Try, try again
Written on February 15, 2008 by Katherine W. Prawl
I’ve given up trying to configure Ubuntu to use as anything but a desktop system. It’s very pretty, and would be an excellent end-user computer for someone to use for web surfing and email, and maybe running SecondLife, but at least as I installed it (important caveat), it doesn’t have the right packages to let me get Wonderland to work on it. There seem to be some of them, but the versions are wrong or something. I got completely frustrated trying to install Java JDK6, which requires GCC 3, but Ubuntu has instead GCC 4.2, and so on. I couldn’t even get the Java plugin for Firefox to work, in order to verify my Java installation was correct!
So now I’m setting up Debian Linux on yet another virtual machine. Yesterday I tried OpenSuSE Linux, but wasn’t very favorably impressed with it. Maybe I’ll look at it again sometime, since there are lots of people who swear by it, but at least my installation left something to be desired. I guess appearances do matter to me, because the fonts they use on their desktop were difficult to read on my screen, and I couldn’t get it to use any display definition but VESA 800×600, which is pretty skimpy for someone used to a 20″ diagonal high-resolution LED display. I’m hoping Debian will let me use a bigger window — Ubuntu did. Thank goodness Linux distros only cost the time and bandwidth it takes to download them.
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