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You don't need to reinstall Ubuntu if Windows overwrites GRUB. Details are at http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=224351 and here's a summary:

1. Boot into an Ubuntu live CD session.
2. Open a terminal.
3. sudo grub
4. find /boot/grub/stage1
5. Out of the list of hard drives produced, choose yours (it's most likely "(hd0,0)").
6. root (hd?,?) (replace ? with the hard drive identifier in the previous step)
7. setup (hd?)
8. quit
9. Reboot and you should get a GRUB prompt.

I could be wrong but I think this points to a userbase that MS traditionally held onto.

No you didn't have to wait till the next release of ubuntu, they offered the package in the backports repository. . .

Dear Diary,

Some days I really wish I had mod points. Even if I did have them today I would be torn. "Insightful" for the Karma? "Funny" because, well damn, it made me laugh?

You have a big win from me today. There's some great info on the Ubuntu forums about which hardware manufacturers have the best Linux support. http://www.ubuntuforums.org/

Access 4.0 never existed. It went straight from 2.0 to 7. I'm not an Access user however, but regardless of this if you're even right about this it's the only example you've provided of a 'toy language' that breaks 'every two to three years', and it's debatable.

VB 3.x was released in 1993, 6.x in 1998, and VB.Net is barely in it's infancy. This is not 'every two to three years'. It's pretty much double that. Also, VB is not a toy language to those of us who make our living using it.

I found trivial differences between 97 VBA and XP VBA but YMMV.

OLE 2.0 was released in 1993. I'll repeat that one: 1993. Please note that nobody can just sit on something for 14 years. Are you seriously suggesting that Microsoft should have retained all backwards compatibility for that long? Sometimes things have to break to move forward. Take every kernel upgrade to Linux that breaks one thing or another in a distribution. Shit happens, but you fix it. I don't know about you, but that's my job.

Have you got any others? Those examples wouldn't cut the mustard even if you looked at them generously.

On Linux/BSD/etc., it hardly integrates with GNOME (similar to how it "integrates" with Windows, just using the graphical toolkit and UI guidelines doesn't count as integration), and when it comes to KDE, you might as well use Konqueror because Firefox is Peter Griffin in the Million Man March.

There is a way to get Firefox to use its own file dialogs instead of the sucky GNOME dialogs. It's still not KDE, but at least it's more usable than GNOME.

(The necessary files may be in a slightly different location; they are on Gentoo, which is what I use. You can also use this fix with Thunderbird to the same effect.)

Try the graphical tool this guy wrote:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=156243&hi ghlight=xorg+edit

Some people seemed to have luck with this issue using this tool.

I have a linksys card that uses the rt2500 driver. I also had difficulty with WPA under 7.10 until I disabled the Network Manager as per this thread on the Ubuntu forums.

I used a very good online tutorial when I set mine up, but I can't seem to find it again. I found this guide (advicesource.org) that seems to be quite complete and sounds exactly like what I did. One change I would make is that it recommends installing vmware player with automatix, but this isn't necessary because it's in the repos. You can just apt-get install vmware-player to install it. It's actually quite easy to set up and very easy to use, as long as you don't forget when you have your windows partition paused in vmware and try and boot it again. Windows doesn't like this very much :) You may also want to check out ubuntuforums.org. Good information and friendly people. Enjoy.

Someone else replied with a much more complicated procedure than I used. Try this:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=183209

It's essentially "Install build environment" (one cmd line entry)
Download and unzip VMWare server into a temp directory.
Execute script in temp directory (with root permissions)
      Hit enter a lot
      Enter serial number you got for free from vmware web site where you downloaded server
Start vmware server
everything else is simple GUI.

The VMs can be run full-screen or windowed. Full-screen, the performance ran full-speed video and audio pretty well. I don't know how it would do with a very heavy full-screen graphics game...

If anyone wants to see some IRC logs from the countdown party channel (850 users going crazy on IRC = mayhem!)...

http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=2482851&pos tcount=3

It is a 50KB UTF-8 logfile compressed with gzip. Yes - 50KB worth of IRC conversation in the spate of just a few minutes.

Show me any other software project which has an IRC party (yes, we're geeks ok!) that large, and I'd be most impressed!

What's a release of Ubuntu with an eccentric release party practice?

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=413529

Mmmm....Ubuntu donuts...

ZL

If you download the Alternate Install CD, you can choose where to install grub. Install it to a floppy or usb drive and you can use that file with the windows boot loader. This way if you want to remove the Ubuntu partitions in the future you won't have to worry about fixing the boot loader. It's been a while since I've done this, but this looks about right: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=56723

You say you write down all the extra apps you install. You may be interested in this, it looks very useful, though I have not used it: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=261366&hi ghlight=backup

I just remembered it when you said you keep a list.

Yeah, ATI under Linux is pretty horrid, in my experience. =/

For future reference, might want to try the forums:

http://ubuntuforums.org/

Be sure to include as much information as you possibly can, about hardware, version of Ubuntu, and obviously, the nature of the problem. It also doesn't hurt to point out that you've sought help before and didn't get answered/understand the answer, but do it politely because sometimes people on the internet totally read more bitching than is actually in a post.

My Ubuntu experience is to the contrary. It does subpixel rendering, but it does it poorly and without the bytecode hinting interpreter. Installing patched font rendering packages improves the situation dramatically, but that's not part of the default install.

Yes, indeed Cleartype sucks, and ive not even known you can have it under linux. For an ever better font setup you can enable BCI in freetype and have freetype display font quality on par with Mac OS X (which nobody can dispute displays the best quality). For example ubuntu people can download debs with prepatched freetype here http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=343670&hi ghlight=feisty+fonts.
The standalone patches are here http://david.freetype.org/lcd/

I am interested in Linux and want to give it a fair shake, but after I spend three hours tinkering with it to get it to perform some minor task, I need to get some real work done so I switch back over to XP.

yup.. linux is definitely ready for primetime. -_-

"The Gentoo install really isn't that bad." - can you tell me what's worse?

for those of you that preach how easy to use ubuntu is.. please help this n00b out on installing a wireless usb adapter into 6.10. i've spent almost 20 hours going through every fucking site/how-to that i can find with no luck.

http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=39641 7

Firefox default browser: Check.
Thunderbird default email: Check.
Start menu emulating 90% of the world's previous computer experience: Check.

Weird how all the Linux gees come out to troll just because *GASP* somebody is trying to make something useful for the other 90% of the world!

Stop being assholes. I'm using Feisty right now, and I love it, but it's got twenty pretty serious flaws that make it hard to recommend to n00bs:

http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=39183 4&page=30/

Any distro that addresses and solves all these issues, and offers a solid LiveCD that does what 90% of humanity wants "out of box" is a good thing.

What's the matter with you people? Did you get picked on too much in school or something?

run mainstream software that is available to the average user.... Can Linux do that? No.

Mainstream software like MS Office? Runs in WINE.
http://www.pclinuxonline.com/wiki/InstallingOffice Wine

World of Warcraft?
run mainstream software that is available to the average user.

Or even running Windows XP and applications that run on XP?
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=183209

Should Linux and Mac sales have also doubled?

Um they have, but in the last couple months, not over 6 years ago sales figures..

Mac sales... From the financual page..
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/is?s=AAPL&annual

Income Sept 30 2006 19,315,000 All numbers in thousands.
Income Sept 24 2005 13,931,000
Income Sept 25 2004 8,279,000

In two years from 2004 to 2006 the income went from 8 Billion to 19 Billion. It's not all iPod and iTunes sales.

Picking just one Lunux distro which is popular..
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=2276320

Since there isn't any real sales figures, I thought I would go to see if the online chatter is increasing. The Ubuntu forum is growing rapidly. "We register over 14,000 new accounts each month"

If you want a pretty graph of Linux installed base from 2000-2006, take a look here.
http://linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/reports/6065/1/ screenshot3524/

A casual glance seems to indicate more than a doubling of the 2000 installed base figure.

Here is what a market analist has to say;
http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS2014 7206

"IDC offers the following recommendations for services providers:

Open source will become business as usual in two to three years, so act today and create direct open source services offerings and embed open source in your solutions where you can"

and

"The study also reveals that open source is moving up on the investment agenda of companies worldwide, as services providers (mostly services arms of technology companies) have formalized support, training, and certification services to encourage adoption of open source (principally Linux) on their products. As open source software goes mainstream, IDC finds that services vendors must further develop open source capabilities in order to meet their clients' needs and attract new customers."

It is posible to disable the loading of Java libraries. If you don't need advanced stuff (90% of users), disabling loading of Java speeds up the load time of OpenOffice.org

Also, modifying OpenOffice.org's memory settings also help. A quick search at google turns out:

* http://element14.wordpress.com/2006/11/01/speed-up -start-time-for-openofficeorg/
* http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-9925.h tml

You can easily go from 30 to 8 seconds of load time.

Peace!

The full implementation of upstart isn't in Ubuntu yet- It was delayed until Feisty +1. So yes, upstart can still be much faster than it is now.

See http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=2264992&pos tcount=8

Some linux versions use readahead while booting for a specific set of files which will be needed during the boot. The set of files is stored in a boot profile. After upgrading your system or changing the services started at boot, you should re-profile the boot, so that the readahead files are the ones actually needed. It can make a remarkable difference to boot speed.

Instructions at http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=25426 3&highlight=grub+profile+speed+boot

Note that the profiling boot takes longer, but subsequent boots should be faster, since most files needed for booting will already be loaded before they are required.

When I went out to take advantage of the article's suggestions, I found that, according to this thread in the Ubuntu Forums that Ubuntu 6.10 already uses Upstart.

I did used the "profile" command in my bootup once, after reading about it in another article recently. So I guess my Ubuntu is booting about as fast as it can (unless I have useless processes starting up. I'm still trying to figure that out--I'm a noobie).

about our little plan and they a putting safegaurds in place http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=389933 "hi guys i don't know if your interested but i have a little project going. basically the goal is to push linux vids to the front of video hosts youtube, google, aol's,ect... popularity lists for a few days using blogs on digg like sites to direct people to video sites. we already have a tentative time frame and some ideas. i'm going to try to get the big 4 disto's on this and who ever else wants to contribute. i'm going to have links to the other threads to keep them together."

he tried to run Synaptic later on and it said 'you have to run dpkg update -a to fix these errors!' or something along those lines. Big mistake number one: it told the user to type in commands at the shell. Big mistake number two: it didn't tell him to use sudo.

The thing is, everyone knows someone who's pretty good with Windows and can help them with their problems. Five minutes with Google usually does the trick.

When I put dpkg superuser Ubuntu into Google and hit "I'm feeling lucky", it took me straight to a page where somebody had exactly the same problem and was shown exactly what to do, with a link to a tutorial as well.

How is "five minutes with Google" not enough in the Ubuntu case?

That is why I always suggest people not to upgrade unless they have a specific reason to; if what you have works the way you want it to, run with it.

My best recommendation would to do a new install. That would (obviously) be faster than trying to fix the set up as it is now. If I were you, I would put the entire OS including /home (maybe partition so that you have 9gig to /, 1 gig swap, 10 gig /home) on your first drive (20 gig should be more than enough), and then during the install/partitioning step just mount the other HD in /media/storage and keep all your big files (movies and such) there. I'm on the Ubuntuforums if I can help you more just drop me a private message. It might take me a couple days but I'll answer.

  Wine makes Linux less secure. Wine will run windows viruses and connect to the internet. Check this post out at ubuntu forums.

Guys, running a second monitor leans toward a hardcore user and not for the faint of heart. But let me give you this, this http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=22117 4 page on the forums on Ubuntu has the most advice there is, whether it's nVidia or ATI (even got span to run on Mandrake!), whether its spanning or xinerama, BigDesktop, or clone.

http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=25426 3&highlight=grub+profile+speed+boot

That alone took my boot speed back down to 80 seconds. Then you can install the package bootchart to see what is taking so long to load and tweak those services to load faster or not at all, depending on what you need. For example, I saw that fsck was taking around 25 seconds on boot, and I gained back about 15 seconds by modifying /etc/fstab so that fsck would not check the FAT32 partition that I use to share files with XP. Bootchart will help you figure out why your box takes so much longer to boot when plugged in, as well.

Now I have a laptop that boots into a usable kde desktop in 47 seconds. I am sure you can do this too. If you need more help, go to the Ubuntuforums, they are full of people who want to help.

Take care

-mat

From the Ubuntu forums:

Ubuntu 7.04 Alpha 5 CD image testing started
** FEISTY IS NOT SUITABLE FOR EVERYDAY USE RIGHT NOW IT IS ONLY IN ALPHA. **
If you are interested in helping to test CD images for the upcoming Ubuntu release you can find more information here:

From the Ubuntu forums:

Ubuntu 7.04 Alpha 5 CD image testing started
** FEISTY IS NOT SUITABLE FOR EVERYDAY USE RIGHT NOW IT IS ONLY IN ALPHA. **
If you are interested in helping to test CD images for the upcoming Ubuntu release you can find more information here:

In this story, one of the links is apparent that it's to a video, since the URL is a video.google... link.

Oh, by the way, I *think* I'm one of the poisonous people they're referring to.

If only I could just plug one of these into my PlayStation and boot Linux in 6 seconds, instead of the hours, reboots, and disc swaps to install Ubuntu on it.

In fact, what would be great would be a 2GB (maybe 4GB) Flash drive with minimal linux and gcc running on many different architectures, which loads the Linux source and recompiles for the host into which it's plugged. Maybe caching the last few, including the most popular PPC/x86/MIPS versions, which could of course be precompiled. There's probably a role for the Internet in updates, but running off the local drive will make the process much faster.

Ultimately I'd like to see all this run off the Flash in my mobile phone, booting the hosts off Bluetooth. That would take new BIOS'es for the hosts which could pair with Bluetooth and boot from it before booting the installed OS. Preferably all config'ed and run from an app in my phone.

The PS3 OS is designed to allow you to install Linux on it.

Now Linux games can blow away Windows and Mac games. If you write a good one, that is.

Or you can just use the PS3 supercomputer for mundane tasks like MP3 encoding.

UbuntuDupe is a known forum troll.

UbuntuDupe is a known forum troll.

Have you checked this page? There is help for 64bit under Troubleshooting.

> For one, getting X to work at a good resolution was hard (I've a widescreen notebook).
> In fact, until a recent upgrade, I could only get it to work at a much lower resolution.

Please, go and bitch at the manufacturers. They are the only ones with the specs. Without the specs, all the driver developer can do is guess.

Umm, the manufacturers (Intel) have drivers - the install still expects customization from the user end (and I am not talking point-and-click customization, either).

> Secondly, getting the WiFi to work wasn't a cakewalk, either.

Details? Driver problems, installation problems, configuration problems, connectivity problems?

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=25683 - there, knock yourself out.

> And during the whole messing around with install process, I had to restart the system at least a few times.

Let's be clear on a couple of things - upgrading a kernel will require a reboot. Upgrading X will require a restart of X. What can be avoided under Linux is the situation where you upgrade one driver, reboot, upgrade another driver, reboot, ad infinitum.

Really? I'd never have guessed. Psst - I've given talks on writing Linux device drivers, I'm not totally ignorant of what is needed. Obviously I was talking about the need to unnecessarily restart X or reboot the box. For instance, there was a clash between xorg and libgl libraries which took me forever to figure out, and had the system go totally unresponsive (could not even go to the CUIs - frozen stiff). A hard reboot was the solution, which happened enough times to annoy me.

> And oh, I've had hell trying to get files on a USB thumb drive --
> for whatever reason, the files are simply not accessible from a Windows box.

That's the fault of Linux? Did you format the drive correctly? Try mounting it on a different Windows box?

Obviously, it is something that works well on Windows. All I wanted to do was transfer two files on the USB drive for a friend - and after struggling for about fifteen minutes, I gave up. And oh, treating someone complaining about the problems like an idiot is a great way to get things done.

> And I still can't get my printer and scanner to play nicely with Linux.

Again, please bitch to the manufacturers.

Oh, sure. Nice answer.

> Half the time, the box ends going bonkers.

Details?

Where do you want me to begin? The fact that Firefox magically stopped going to https websites after I upgraded? Or the fact that Gnome would refuse to restart every once in a while, and I'd have to manually do a killall of the gnome-panel process? No, you'll end up coming with an excuse for every point rather than admitting that the system is unstable.

> Its support for other things (e.g. Indic language support, accessibility etc.) is also nowhere near Windows.

Really? The why do I still have to buy two separate versions of Windows if I want both English and Japanese versions? Why do some apps on Windows insist that they cannot be installed on anything except {English|Japanese} Windows? You can switch Ubuntu between dozens of languages in minutes.

So what? I'll pay for Ubuntu if I get the level of Indic support that Windows gives. And FYI - Indic language support is free in Windows (http://www.bhashaindia.com/).

> And the reason it is hell to install is because you have to go hunting for drivers, appropriate fixes etc.

And you don't have to do the same thing with Windows? Then why do I have to go trawling through half a dozen websites looking for the right drivers for my chipset/network card/sound card? All those come with the default distribution in Linux.

When did you last use Windows?

The last time I went hunting for something in Windows was i

OK, let's see how you acted on the Ubuntu free support forums:

Before you make this even more frustrating for me:

Nice way to ask for help. Sure makes me feel like giving you a hand (or maybe a boot up the ass). Mm-hmm.

I should never have believed all that crap about "providing access to all".

Useful information? Missing. Needless slagging off of OS you're purportedly trying to convert to? Check.

Thanks for any assistance you can provide in helping undo the damage Ubuntu has done.

I guess there wasn't quite enough needless slagging off yet.

I thought -- probably because of all the liberation/openness rhetoric of Ubuntu -- I wouldn't need Microsoft software to get Ubuntu to work.

And I guess he thought you were actually interested in recovering your PC instead of trolling the forums.

So in other words, you didn't read my first post, in which I said that the disc is fine and I've tried reinstalling multiple times. This just makes my day.

If this is how you act towards people you've never met who are trying to help you, I'd hate to work with you.

Don't see what difference that makes, given as I can't even get into Windows, and the problem is obviously due to GRUB. Seems like a fishing expedition there.

How about just giving him the fucking information he asked for? Too much to ask for some people, I guess...

Just yesterday I thought I knew what chutzpah was.
"Starting on the right foot" would include "not getting locked out of my computer because I installed a OS billed as 'Linux for Human Beings' ". "Starting on the right foot" would include finding instructions that answer the frequently asked question of "how do I set up a new partition and install to that partition?". "Starting on the right foot" would include an Ubuntu forum that doesn't take me a week of trying to access from different computers and connections before it consistently loads.
Stop making excuses. So I wouldn't answer what Windows version it is. Can anyone think of any reason why one version of Windows over another would cause GRUB error 25? No? Okay then.
The problem is not the devices, or the Windows version, or getting the latest install CD, or scratches on the install CD. The problem is the boot loader. The problem has already been diagnosed. You just want to chase all these wild geese because you don't want to admit that maybe this "access for all" OS has a serious problem.
Would somebody just tell me how to edit, modify, fix, whatever, the boot loader? That's all. It should be really simple, given the rigorous testing that they would put a software capable of locking you out of your computer through.

Sheesh. You actually expected that to make people want to help you more than they were already?

4) Commands to diagnose the problem won't run.

Oh, and:

5) If you act like a spoiled jerk on a community-driven forum, stamp your little feet, and absolutely refuse to try any of their troubleshooting ideas or provide them with the information they repeatedly ask for, then they probably won't help you.

Yeah, I read the thread where you "tried" to get help. Your take on the episode doesn't have a lot to do with what you actually posted at the time.

Moderators, before you mark me down, actually read the Slashdot thread he linked to. I'm not the one who initially pointed out his tantrums and complete refusal to help fix his own problem. I can't believe that he uses that thread as supporting evidence of why Ubuntu is broken.

Dell is paying consumers to use Windows! The exact same Dell Latitude D520 Notebook costs $48 MORE if it comes with no operating system than if it comes with Windows.

The laptop loaded with Windows XP costs $699, while the same laptop and configuration loaded with no operating system costs $747. Note that you must change the following two hardware options on the web page showing laptop without an OS so that they match the hardware options found by default for the Windows laptop: Hard drive=60GB 5400RPM and Modular Bay Optical="8X DVD".

So it seems that Windows has a negative price tag as far as Dell is concerned! It looks like Dell is still subsidizing Microsoft for every Windows-free laptop they sell. I'm getting my laptop from System76 -- they sell excellent quality Linux laptops, desktops, and servers. They also have a great support team that cares about Linux and open source.

I had a 12" G4, and these instructions worked for me: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=314036

There is, for box.net at least.

linux:
http://www.ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-20 2761.html

windows:
http://techie-buzz.com/technology-buzz/mount-box.n et-account-in-windows-explorer.html

mac:
http://www.tuaw.com/2006/06/06/mount-a-box-net-acc ount-on-a-mac/

I'm pretty sure the X.org 7.2 merge is pretty close to complete. It borked a bunch of stuff, beryl, compiz, 3d stuffs, when they only half merged it with the repos last week. From what I see right now all the X.org drivers (except fglrx, ATI's proprietary driver) are at 7.2 as are the xorg server bins. I'm sure there are some modules still to be upgraded especially since Compiz hasn't worked for me since last week. There are plenty of threads about this on http://www.ubuntuforums.org/.

System76 actually has a support forum at ubuntuforums.org There are quite a few testimonials and other user impressions on the service and hardware and you can post questions and problems which will be read by system76. I've been a roll-my-own person for quite a while now, it's half the fun, but if I was going to buy a complete system from somewhere else, I would buy from these guys.

What *are* you talking about?

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=176998 I had to do this with either drake or edgy within the last 6 months.