps

Well, here is some other stuff i picked up:

If the issue is the blank screen being identical to what you would see if prompted to login - but w/out the login window

what worked for me was to Tick "Lock screen when screensaver is active" in screensaver preferences dialog

This host was running Ubuntu (Bug #150109), but other things to try:

Option "ForceEnablePipeA" "true" # in your xorg.conf:devices section
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/X/Quirks#Force_Pipe_A_Quirk

try nomodeset (disable KMS) and/or vthandoff in grub

run below from a console:
compiz --replace --sm-disable --ignore-desktop-hints ccp

use xset to control DPMS
  sleep 1; xset s activate
      Or to turn the screensaver off:
  sleep 1; xset dpms force off

In a terminal (Applications-->Accessories-->Terminal), type: gconf-editor
Navigate to apps-->gnome-power-manager-->buttons and set lid_ac and/or lid_battery to "nothing" (without the quotes)

SEE: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-power-manager/+bug/416236

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/X/Troubleshooting/Freeze
http://linux.bigresource.com/Fedora-14-Black-screen-with-pointer-only-after-waking-2Nn2FdoSA.html

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xserver-xorg-video-intel/+bug/138256?comments=all

Hope this helps

The Ubuntu Linux windows installer solves the setting-up-to-dual-boot problem nicely.

http://www.ubuntu.com/download/desktop/windows-installer

Posting AC cuz I'm not a karma whore

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Wayland

That will roll around in some half a dozen years, but Ubuntu also has YY.MM version numbers, so you know immediately that version 08.04 is over four years old.

Why would I know that? Do you mean they also mandate that their major releases match the last two digits of the year they came out? Good to know. Certainly not obvious.

You would know that if you cared enough to look it up. It is of course much more comfortable to assume that the numbering is arbitrary and stupid. Feel free to explain any numbering/naming convention that is easier to understand than YY.MM and is at the same time so intuitive that no one could ever ask "Why would I know that?"

Surprise, surprise. Infoworld filling their pages with tripe, and again, Slashdot reposting it.

This was the sentence that tipped me off: "Ubuntu Linux is scrambling to find ever more obscure animals to alliteratively name its versions after."

No one is scrambling. They obviously haven't seen the list, or the matrix.

While I can't blame Infoworld for trying to fill the pages with some content, any content at all, somehow I believe that Slashdot should be different. I don't know why.

Surprise, surprise. Infoworld filling their pages with tripe, and again, Slashdot reposting it.

This was the sentence that tipped me off: "Ubuntu Linux is scrambling to find ever more obscure animals to alliteratively name its versions after."

No one is scrambling. They obviously haven't seen the list, or the matrix.

While I can't blame Infoworld for trying to fill the pages with some content, any content at all, somehow I believe that Slashdot should be different. I don't know why.

yeah, and now have a look at ubuntu for example. pushing their own DE, which is used by no other distribution to all users by default, building own "standards" like unity-features (which thankfully are at least supported by kde now), trying new stuff like webapps extensions and stuff and moving away from all other distributions just to make money on their own.

yesterday i saw https://apps.ubuntu.com/cat/department/internet/ when i googled for something ... mixing opensource, proprietary stuff of questionable quality, payed apps (opensource and non opensource) together in one big apple-like appstore ... maybe its soon time to leave ubuntu for a more pure linux distribution.

just have a look for example at https://apps.ubuntu.com/cat/applications/cookiebreaker/
> Provides performance and from disk gain by deleting your browser cookies
okay, first Bullshit: deleting cookies gives performance and significant disk space gain? I do not think so ..
then: $3 USD for a cookie deletion tool? What it does can be done by a simple shellscript.
and of course its only available via the website (and the software center maybe), not via apt, even when its GPLed. What extra is ubuntu doing there?
And what the overall quality is from the short and long description and the screenshot, i think you can compare it to some software from a shareware CD, like we had them when windows 98 was around.

So, we need our linux distributions to be more like debian, and less like the new traits of ubuntu.

yeah, and now have a look at ubuntu for example. pushing their own DE, which is used by no other distribution to all users by default, building own "standards" like unity-features (which thankfully are at least supported by kde now), trying new stuff like webapps extensions and stuff and moving away from all other distributions just to make money on their own.

yesterday i saw https://apps.ubuntu.com/cat/department/internet/ when i googled for something ... mixing opensource, proprietary stuff of questionable quality, payed apps (opensource and non opensource) together in one big apple-like appstore ... maybe its soon time to leave ubuntu for a more pure linux distribution.

just have a look for example at https://apps.ubuntu.com/cat/applications/cookiebreaker/
> Provides performance and from disk gain by deleting your browser cookies
okay, first Bullshit: deleting cookies gives performance and significant disk space gain? I do not think so ..
then: $3 USD for a cookie deletion tool? What it does can be done by a simple shellscript.
and of course its only available via the website (and the software center maybe), not via apt, even when its GPLed. What extra is ubuntu doing there?
And what the overall quality is from the short and long description and the screenshot, i think you can compare it to some software from a shareware CD, like we had them when windows 98 was around.

So, we need our linux distributions to be more like debian, and less like the new traits of ubuntu.

I think they fixed that around the 586 or 686, but sine you're usually choosing between i386 or AMD64

I'm under the impression that most Linux distributions compiled for "i386" are actually compiled for i686 because pre-1999 PC hardware isn't worth supporting anymore except in very specialized distros. Ubuntu, for example, dropped i586 support in 2010.

On Ubuntu's download page it doesn't recommend using amd64, it recommends x86.

That's probably why Ubuntu shows less amd64 installs than x86. They could get with the times and recommend amd64 -- my 6 (or was it 7?) year old laptop even supports the amd64 instruction set.

Canonical should recommend by default that you buy CD's from them

They provide that as an option on the Ubuntu Desktop landing page.

since they can't know that you have a CD burner in your computer.

If a novice is trying to decide whether to download or buy, it's easy to tell whether or not the optical drive can burn CDs by looking for the CD-RW, DVD-RW, or DVD+RW logo on the disc tray. And even if not, a CD image can be turned into a bootable USB image; at least one of my machines got Ubuntu through UNetbootin. How can a novice easily determine whether a PC has a 64-bit CPU without opening the case?

Or just recommend that they'll sell you a whole new computer

They provide that as an option, though it's slightly harder to find than buying CDs.

Canonical should recommend by default that you buy CD's from them

They provide that as an option on the Ubuntu Desktop landing page.

since they can't know that you have a CD burner in your computer.

If a novice is trying to decide whether to download or buy, it's easy to tell whether or not the optical drive can burn CDs by looking for the CD-RW, DVD-RW, or DVD+RW logo on the disc tray. And even if not, a CD image can be turned into a bootable USB image; at least one of my machines got Ubuntu through UNetbootin. How can a novice easily determine whether a PC has a 64-bit CPU without opening the case?

Or just recommend that they'll sell you a whole new computer

They provide that as an option, though it's slightly harder to find than buying CDs.

And Debian, no less. You don't pick Debian for 'new hotness'.

Ubuntu has less amd64 installs than i386: http://popcon.ubuntu.com/

sudo dpkg-reconfigure popularity-contest and "Yes" to join the contest (mine was disabled for some reason).

If you want Ubuntu without Unity, try using the minimal ISOs at https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation/MinimalCD/. It will install a base system that boots to a terminal. From there, just "sudo apt-get install gnome-shell, lightdm, xorg, firefox, gnome-terminal" and whatever else you want. You'll get a lightweight gnome-shell DE without kitchen sink.

Go to the back of the class. Kunbuntu is still part of the official family, it is simply no longer directly developed by Canonical.

http://www.ubuntu.com/project/about-ubuntu/derivatives

Linux worked well if you picked up a 1-2 year old laptop, because by then you could find support for most of the hardware, but you were in for a world of hurt if you wanted anything new.

If you're buying a Laptop and want to run Linux on it, you should make sure it's certified. Of course, results are best when Linux is already pre-installed.

Maybe the next generation will be able to combine the best of both. Ubuntu for Android looks promising as it would allow the use of full desktop type software. Of course it will be limited to the computing power available on the mobile device, but that is probably sufficient for many uses.

Does Windows 8 have an opt-out feature?

Yes, they do

For now.

I don't believe you, or you are just doing It wrong. It appears there are openjdk packages for Ubuntu.
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Java has all the info you need.
For debian it is no more than launching aptitude and selecting the openjdk jre package. I can't imaging it is harden on Ubuntu.