User:Buttercup/Ubuntu

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Revision as of 06:58, 24 May 2008 by Buttercup (talk | contribs) (Adventures in Ubuntu chapter 1)
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This is where I (might) write about my adventures using Ubuntu, a Linux derivative. Currently I have version 8.04 (Hardy Heron). Oldest entries are at the top. Dates are based on when written, not necessarily exactly when it happened.


May 24th, 2008



My adventure begins here, when Windows 2000 decided to commit suicide. I had been contemplating turning my machine into a dual-booter, and was also thinking of doing some hard drive back ups in case the inevitable happened (which it did), but this latest catastrophe pushed me over the edge to go straight for a Linux-only machine. I'm still planning to do some backups, but have to sort out whether to use DVDs, a big ol' hard drive, or some combination of the two. I saw a one terabyte external hard drive (Western Digital MyBook Home Edition) for about $230 the other day, which is quite tempting. But mostly I'm just not looking forward to sorting through the junk on my hard drive and deciding on what's worth keeping.



Web browsing:Firefox is a pain, but then it was a pain under Windows as well, always crashing or freezing. Thinking about it, I'm wondering if it's the plugins I'm using. I've only got two "extras" - Adblock Plus and DownloadHelper. I've also got Flash and probably some other stuff, but I count that as normal things you need for web browsing, so I'd expect those to work. (Expect as in, darn it, it *better* work, not necessarily expect as in I have no doubts that it would.) I like how Firefox saves your tabs so you don't loose the websites you've been to, however it could be better. For one, if you could have multiple instances open so *all* your windows don't close when one of them goes screwy, and two, if it just opened up the address but didn't load the page. When I've got 40 YouTube videos open or I'm in the middle of a CGI based game I don't necessarily want those to all load up when Firefox restarts.

What really irks me though is that today, when I was closing down some tabs, all of a sudden my screen went black. I just sat there in disbelief, and then about 30 seconds later the login screen for Ubuntu came up. Well, I've never had a browser crash *that* badly before, as far as I can remember. I had some files open I wanted to save, too, but oops, they're gone. So, I'm a little bit pissed at Firefox right now, and have started looking around for another browser. Sure, it could be the plugins, but this is ridiculous.