At 07:40 AM 6/26/2010, John Ferrell wrote: >It was just too easy to work for me. SUSE loads to a stop with just a >"$" prompt. I'm not sure if it has been mentioned yet, but you may want to spend a few hours with Ubuntu 10.04 LTS which currently available at the ubuntu website. The 'LTS' means Long Term Support - it will be supported for a significant length of time (5 years?). I ran it for the first time last night and was pleasantly shocked at how well it ran on my little netbook (Asus 1000HE /w 2GB RAM). I had installed it on a 2GB USB stick, using the installer that was recommended by the ubuntu download website. It took a couple of tries to get my netbook to boot from the USB stick (had to tell the BIOS that it should consider bootable USB devices to be the 1st hard drive), then up it came. I had a few minor problems that I'll list here: 1) Although ubuntu found my bluetooth mouse, it didn't seem to want to connect. I finally figured out that I should press the 'connect' button on the mouse first . . . 2) I initially couldn't see how to connect to my wifi network. I kept trying to go into network setup -> wireless and it kept prompting me for all of the stuff it should have been able to find by itself: SSID, etc. So: I tried the help pages, which told me to go look for the wifi button at the top of the screen. Clicked that button - a list of available wifi networks appeared, and I was able to connect to my network. Easy and painless. 3) This last problem was a bit disconcerting. I wanted to play some movies that I had stored on the netbook's hard drive. Browsed to the directory, double-clicked on the desired file and a movie player screen opened up. But: it said that it didn't have the proper codecs and offered to go get them. I told it to do so but it kept failing: it said that it couldn't find any suitable codecs. That truly didn't make any sense. So: I headed off to the ubuntu forums hosted on the ubuntu website. I selected the sub-forum 'Multimedia', figuring that should get me close to where I needed to be. I *think* the first message in that forum was a sticky, telling me what the most common problems were and how to fix them. They were right on the money - I found out that I needed to tell my ubuntu installation which repositories that it should get files from. They told how to open a terminal window and then gave MANY possible long strings that you might use - each string was prefaced with which Linux distribution you would use it with. Copy / pasted the one long string associated with ubuntu 10.04, pressed [Enter]. That did it! Selected another movie - the movie player listed a whole bunch of files that it wanted, then proceeded to go get and install them. All in all - pretty darned painless. What I find disconcerting, though, is that I had to configure my ubuntu install to go get those files. My question is: Why? Why wasn't that stuff already done? I can see how a complete newbie might just get frustrated and quit. What I find amazing about my whole experiment it was almost as easy as getting Windows on to a brand-new machine. It just worked. No searching for drivers, no cussing because something on my machine didn't work. I would have said 'Easier than getting Windows to work on a brand-new machine' except for having to tell APT where to get its download files from. That required a few minutes of looking for help from an online source and I can really see how that would put non-techie types off. I plan to play a LOT more with ubuntu - I'll probably put it onto one of my older desktop machines and have it connected to the KVM that is already under my desk. FWIW - going to the software sources section under Admistration shows that there are THOUSANDS of programs ready to download and install. Among those is a bunch of Math and Electronics stuff - both Eagle and KiCad are shown as available. Its as simple as putting tick marks on each program name that you want to get, then telling ubuntu to get and install those programs. Anyway - it might be well worth your time to have a look at this most thoroughly-modern Linux distro. dwayne -- Dwayne Reid Trinity Electronics Systems Ltd Edmonton, AB, CANADA (780) 489-3199 voice (780) 487-6397 fax www.trinity-electronics.com Custom Electronics Design and Manufacturing -- http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive View/change your membership options at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist