Friday 19 August 2011

Moving to Ubuntu 11:04 (2): compuwiz and the Subsequent Re-Install

Yep, I re-installed. It didn't take as long as the first time, partly because I decided not to put Open Office on. 11.04 comes with Libre Office, which is an Open Source fork of Open Office and not so very different. I can work with it. All I really use is Writer anyway. (If I use a spreadsheet or presentation programme, I think I'm in the office and I get the shivers.)

Why did I re-install?  Because setting up a computer to be the way you need it takes time. It's not just about installing your favourite browser, cloud and office applications and like that. It's about turning off tap-to-click on the trackpad, which I have to do because of the way I take my finger off the pad when scrolling, which I have to do because I slow the trackpad / mouse down because then I don't have to do lots of cramping fine muscle control to get the pointer where I need it, and consequently need to take my fingers off the trackpad when they reach a side, move them to the other side and replace them, which causes a click if I have tap-to-click set on. There are a lot of little tweaks like this and everyone has different settings. Not all of which you get to control from the stock GUI.

So after some Googling, I wound up installing compuwiz to make some adjustments. Big mistake. It doesn't play so well with the new Unity desktop and for some reason I ended up down to one application workspace. Now on a Windows machine I accept one workspace, but on a *nix machine "I want my work-spac-es". I use four on the Macbook Pro, set up the exact same way that Andy Hunt (of Pragmatic Thinking and Learning authorship) has his set up, which I found a little spooky when I read it and maybe goes to show that a) great minds think alike, b) alike minds are equally great, c) everyone does it that way because it's the best way to do it. So I was not going to shrug and settle for one workspace on Ubuntu.

At some point afterwards, I found out how to boot into Gnome (aka Ubuntu Classic) at log-in, and when I did, I got my four workspaces back. I uninstalled compuwiz and went looking at the settings via the Configuration Editor to remove anything attached to the uninstalled program. I did that, after figuring out how, and logged back in to Unity.

Oh dear, oh no. Don't do that. Utter mess. Now I had the Gnome interface with the Unity Dock appearing and disappearing like a frightened mouse. And I lost the Ubuntu Applications menu. Logging in to the Gnome interface, I had... the Gnome interface with the Unity Dock appearing and disappearing like a frightened mouse. And I still lost the Ubuntu Applications menu.

There are of course no books on this stuff and I decided it would be shorter and simpler to re-install than go Googling and manually un-pick the damage. So that's what I did. I now log into Gnome and set the menu bars at the top and bottom to auto-hide. Unity isn't quite ready yet and compuwiz certainly isn't. I can understand why Apple are obsessed with controlling third-party applications.

But, but, but... Windows stopped doing stuff like all that a long, long time ago. Amongst the many things they understand in Redmond, it's managing backwards compatibility. The program base for Ubuntu is now large enough that they need to address that if they ever want it to move out of geek-land to the normal user (i.e. someone even more clueless than me).

And don't get me started on networking, or I'll write a whole post on that.

I'm going to persevere. So far it seems to run everything faster and smoother than Windows 7 Starter does. And using any Linux distro is cooler than using Windows 7 - if you care about that sort of thing.

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