Annoyed with Ubuntu
 

I removed gentoo/openbox (which I really liked) from my machine, about three weeks ago, and installed Ubuntu 12.10, which I am beginning to really dislike. I had to make the switch because a lot of closed source scientific software is optimized for Ubuntu and getting it to work on anything else is either impossible or very difficult, eg. FeNiCs.

I could probably complain for hours about things I don't like but right now I'd be happy if I could get the simple stuff to work.

Everyone complains that the openbox menu.xml is hard to work with. I really don't think it's all that bad compared to Ubuntu I can't find any controls to manage how the toolbar functions. When I right click on applications and pin them to the toolbar, they only stay there for a few minutes, if they even show up at all.

I installed openbox with makes things a little better. It's still really slow compared to gentoo.

What is the proper way to change start-up services in ubuntu. I want to leave the default desktop in tact for my wife but I want to change a lot in the openbox environment. For instance I really don't like network-manager, It's really causing problems on my network. wicd is so much better.

If anybody could help me out with any optimization tips I would greatly appreciate it.

I've never heard of any of the problems that your're mentioning. Since I've never seen these problems I can't help you fix them. I think that Ubuntu is one of the most stable operating systems that I've ever had.

If you really don't like it, try a different desktop. Xfce, MATE, KDE are all available.

I think I solved the network-manager problem by uninstalling it, though I think I had to reinstall a lot of gnome dependencies afterwards and it was a bit tricky. Might be different in Ubuntu but in Debian network-manager-gnome seems a little too tied to anything gnome related.
I'm not sure though why you went from Gentoo to Ubuntu? Slackware may be a little more as you remember, or Xubuntu with openbox/whatever/...

You could install wicd in Ubuntu and remove network manager.I think leaving the two of them cause conflict so only one can live do the switch while connected with a hard wired connection.
You said you already installed Openbox so what you need to do create and account for your wife , when she log in her session will default to the standard Unity desktop environment in Ubuntu. When you use the computer log in to your session it will default to the Openbox windows manager.

Good luck to you

Strange. I must have picked a bad time to try ubuntu. In the past I've run slackware, redhat, fedora, crunchbang, and gentoo for extended periods of time and tinkered with others. I have minor complaints about all of them but nothing like ubuntu. For the most part the debian package manager is pretty nice, and it would be quite pretty if it wasn't so incredibly slow and buggy.

I have never in my life seen linux crash until I installed ubuntu. It's practically like running windows?

What does ubuntu server come installed with? I was thinking about re-installing that and trying to build up, and leave out all the junk.

Gnome3 has a great media-backend framework, but it's a little light on the convenience features. They're working on it. And, Ubuntu is Debian, so what works for Debian will work for Ubuntu, too.

Ubuntu by default (assuming you may be installing the desktop edition) does not have Apache, Mysql, and PHP running.
http://www.linux.com/learn/answers/v...e-do-i-find-it

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/ServerGUI

I too had issues with Ubuntu; mreff555-
Over time I too became annoyed; grew tired of fixing the problems and installed Debian on my desktop:-

If you are going to start over then you could do a minimalist installation and build up from there.
Here is the link
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/In...tion/MinimalCD

But really I think what you want is Lubuntu, that flavor of Ubuntu will have the OpenBox windows manager already there for you to select at login time.
Here is the link for Lubuntu too
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/lubuntu/re...12.04/release/

Good luck to you

Good luck to get rid of all bloat from Ubuntu... *buntu is not made for tinkering with, it's made to be used as it is. I have tried many times and installed openbox in *buntu, trying to get a nice system, and everytime given up because they have hidden everything from the user. Once I installed just the base system from the alternate iso, but when I installed the rest, it was so automated that I soon had no idea of what it had done to my system. It's much easier to build a nice system from a basic install of Arch, than to get rid of all bloat from *buntu. At least for me motivation is much stronger to learn about things I want to use, than to learn about a lot of things just to find out how to get rid of them...

First thing you might want to change is the setting for the package-manager "treat recommends as dependencies". I have seen it in synaptic, I don't know where to change it in the config files.

And then all the autostart stuff... That's where I gave up. I couldn't find out what files are read when X is started (there's no .xinitrc) and I also couldn't find out how to disable LightDM (Why they have config files for both LightDM and lxdm, when only LightDM is installed??? A pure install of Xubuntu or Lubuntu.) and boot to console so that I could run startx manually. (There's no inittab.) Or maybe I gave up to early, and wasn't digging deep enough, maybe it is possible and it just requires more work than I was willing to spend on it...

Maybe it's better to install Gentoo on a different partition, and keep Ubuntu just to run those programs from a chroot.

I dont think being negative to Ubuntu will help his problem. Keep in mind Ubuntu is aimed for new users or people who don't have much experience with Linux, there fore in their full desktop Ubuntu includes a set up that they think it will satisfy the average user.

So what you can do is install your favourite Operating System in your computer and install VirtualBox then install Lubuntu in your VirtualBox to run the software you are required to run for your research project.

VirtualBox is really easy to set up and run once your research is done and you wont use Lubuntu anymore you can remove it from your computer and it will be like nothing ever happened.

Good luck to you

You might like to look at Poseidon, which is Ubuntu-based and intended for scientific work. There's also Scientific Linux and Springdale Linux.

I suppose I could try one of the others. I actually ran a debian derivative which I liked quite a lot. Crunchbang. Minimal, but worked perfectly out of the box. The problem was that I still had trouble with scientific software.
Gentoo what horribly difficult to get working on a laptop with the optimus chip (any other machine is actually not that bad). but once it's up and running I had it doing almost everything I wanted. It looked great and and was so incredibly fast. I still could never get FeNiCs to run. Not It works, but nothing else does.

If you really want to leave Ubuntu for a different OS, you might want to try Linux Mint. It is still Ubuntu based (it shows up as Ubuntu here on the forums), but is probably a little easier to get behind the scenes in to customize.

Yes, I've heard a lot of good things about it. I'm not really a huge fan of LXDE, but I might try it anyway.
Honestly in a couple of weeks I'll be done with FeNiCs which is the only reason I switched in the first place. I may end up going back to gentoo.

If you don't like Ubuntu try Debian, SnowLinux, CrunchBang or Linux Mint Debian Edition. I've been using Debian Testing without problems, it's faster and more stable than Ubuntu.

A lot of the folks that I chat with at Ubuntu do like and have switched to Linux Mint.
I tried Mint and it is nice and it runs smooth-

I've installed *buntu like 5+ times and each time i tried to seriously customize things, i either had to break-up meta packages which pull hundreds of dependencies i didn't wish to be installed and/or at the very end, customized too much for that distro to take, i.e., the next major dist-upgrade left the system in an unusable state, ala desktop no longer starting and things like that. *buntu is simply not designed for excessive customization.

The most extreme example in terms of configurability is the system you had to leave - Gentoo.

Maybe you'd like to give Xubuntu a try. But frankly if you managed a Gentoo distribution then i really see no point in switching to an unflexible "let-me-do-that-for-you" distro like Ubuntu. If you like APT, why not try Debian Wheezy? As for other systems, i don't know much about Slackware, but people who use it are often quite happy with it.

It's not that I like apt. I just like it more than yum. Like I said before, this entire switch was for one package, FeNiCs, which at this point I'm thinking I could have done without. Personally I like emerge. I don't mind waiting for a compile if the end result is better. I'm just reluctant to switch back because getting bumblebee to work right with my nvidia card was such a pain.

Ubuntu, as far as I'm concerned is a broken OS. Sure, it's stable out of the box, but if you touch anything, it breaks. That isn't stable, that is meta-stable.
It's not like I've really customized much of anything. So far, with the exception of Maple, and Matlab, everything I have install has been from the package manager. I'm still getting quite a lot of errors.

And if all else fails, there's still an option to manually compile & install a software if your current distro doesn't offer a specific package ready-to-go. As long as it's only a chosen few (1-2 or so) softwares which require that kind of installation - the doit-yourself approach - i can live with that if it allows me to keep my favorite distro..

...and then there is the option to install *buntu in a VM, not fooling around with the system and then use a shared folder (or maybe even an sshfs mount) for data exchange with your host system, only upgrading from LTS to LTS release. I've done likewise for a couple of things already. Sounds a bit over the top, an entire OS for one or two apps but frankly, who cares, in terms of harddisk storage space or a gigabyte extra RAM that would be required for that.

All you need in that case is a FeNiCs icon on the VM's desktop and a system shutdown button. :P

You say the software you need to use is optimized for Ubuntu, so that's a good reason to stay with an Ubuntu-derivative distribution, such as Linux Mint. Mint has several different desktop environments, and I can highly recommend Cinnamon. I'm not familiar with Poseidon, but since that's another Ubuntu derivative it might work. Scientific Linux is based on Red Hat, so would get you away from the Debian/Ubuntu backbone.

Actually this is one of my biggest complaints about many distro's, the functionality of the package manager, apt included. Every time you manually compile something you risk screwing up the package manager. The more software you have install the more likely it is to happen. At least with Gentoo I was usually able to circumvent the problem since I had a pretty good idea of everything that was installed.

You might like to try Slackware then. There IS a package manager, but it doesn't solve dependencies. So, that is left to you. You might like compiling something newer in Slack without screwing package manager. And its a beautifully crafted system, too. Computing beauty you know.

I'm planning on giving that one a try next.

Did you consider my other suggestion, installing *buntu (e.g. Lubuntu) in a VM and not screwing around with the installation except checking if the mouse is moving and the keyboard layout is correct? You would only install two packages there: virtualbox-guest-additions (to be able to conveniently resize/maximize the VM window) and the one software you wanted to use in the first place.

Config/data directories for that software can be replaced with symlinks to your host system's home folder(s) so you would have all data stored on the host and if something goes wrong with the *buntu system in the VM you can easily format the virtual harddisk and re-install any *buntu from scratch which is a pretty easy task which doesn't involve much work.

That way you can keep your favorite distro (your host system) as-is..

I got Ubuntu from a Magazine and have not installed any other Dtops maybe why all is too good on my newer hardware (feel trapped in a lazy box :twocents:); I definitely miss other distros as I'm a power hungry KDE man, usually... :Pengy:

Sold on Slackware. Should have switched to this a while ago.