[Tfug] (no subject)

[Jim March]

OK. So I hate Unity with a passion. Sorry. I'm not going to argue
about it, it just isn't my thing.

I can deal with Gnome3 set to classic mode - while the menus are a bit
annoying plus there's that whole "hold ALT to modify the toolbar
stuff", there's some quite decent stability enhancements that make the
nuisance parts worth it.

The question then is, do you want to go with Linux Mint 12 (which is
basically Ubuntu Oneiric tweaked to no-Unity plus restricted
codecs/players) or do you run "real Ubuntu Oneiric" and hand-tweak
Unity out yourself?

Well the answer to me has come down to "tweak Oneiric".

1) Mint 12 just "felt unstable". Hybernate-to-disk didn't work (across
two machines) and other small glitches popped up here and there.
Nothing show-stopper but still, very obviously some unpolished bits.

2) The first time I installed Mint 12 (32bit) I got
whole-disk-encryption working via the scripts at:

http://community.linuxmint.com/tutorial/view/344

For reasons I don't understand at all, it stopped working. I tried it
in 32bit, failed, tried again in 64bit when I recently scored a more
potent machine (more memory for starters) and yet again, failure. This
forced me into the "encrypted home folder" plan which is quite
possibly where some of the glitches occurred - possibly including the
hibernation fail.

A few days ago I backed up and reinstalled clean from an Oneiric 64bit
alternate install disk. I did the "anti-Unity" tweaks at:

http://www.webupd8.org/2011/10/things-to-tweak-after-installing-ubuntu.html

...to get "classic Gnome" running right, and they worked like a champ.
The only thing that went wrong was, on one of the reboots LightDM
failed completely and dumped me to a command prompt. But doing:

sudo apt-get install gdm

...and picking the GDM startup manager fixed that. (The instructions
warn of problems with LightDM and sure enough, he's not kidding! I
ignored that and it bit me in the butt.)

I now have fastest, most stable full-on setup I've ever run. It starts
up without Compiz but doing an ALT-F2 and "compiz --replace" gives me
the eye candy when I want it. Cool.

Starting with real Ubuntu you need to do the usual tweaks (medibuntu,
load w32codecs or w64codecs, libdvdcss, flash player, extra gstreamer
stuff, etc. but that's not a big deal.

Random thoughts:

For my needs, the breakover point at which 64bit is a good idea is
3gigs RAM. I need to run WinXP virtualized (VirtualBox for now but
since my latest lappy has hardware virt support in the CPU I'll switch
soon). 64bit code is bulkier so with 2gigs RAM and 768megs assigned to
the XP machine, RAM gets tight. With 32bit code, memory usage in more
efficient. At 3gigs of real RAM I can run 64bit and assign 1gig to the
XP VM with no problems.

64bit still has "glitches". For example, to get Adobe Flash going you
end up adding some 32bit libraries. Which is fine until you load
Google Chrome, at which point it wants the 64bit version of said
libraries. Ooops. This is solvable: the solution is to install the
google .deb file at the command line:

sudo dpkg -i googlesupplieddebname.deb (after CDing into the dir with
the .deb file)

...and watch for what it fails on. Load synaptic if you haven't already:

sudo apt-get install synaptic

...and use that to specifically load the 64bit versions of the
libraries it's choking on. (Leave the 32bit versions in there so flash
still works.)

That said, the "64bit glitchies" are extremely minor and no trouble
for anybody slightly Linux-experienced to cope with. For total Linux
newbies OR those with 2gigs or less RAM I'm still recommending 32bit
and I suspect Precise won't change that.

Jim