Now that the first waves of rage calmed down and i’ve been using Unity for a few days, it doesn’t seem that horrible anymore. I managed to tweak many stuff to my liking, and many still await, but now i can at least get stuff done without constantly being held up by the clumsy interface.

There are stuff that disturb me still though. There is no simple way to switch between workspaces. In the classic Gnome, there was the handy workspace switcher applet on the tray, and it took only a click. In Unity, i’ve to click the icon in the launcher for the workspace wall to show up, and right-click on the workspace i want to move to. I can’t even use the “send to workspace …” options on the right click menu of windows, because it closes the window without warning or question. Not to mention that Unity is prone to crash without any real reason. In the past three days it crashed at least three times when i was just normally using the system and pretty much every single time i tried tweaking the settings. Luckily it restarts quickly, but it’s still annoying.

I have a DSL network connection, which is really nice fast, at least inside Japan, if it works. Luckily unlike my previous provider at the dorm, who would randomly cut off my net for days without warning if i left the torrent client on for a bit too long, there are no problems on the provider’s side. There are smaller ones on mine though. I have to manually connect whenever i boot Windows, but i never really bothered to look deeper into it, since it only happens once or twice a week. However, under Ubuntu the problems are quite different.

After i upgraded and then reinstalled the 11.10 o-something version, i faced some problems i couldn’t really handle. First it was the “waiting for network configuration” thing mentioned in the earlier post, but that went away after the reinstall and home folder wipe. But then there were other problems. It wouldn’t or only partially load certain pages (without any connection to each other, such as Rakuten and Tumblr) although i could ping and netcat them, it wouldn’t connect to MSN and in general it was slow. I rebooted to Windows to check, and found that everything worked all right, thus confirmed that it was an Ubuntu thing. I checked every setting in the network config manager gui, but none had any effect.

So, again Ubuntu delivered a distro update, and with it, another afternoon of pure rage. First, why the hell do you need to remove Gnome if i already have it installed? I don’t give a flying fuck about Unity, i’m not using a tablet and i always have lots of windows open at once. But all right, if you want to install that pile of crap Unity, do so, but leave Gnome on. No, you must remove Gnome. Okay then, remove it, but let me reinstall it after the hour-long update misery is over. I was naive enough to hope it’d work. I installed Gnome, rebooted (of course the distro update fucked up my bootloader too), chose the Gnome session, logged in, and faced something that reminded me of Windows 98 in 8bit color mode with the monitor’s cable having serious contact problems. I thought maybe it didn’t reinstall some required Compiz stuff (which again is fucking stupid considering what’s the point of installing Gnome if it just won’t work), so i logged out, and tried to log in into the Unity session to install stuff. It wouldn’t load. Reboot. Wait three minutes for some kind of “network configuration” (implying this fucker erased even my PPPoE settings), and i couldn’t even skip it. Still neither Gnome nor Unity would boot. So now i’m burning the install CD and getting ready for erasing the system and reinstalling from scratch. For the first time in two years.

I’m a bit annoyed right now. Yesterday i got fed up with that under Ubuntu all sounds on the output were noisy and quiet (the built-in speakers of the laptop sounded all right, but i hardly ever use those). I looked at the Ubuntu forums, and found a post asking about this very same problem. They sent that guy over to a page where the first link was a guide on how to install open sound (OSS) instead of ALSA. And i fool followed. First, installing OSS wasn’t simple. Included downloading loads of stuff and running home-made shell scripts i didn’t even know doing what. Before that Ubuntu produced noisy and quiet sound. Since then, none. So i wanted to revert back to ALSA–at least that worked somewhat. Unsuccessful. I tried reverting the steps of the OSS install, i tried following a guide on how to reinstall it, and tried running a supposedly installer script–but all failed. Then i wanted to reinstall Ubuntu as a whole. That would surely solve it. But i only had a 8.04 CD at hand, and that Hardy doesn’t recognise even my wired network card (or it does, but the main thing is that no networking works) (Asus A6M-Q035 laptop), so no updates, no use. Back under Windows i downloaded the 8.10 CD and burnt it, but it won’t boot. At all. I’m reburning it right now (i always use rw discs, and they worked fine, so i will use them later too).

All that was in vain, by the way. The problem was that the volume of my “CD drive” (in the mixer or volume control it goes by “CD”) was set too high (who would’ve thought that could make the normal sound output that noisy?). I muted it, and no noise. I hope i could get it working again.

Naturally the Total Commander CD/DVD burner plugin decides not to work properly only when i’m in a hurry. When else? This is not my day. (I hope tomorrow will be, with my linear algebra exam.)

Edit 16:30

And to further my happiness, the otherwise over-10M net in the dorm is for some reason under 1M, so downloading the alternative Ubuntu image takes about five hours (normally about ten minutes). I am overjoyed.