Picatho's causeries

I was all the while much skeptical about Ubuntu. I googled and binged for days on how to get the Ubuntu be installed but yet still didn't have the courage to venture a step farther when booting from a live CD. The hesitation or perhaps the fear had dragged me for a couple of days, as if age had stole onward and benumbed me more and more.

Until the last few days when I came across a statement, posted by one of forum's users like this: "Never wade in water you're afraid to swim in unless it's the Linux pond, cause there's always a life ring in the forums." and that had just reminisced about my words of courage to my little grandchild during a pool-bath time the other day like this: "girl, grandpa is holding your hands and don't be afraid to lay down your body into water." So I took both courages in both hands to explore the usage possibility of Ubuntu.

After 2 attempts of installation, I finally got the Ubuntu having dual booting with Winxp installed inside my Compaq notebook. Everything were seemed workable except the Broadcom wireless lan that was totally not listening to the kernel. I clicked and clicked everywhere to try for any miracle to enable the wireless icon be popping out but gradually getting all in a fluster at the end. Suddenly the impression "is that I'd missed something during the installation" drew away my entire IQ and inadvertently reinstalled the Ubuntu again. Only when after I got the similar defeated desktop, then I realized that I was a computer-idiot! This time I was getting smarter and drew a straight furrow to fire up the Firefox for pounding questions on Google. Finally I got the solution thanked to this friendly tutorial.

Next day, I thought of getting my Lexmark Z1420 wireless printer to work with Ubuntu and as usual I'd to bury myself into search engines. I'd searched arduously for clues, I'd spent long hours of laborious effort, yet Ubuntu was still neglected to marry my printer. I could only bemoaned of being on the horns of a dilemma. The trouble is that I have to alternatively reboot into Winxp to perform my print jobs. If someone asks me to change printer, I'll rather making a U turn back to the road of Windows.

I was much encouraged in learning the Ubuntu-ibus to be functioned inside Tomboy Notes and Gedit as well as enabling my Chinese's files correctly be read-and-written. But Ibus failed to work properly; the system prompted - if you can not use Ibus, please add below lines in $HOME/.bashrc, and relogin your desktop. After inputing these 3 lines; export GTK_IM_MODULE=ibus;export XMODIFIERS=@im=ibus;export GT_IM_MODULE=ibus, the Ibus eventually worked by firstly to enable IBus daemon; secondly right click on any blanked area of client's window to select Ibus as input method and thirdly right click on the keyboard icon of Ibus in the notification area to select the desired input method from the combobox. Switching to and from Ibus thus required more clicks and is not easier than using Ctrl+Alt keys in Windows for Asian input.

Using Tomboy Notes and Sticky Notes is found to be not productivity improvement over the using of my Windows version of Cinta Notes and Stickies. Cinta Notes allowed me to make multiple tags on single note and the relevant source url address was just automatically be saved. Stickies have more features and ease of use than the Ubuntu's Sticky Notes.

I have the enthusiasm of ripping audio CD to mp3 and the Audio CD Extrator only gave me ogg format unless a Lame plugin was installed. But once there had been an update to the Ubuntu kernel happened, the Lame plugin was just unknowingly missing.

In fact, there is a lot of Ubuntu things to be learned anew like recently I'd learned to press ALT+F2 keys to bring up the run dialog and type smb://192.168.1.70/Chris's Shared to mount and access my wife's shared folder over my home's network. Just hope that my enthusiasm about Ubuntu would not eventually greeted with dismay!