Ubuntu 9.04 doesn't get me anywhere. It hangs on an illegible screen a minute or so after selecting install so I can't do anything with it. I'm back on Kubuntu 8.10 now and I'm going to try the FGLRX drivers for a laugh. My next post may be from windows!

I can't bloody do anything again asrrrrgghhhhh!
^That's because FGLRX blew up Kubuntu 8.10.

Have found the "safe mode" install option for Ubuntu 9.04 so got that installed. Still no second monitor though. Not sure if I can be bothered to try FGLRX again tonight, need to sit down away from a PC!

I have just read through the whole thread, very interesting.

Keep up the story

Well I did try, now typing this from a working windows PC!

Well tonight I will be mostly using Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron.

Another 'buntu install, another browse to this thread on my phone so I could remember which partition was which upon partition selection, another desktop that won't run my dual screen set up properly.

Tonight though, I won't be trying the ATI proprietry driver. Coolant hose of death went on the coop this morning so I'll be sitting down and watching tele with a large whiskey (coops fine by the way, temps still normal, parts ordered and booked in at garage).

Well no success at all with this version either. 5 flavours of Linux have now been unable to work with my graphics card properly (ATI HD2600AGP FWIW). Basically they all work but none will run dual screen. I'm so at a loss I've registered at the Ubuntu forums!

I think I may stay with Unbuntu rather than Kubuntu now as
a) Most of the 'tinternet help is focussed to Ubuntu.
b) I much prefer that I start with Firefox than that horrible Konqueror thingy.

On a more positive note I found a great dummies guide which I intend to get through here.

I also forget to link (for my reference purposes more than anything as I do pop back to this thread everytime I re-install) how to set the boot order to default to Windows. That link is here.

stupidly, the one thing stopping me move over completely on my laptop is the fact that firefox is laggy with the scrolling of websites, general use. Poor fonts (although I have got it better) and lack of a good msn client

I have noticed that Firefox doesn't look as nice on 'buntu but it doesn't annoy quite enough to be bothered.

If I could just make the flipping dual screen to work and get a home accounting package to migrate (Money 2000 at the moment) then my days of windows would be very severely numbered.

Latest update
I now have my ATI card and proprietary drivers all installed happily and even have windows that wobble when I move them around. FWIW these are the instructions that got it going.

Dorky blah blah (as if this thread isn't)

Now what remains is that I still can't get the dual screen thingy to work properly. What I get is .......



Followed by



when I untick clone screens but whatever I do leaves me with two identical cloned screens.
Clicking APPLY makes no difference and whatever I do gives me a pair of cloned screens.

Any ideas?

Here we go again. Had a go at 10.4 to see if I could get my ATI card working properly before binning it and going to buy an NVidia one.

Realised tonight that I'd downloaded Kubuntu instead of the intended Ubuntu but installed it anyway. To my absolute delight TwinView worked straight away on both of my monitors without needing to resort to fglrx etc, that is of course until I reboot at which point it just hangs on restart, everytime. Just popped into Windows to print the CD cover for my Ubuntu and will see how that goes.

I WILL get my dual monitor set up working.
I WILL get my dual monitor set up working.
I WILL get my dual monitor set up working.
I WILL get my dual monitor set up working.
I WILL get my dual monitor set up working.

On the positive side I realised that if I don't format /home then I keep all my browser bookmarks.

That's why you keep /home on a separate partition...

It's threads like this that remind me why I shouldn't start playing with Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Oovaavoo or any of the other Pokemon.

Best of luck though....

Eranu

Thanks, I'm feeling way more confident with this OS after only really intermittently faffing around with it over the last 15 months. Go on you know you want to really.

@ Barnacle
Yep, and I know you did tell about /home way back near the start of the thread but it's only this time that I remembered not to select format /home on install.

I have to admit to a faint frisson of amusement when on other fora (not here) people who whinge about how hard linux is reinstall their entire windows system every six months to stop it slowing down... and assume this is both normal and expected.

Idiots.

Yes quite, after only 15 months I can already agree with that. A full blown Windows install is something that I will only start when I've got a few free evenings ahead (just in case).

Newbie or not I can now get Linux up and running (albeit without loads of the apps that I need) in 30 minutes. I installed two different distros last night!

Update on mine is that finally Ubuntu 10.4 finally likes my graphics card and dual screen works happily without any proprietary drivers. I'm been on such a roll tonight I've also set all the partitions on my USB pen drive how I want so my next steps will be a Windows/Linux Dual install live USB stick thingie. That should be fun.

You've almost persuaded me to see if I can get my 10.04 to work with both an internal 1366*768 and an external 1280*1024... this caused some confusion last time I tried it.

That's a G4500 chipset.

<after a quick test>

Blow me down with a feather, it works. Either clone the existing screen or grow a separate screen on the external monitor - result.

Much better than all the faffing around on 9.10 - just tell it to detect and it does it all. And it doesn't complain if you unplug the external monitor, either.

9.10 made such a mess of my install I went running and screaming all the way back to 8.04 and stayed there until Wednesday night (happy albeit only with cloned monitors).

Next step, GnuMoney for the household finances and the all singing and dancing dual boot USB stick install/live CD. My XP machine reads the partitions I made last night that it needs to so I'm on the way there.

After that, a decent graphics editing app (I don't get on with the Gimp, and have been spoilt by having Photoshop at home and work) and I would be 95% Windows free.

sudo apt-get install virtualbox



And for those who know what sudo means...

Good find Neil
Although I can see both sides, this post illustrates just how hard even the simple tasks with different hardware can be with linux.

Saying that I have a windows 7 laptop in front of me dead because of a windows update, and no simple uninstall is possible

Sam, download Puppy Linux and install it on a USB stick and boot the laptop from than. You can then try to remove the offending driver. (I'm assuming that it allows you to watch the log as it boots).

The thing currently wont even boot in to a live distro
Im struggling to find out just whats wrong with it, its currently looking a little more like disk corruption, having just finished a check however, no errors!

This picture probably sums it up for me. Guess which is my Linux dual screen set up and which is Vista!


Fortunately this turned out to be a defective user problem. So easy the cat fixed it.

oooh, that sick huh?

Thats funny as my windows XP install is just fine on triple screen! (now quad)

But in such cases, the differences are almost always down to the manufacturer of the hardware not making the driver information available to the linux developers...

Linux has had bad press as a geek's OS, and I've plenty of trouble in the past trying to install software where the authors have assumed that any user will have the latest versions and libraries, but it's getting better largely as a result of Mark Shuttleworth and Ubuntu. The consistency is so much better than it was only a year or two ago, and the device support is equally improved. I haven't had to compile a kernel in ten years...

But consider some of the tricks it can do - would you expect windows to be able to run linux applications natively? I can run all the software I've written in windows, in linux. Windows refuses to accept the presence of any file system except FAT and NTFS - and it won't even follow its own rules on FAT... try formatting a multi-gigabyte partition with FAT32. It's legal, to specification, but Windows won't do it. Meanwhile, Linux cheerfully reads anything thrown at it...

It can be difficult - as can anything worth doing - but it can be simple to. Daughter has used it for a couple of years now as her only OS, for all the things most people in their thirties might expect to do and with no support from me, including reinstallation after a disc failure. I'll be feeding it to my octogenarian parents shortly, to avoid yet another windows help-desk phone call!

I wonder how much of Windows' alleged superiority is simply down to the fact that it's delivered by default on the majority of new systems? People are simply used to it.

Neil

Quite probably ALL of it. The flipside of that is of course that *nix's security and stability superiority could be seen as just because they are less systems around and therefore less to be hacked.

One thing that did suprise when I started to move over is that I always got the impression from Linux users that the OS was really stable from the off and didn't require numerous patches issued after the fact like Windows. That bubble was soon burst when my first Linux install greeted me with the news that there were loads of updates ready for me!

Don't get me wrong here as I'm just playing devil's advocate a bit. Despite being a long term Windows user I am making substantial efforts at these 'buntu thingies.

I see your point Neil, I have linux on a number of PC's around the house and for the most part, its simply a case of install and forget.
They perform the task they were assigned to do with little or anything in the form of maintenance.

You do need to concede however that software repository's are difficult for a new user to get there head around, also the installation of a package from a download and not a repository is ni on impossible to do correctly.
You then have good old dependency hell.

All of this is slowly improving, when you have to force a user to use sudo commands however, you have already lost.

If linux had the support of the hardware venders from the start and were not only a secondary consideration when creating drivers that it would be a lot more mainstream.

Until software devs start cross platforming apps like Adobe, Autodesk, bently. Its never going to get main stream as as such never in to the homes.

For the most part a windows sytem works, Mine is stable and has been for a long time, My windows 2000 server box has been up for over 6 months with no issues. This laptop however has broken for no reason I can see bar user, id expect giving them a linux laptop would have eventuality come out with the same results however

The 'sudo apt-get install' I mentioned earlier is just one of many options; I don't have a problem with terminals and I'll tend to use that approach, but there are at least two other graphical ways of doing it - including the dead easy ' Ubuntu software centre '. Just click and it's done.

Have you looked at 10.04's software installation? Can't do anything remotely similar on any windows. Also, DLL hell is much worse on windows.

That said - I have an absolute and uncompromising attitude to dynamic linking anyway. The reasons given as to why it's a good idea have been demonstrated so often and for so long to be fundamentally wrong... any and every program apart from the OS should be compiled statically linked every time. That way, if it works when delivered, it works for ever.

I'm returning to this now as I'm having trouble connecting to a VPN that I want to use. It works fine in XP and Vista but I'd like to do this in Ubuntu as well.

Anyone care to give me an idiots guide to troubleshooting? I've been going through this guide but end up with an error (VPN connection failed) when I try to connect. I've installed network-manager-pptp and created a VPN connection using server name/username/password. I don't seem to see what I've missed and it was easy peasy in that *other* operating system.

I understood it was installed by default on 10.04? Never used it so I can't advise, but:

http://computergyan.wordpress.com/2010/04/21/out-of-the-box-support-for-pptp-vpn-in-ubuntu-10-04/

There's a long 'how-i-did-it' post halfway down the first page here: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1307345