Discovery Canal+

[hirez]

Laptops are horrible. Grim keyboards, squitty screens, nasty UI. They do everything that a proper computer does, only in a rubbish way that no sane person would put up with.

(Yes, I know. I'm behind the times. I've only had one (well, three) in the house for two days and I now cheerfully hate them. I've got to put up with blasted device for a week. Ugh!)

Gnome's horrible, too. And Fedora. Dear 'Bob' what a mess.

I have a Nokia and a Moleskine and I know which I prefer.

Comments

[redcountess]

Older laptops are indeed pretty naff, but if you got one of the newer 14" thin profile laptops running Ubuntu, I think you'd find the experience a lot nicer.

[perlmonger.livejournal.com]

Ubuntu

...especially if you trash the horrid standard WM and bung E and a sensible theme (an aquaized absolute-E in my case) on it. And strip down the silly default panels. And hack gconf to reverse the brain-deadness of recent nautilus default settings (can't confuse the poor peepul with a treeview, can we?)

[redcountess]

Ooh, thanks for the tip - I've been planning on installing Ubuntu on my *nix partition on my desktop, but really dislike the brown theme!

[evilmandykins.livejournal.com]

yay moleskine! heh i just bought an antique writing slope ( 150 year old laptop desk- starts as a box then opens to reveal a sloping desk surface with inkwells and a pen tray heheh)
tho i must say i love my lil ibook....

[reddragdiva]

I personally prefer LCDs to CRTs, and it's a matter of finding a nice keyboard. My 560x collection is woefully underpowered these days, but it's got a surprisingly nice and usable keyboard for such a tiny box.

[perlmonger.livejournal.com]

I built the thing from source, but E's on universe if you don't want the hassle.

[redcountess]

My Linux geekery doesn't run that deep *g* - what is universe?

[dr-atheist.livejournal.com]

you want to edit /etc/apt/sources.list and uncommet the lines
# deb http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu hoary universe
# deb-src http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu hoary universe
to get at universe repositories with $apt-get

[redcountess]

Even that's a new world to me - remember, I've only had a couple of brief plays with the GUI in Ubuntu, been using Fink on OS X (with FinkCommander which uses either CVS or RSync), getting some Linux stuff off FreeBSD ports, and using the win32 ported versions of Gaim and Gimp, other than that I'm a total Linux n00b! However, I can correlate this to CVSupdate in FreeBSD, so it's all good :-)

[perlmonger.livejournal.com]

sorry - it's one of the Debian package repositories Ubuntu uses, but one you have to select yourself.

Fire up Synaptic Package Manager, go to "Settings » Repositories", select your first non-CS "deb" line. You'll likely see "main restricted" in the "Section(s)" section; tack "universe" after them, hit "OK" and then "Reload" in the main toolbar.

You should have ended up with a whole load more stuff available to install. There's "multiverse" too, which includes various odds and ends with dodgy licencing regimes and the like, like acroread.

(if you're curious, the relevant config file is /etc/opt/sources.list)

[redcountess]

Oh, I'm pretty sure reddragdiva did that and mentioned it when he was setting up Ubuntu on his Thinkpad 560x, but thanks for explaining it to me :-)

[perlmonger.livejournal.com]

ach! bloody fnigers - it's /etc/apt/sources.list (as squeee said :)

[hirez.livejournal.com]

Oh, indeed. I run a LCD at mumbleXhowbig at work and love it.

DeadRat's startlingly b0rked Gnome/KDE mashup is about at fucked as these things get and made me think fondly of fvwm.

I may eventually get used to the nasty keyboards and the two-handed mouse-panelling, but I doubt it. Yell and Google work on my phone, and it's only wilful cluelessness that's stopping me getting the IMAP client working. After that, there's no reason to risk shoulder, back, eyesight or sanity in attempting to look like some blog-bothering hipster with its life on its laptop.

I think 16 quid for a wifi card was taking the piss, too.

[reddragdiva]

See, I feel that way about intarweb on phones ...

I'm putting up with GNOME on this thing because Ubuntu is mostly sane. For Leegnux. Even if GNOME has an actual policy of making the interface luser-friendly by deliberate dumbing down. (May try Kubuntu next time.)

I still really really reeeeeeeeeeeeeeely want a 12" PowerBook. Just because.