Tech help general

[Ersatz]

Does it happen when running on live media before installing?

It shouldn't make a difference if the computer is not recent, but you could try with a more recent version, like 16.04 or 15.10, or another distribution.

If the computer is old and crappy, you should try another desktop environment. Unity is really heavy and demanding. You could try Xfce (with Xubuntu for simplicity's sake) or Mate (with either Ubuntu Mate or Linux Mint, which I would recommend over Ubuntu Mate).

[The Nightman]

I haven't tested it on live media. It's already installed. I no longer have the USB copy of it at the moment, and if I'm going to redownload an installation of it, I'll likely go with a different environment like you suggested.

Right now I'm updating the video drivers and if that doesn't work, then yea I'll just install a different version of Linux. I've actually not heard of Mate though.

I also need to switch from Ubuntu 14.04 on my main desktop as well, but I can't be arsed to back up my data right now.

EDIT: Updating the drivers worked. I am noticing a lot of slowdown in normal browsing though, so I'll probably still switch environments anyway.

[Ersatz]

Good!

Didn't you previously say you made a separate partition for /home? In this case you normally don't have to make a backup because when reinstalling you tell the installer to mount that partition on /home without formatting it so all your personal data is left untouched.

Mate is similar to Xfce but not as frugal.

[The Nightman]

Oh, alright, that's neat. I'll probably make the switch then. Any recommendations on which distro I should use? I put Mint Mate on the pc I was having porblems with earlier and I like the look of it, but I'm not sure if that particular distribution would be good for my main desktop or not. I know you've recommended me a distribution to use before when I first mentioned switching to linux a few months ago, but it'd be hard for me to find that post, haha.

[Ersatz]

openSUSE. It's the most sensible distribution with the best testing behind it and it has great features. It has the best installer, one of the best package managers and a graphical configuration tool that allows you to do everything without fiddling with the commandline. It defaults to btrfs as its filesystem, which is already cool, but the best part is that openSUSE is set to automatically create snapshots of your / partition when you change system settings or do software updates, so if something goes wrong you can rollback to a working state within a single reboot. You can also boot to existing snapshots.

It offers KDE and GNOME officially, but you can also install just about every environment quite easily. I would go for KDE.

There are two versions of openSUSE: Leap, which offers updated applications on top of a stable core, and Tumbleweed, which is rolling and changes all the time (but unlike other rolling distributions, Tumbleweed never ends up broken after an update).

One negative point is that some proprietary software is harder to get (like Spotify I think) than on Ubuntu.

[The Nightman]

Alright, I'll try it out. I guess I'll go with Leap. I like stability. I only use spotify in my browser anyway and there aren't many proprietary programs I use now anyway, besides the few that I have on my Windows partition. I'm getting to where I don't really like using anything if it's not open source.

How is the community for it? As in, if I encounter a problem that I can't figure out how to fix, would there likely be a solution for it online?

EDIT: I can't find my good flash drive and my other ones are all 4 GB so they can't fit the iso.

EDIT 2: Nevermind, I got it working via the network iso.

[Ersatz]

Alright, I'll try it out. I guess I'll go with Leap. I like stability.

Yeah that's a good choice.

I'm getting to where I don't really like using anything if it's not open source.

one of us one of us

How is the community for it? As in, if I encounter a problem that I can't figure out how to fix, would there likely be a solution for it online?

Search results always point to Ubuntu and half of the time you can't apply solutions outside of Ubuntu. The openSUSE wiki is nice but very outdated in some parts. The openSUSE subreddit is your best bet. It got really active in the last months.
The Arch wiki is always a good place to look regardless of your distro. You can always just PM me.

EDIT 2: Nevermind, I got it working via the network iso.

I tried yesterday (because I screwed my installation Wednesday evening) but I could never setup the wifi. I don't understand the decision to stop providing sensible-sized installable ISOs like they did prior to Leap. They still have live KDE and live GNOME isos buried in a FTP somewhere but they don't include the installer (??).

[The Nightman]

I didn't have any problems getting wifi to work. My problem was that I wasn't able to get the NET iso to become bootable via usb and I didn't have a usb big enough for the full iso. It turned out to be a problem with Ubuntu I guess. I tried three different image creating programs on it and each time, the drive either showed up as blank at boot, or it wouldn't load into it. Finally just went to Windows to create the image, and it worked the first time. Not really sure what went wrong there.

I actually have a friend that uses Slackware. I wouldn't even want to begin getting that set up.

[Ersatz]

You can just use dd, a commandline tool.

Code: Select all

dd if=path/to/file.iso of=/dev/sdx bs=4096

where if means input file and of means output file (You can find the drive corresponding to your usb stick using the lsblk command. It needs to be unmounted). The bs=4096 argument is not mandatory but not including it can make the result unbootable sometimes.

Beware though: dd formats the output drive, and since it has to be run as root, it will erase your /home or your / if you tell it to.

I also use dd to rip DVDs to ISO files, which VLC can read transparently.

[The Nightman]

I did that as well, and when I booted into the usb, the only option available was "default" which did nothing when I selected it. The guide I was following for it used bs=4M instead of 4096, so maybe that was it?

[Ersatz]

Both do the same thing so it wouldn't have made a difference.

[The Nightman]

Hmm, I'm not sure what went wrong then. Oh well, it's working now at least. I like openSUSE pretty well so far.

[Bappie]

I am having so many problems with my gaming PC.
Whenever I turn it on, it says Failed to connect to a Windows Service.
I tried to see how to fix that, involving opening command prompt as Admin.
Computer won't do that, it just doesn't open.
So i try to find out how to fix that.
Right click desktop and make new shortcut.
I do that, desktop freezes whenever I hover over New.

I don't know what is even wrong and every piece of help just leads to another problem.

I can't open Task Manager, Windows Update won't load and my computer takes 5 minutes to shut down every time I do shut it down.

[Brekkjern]

With limited ability to troubleshoot that, it sounds like an issue with your storage device or the storage controller on your motherboard.

[Bappie]

Any idea how I'd be able to find out if that's the problem?

I bodaciously do not know where to start.
I can open regular command prompt but my computer says it can't find Command prompt if I choose to open in as an Admin.
It also seems to freeze up any app trying to use Admin settings.

Everything is working but Windows' inner programs.

This all seemed to start when I downloaded Flash Player for Firefox.