Ubuntu
A slip of the fingers in Slackware recently, and I entered a twilight zone of mis-matched libraries. All I wanted to do was to update a video-editing package, and 2 days later my wife asked me "why is it so hard?". I didn't have a good answer. I've been using Slackware for 7 years, and since most of what I do is editing and compiling code, it seemed Just Right. More recently, I've been drawing logos, editing movies and requiring a bit more integration at the desktop level. It seemed Just Right for that too, until I experienced the library issue.
Perhaps a knee-jerk reaction, but I thought I'd give one of the more glossy distros a try. I'd installed Kubuntu on my wife's PC some time ago, but the 'Skype issue' forced an install of a proprietary operating system. I don't use Skype, and I'm not very keen on the KDE desktop either, so I installed Ubuntu. I got a bit of a shock at the outset, when it failed to start X for the install GUI. I haven't a clue why. I use a 1280x800 laptop screen with a 1280x1024 screen next to it. Perhaps there was a way to get round it more sensibly, but I edited the xorg.conf to change the display driver from 'vesa' to 'vga'. The install GUI was a pain to navigate at 640x480, but the pain soon went away when the install completed.
There's a lot to do, to move from a well-used environment to a new one. It's like moving house. Nothing works at first, and everything you normally use is hidden away in boxes, and they don't quite fit right when you find them. Ubuntu makes life easy with its package management system. At first, I had to exercise extreme restraint to force myself to use only the GUI configuration tools and not to open a terminal and start bodging. It's going okay, it really is. Some click-to-install DVD creation software has meant my 22-month-old daughter has some new movies and cartoons to watch, without me breaking a sweat.
What I'm missing most from my old setup is ROX-Filer. Nautilus works great, at first use, but compared to ROX, there just seems to be a lot missing. And it's SLOOOOOOOWWW. It does have some sort of script extension facility though, so ROX's "Terminal here" facility is available to download for Nautilus via the Ubuntu package management facility. Just now though, I wanted to copy over one of those scripts that I used frequently in ROX (I don't like to use IDEs, instead I start a script for each source file I'm editing that waits for changes using inotify before compiling the file - it makes the text-editor's save button work like a 'compile' button). The first place I looked in the old ROX directory structure had a symbolic link to the original script. In ROX, you can right-click a symbolic link and 'follow' it to the original. There appears to be no such feature in Nautilus. I found nautilus-follow-symlink, but this has yet to be incorporated into the Ubuntu package management system. Compiling this little feature requires a few visits to the package management system to install some extra files, I'm up to nearly 60 files and over 15MB of download so far. It compiles after a few tries, some autoconf issues that it mysteriously gets over, I think. Finally, I restart nautilus and find a link to right click on. Nautilus hangs.
I thought about replacing nautilus with ROX-Filer, but it didn't look straightforward to me, and if I'm going to choose a linux distro based on someone else's guarantee that everything will Just Work, it seems to me that I should interfere with it as little as possible. I'm going to miss ROX. I'm going to check regularly to see if the follow link function turns up in nautilus.
