Robin, you are entitled to your opinion as mhumm2 and myself are entitled to ours. If you have a question or statement relevant to the original intention of this thread I am more than happy to try to help. However, if you just intended to post so you can have a go at me then you have wasted your time, effort, and a post.

If you think I am a problem in this fora then please feel free to contact the moderators yourself and ask them to remove me but do not blame others if you are not willing to take such action. I'm happy to be contacted by the mod team and discuss my posting style, are you happy to start the ball rolling? If you aren't then you shouldn't blame anyone else.

My problem with not being able to change the number of workspaces under 11.10 has been solved. I discovered that the machine apparently was shipped to me with a proprietary nVidia display driver installed along with 11.04. Apparently, the 11.10 upgrade disabled the proprietary driver in favor of another one, and this apparently disabled Unity. I located the driver under System Settings/Hardware/Additional Drivers (not through great police work but by just messing around). After re-installing the proprietary driver, I was able to alter the number of workspaces using the gconftool-2 commands given in the Ubuntu Desktop Guide. So I am happily back to my 8X8 desktop.

One serious problem down, one to go. Ubuntu 11.10, unlike 11.04, does not recognize my trusty old HP LaserJet 5L even though Ubuntu has the drivers available and installed. The command hp-probe does not detect any printers. I did plug in a Brother HL-2040 from my wife's Mac and that worked OK. So, thinking about replacing the ancient HP, I've been searching for drivers for some of the newer low-end Brothers printers like the HL-2240 (the 2040 is long since out of production), but the Ubuntu Software Center (USC) refuses to install them, saying they are for the wrong architecture -- my machine is amd64 and the drivers are i386. The 32-64 interface libraries are already installed, but the USC says "no".

I read similar discussion somewhere where the advice was to just plug in the printer and let Ubuntu take care of the drivers. Could that possibly work if Ubuntu's installed driver list doesn't contain the appropriate driver?