THX. I'll look into it. The problem reminds me of the old days when choosing horizontal and vertical freqs when installing Linux - it sort of looked like what I got if you got the freqs wrong. I might just do 9.10/Mint dual boot - and try Mint advanced setup if it has it - it seems all these 10.xx + distros are having problems talking to my laptop screen.
It is also possible you may have one of those intel boards that dislikes the intel XXX whatever driver for video. I ran into that on a Linux Certified laptop (that's the name of the company) which apparently makes 100% linux compatible laptops (not cheap, and they're indian sounding but they live in california, or did when I called their support, screwy accents good english language use.) I forget the exact issue but an Ubuntu upgrade for the 10.04 LTS went screwy big time.
Frankly I'm not sure why you're messing with 10.04 LTS when 12 LTS is out in beta. If you're that obsessed with LTS, just get the beta, and upgrade to full metapackage when it hits mainstream. You do keep good backups, right? I mean, you're not having to backup all your data each time you reinstall, right?Â
That said, I would migrate away from Ubuntu given the choice. Mint seems solid. Debian is still rock solid but many outdated package versions and their distro strives to be pure free software by default (and also reliable and fairly bug free, which it is) and then there's Fedora, which has come a LONG way in being not only Red Hat's testbed distro for experimental and new software, but also among the slowest patcher in the world. 50 patches out on release, and it takes a whole night to successfully pull them. Suse is nice, and Kubuntu is breaking free from Ubuntu, especially since Canonical says they're getting cut loose on support, or some such deal, I didn't read the full details, something about Kubuntu being supported by the Kubuntu Alliance/Group/Council or whatever the head rabbis at Kubuntu call themselves. There are choices, and quite honestly, if your system CAN run KDE 4 fast enough, it is a remarkable desktop environment, still not mature, but at least all the functionality hasn't been stripped from it, they're adding it, not pulling it, and while its cpu monitoring applets and other system monitoring applets aren't nearly as polished as those found in Gnome, you still get full functionality now, and more importantly, not only can you still install the disk utilities found in gnome and command line (Palimpsest is still among the best combination SMART montoring utility AND drive mount management utility I've seen) but KDE 4 brings a fantastic mounting and unmounting utility of its own. All in all it is making progress. What I miss is an easy to find way to type in where I want the file browser to go, and it seems all but windows have gone screwy on that issue. (Sick, isn't it? It seems many of the graphics environment and development environment people have gone to war with the userland as of late. Grub2 comes to mind. It used to be easy to use one removable drive to mount 15 different systems if you wanted to, and keep all the kernels on one easily removed and secured thumb drive. That's no longer the case, as now, if you run grub update, you've just lost all the prior entries in your boot menu that weren't relevant to that system. You can't just edit menu.lst anymore. What a crock of shit. The system went from being easy to administer to being a total pain in the ass!! Instead of adding a one liner to menu.lst and not having to do a damn thing else, even being able to pull different kernels for different machines, your grub update now pulls only the localized stuff for THAT machine. Not only that, but the last time I dealt with it, I wasn't able to find enough documentation to actually tweak it. I can still run the original grub, but Ubuntu now forces grub2 by default. Another point against it, in my book. If they keep it up, I may have to go back to lilo.
I got into Linux because I liked having control over my system, but the way things are going, I hate to say this, but I'm finding that lately, all the companies behind linux are either trying to dumb down the last great information and work OS I've used, or they've taken a payoff from Microsoft or the Federales or SOMEONE who wants them to dumb down and make the OS uncontrollable, all the while Windows is making strides in the OTHER direction and actually cleaning up their act!!! (Well, short of still having NSA/CIA back doors default in the system, and nobody but them knowing about it since their source code stays secret.) We can say that it started with Gentoo's founder/creator/head guy taking a hugely paid job at Microsoft, and then quitting in disgust saying that they lied to him and weren't looking to interoperate with Linux but merely wanted an insider to help them sabotage and undermine Linux. Nothing new. Then a year or two later, Gentoo dumped the stage 1 install and became just another "we compile it for you because its too easy for you to break it if we don't" distribution, despite the fact that gentoo was a GEEK distribution for people who actually KNEW what the f*** we were doing, or at least more so than the average "I want someone else to think for me" user. Quite a few of the ebuilds in the old days had lots of breakage. If that's been fixed, it might be worth going back. I don't know yet. Lastly, as for the toolchain build, it was either Gentoo or LFS. LFS is a bitch, though, especially the early steps of building your own from scratch. Damn fun though. That said, it seems it has become far easier to attain full control over Windows (and you can seriously pare down the install and what goes into it, if you install the right software and slipstream the install disk to only what you need/want, on there from the very beginning.) Linux, on the other hand, is being slowly dragged into the majority's direction, and the majority doesn't value a secure, easily controlled system where all the options are at the user's discretion but the user has to know a little bit about his tools (sure, you have to su or sudo to do it, but that's a good thing) and is now, instead heading towards the "but we want all our options chosen for us, we want to ONLY have the ability to customize our desktops, which means we get to set a wallpaper, isn't that difficult enough?" The latest Ubuntu feels as if I'm using a cellphone (and I hear that's exactly where the Canonical people are going with it, which means Ub 13 will be unusuable on any desktop of any serious power, but it will make your smartphone feel like it actually has an OS with options, sort of.))
The last ones left that are fairly powerful and offer some degree of control, are Slack (obviously), LFS (lots of work until you build a basic toolchain you can trust and then get to work on building the rest, including NEW toolchains. LFS requires a build environment that is trusted for a trusted system, and usually requires you start with an already working and trusted system, and there are also the BSD's (not Linux, obviously also, and you may as well be learning a whole new OS, and I do mean OS, not just distro.) I believe Fedora also has a "security" distribution that offers a lot more networking and security geek options (including supposedly a full suite of network hacking software, netmap, netcat, wireshark, etc, alongside the usual firewall and wireless options.) Hope that helps. Frankly I believe Ubuntu may deliberately be trying to get ditched. Fedora, on the other hand, despite being a full graphical and KDE at that, desktop, is actually not only highly usable from both CLI and GUi, but the GUI offers the kind of control a user might, you know, WANT if he wants to actually fully control and administer his system, without having to go to CLI every 5 minutes to change a GUI option, presuming there's a config file for it that's in some sort of known, documented or guessable location, because the "preferences" or "options" menu only has one option "choose background picture" because we all know that's the most important option a desktop "options" menu should have, right?!
{end pissed off rant}
Author
Topic: need new Linux distro advice (Read 6080 times)