Karmic Cousins. Familiarity Breeds Content.

[Sean Moran]

I've been in love with Ubuntu for over two years, but still stay with Karmic because of the desktop ever since Lucid. I know well enough where to find the right files in the /usr/share directories and Maverick was an improvement, but Natty Unity is a bit too cumbersome for an old laptop with 1366x768, and the classic Natty was so buggy that I had to reboot back to Karmic just to get a post on this forum without freezing the machine.

I've set my hopes on Oneiric but that's still months away, and historically already doomed to disappoint my hardware and ever-loyal user, so I've taken the sensible approach and downloaded a few dozen .isos for Fedora and OpenSUSE and Debian and al kinds of other derivatives, all there to burn to USB Flash drive. Now I realise how long that might take to test them all out one by one.

I'm looking for a current distro with the current kernel and the same sort of apt-get or at least dpkg that I've learned with Ubuntu over the past two years, and most of all, something with a nice familiar desktop and panel ie. GNOME or something with the same ease of customisations. I'm also looking for something minimal, with a basic GUI of 300-400Mb if possible, although I know how to slim off the excess from a Live-CD.

If you know of a suitable alternative distro to help me maintain my loyal devotion to the inherent core of Ubuntu until the Oneiric beta comes to light, please share your recommendations.

[FuturePilot]

Debian

[Sean Moran]

Debian

Thanks mate. If you reckon I can tweak the desktop to roughly the same sort of GNOME that I'm used to with Ubuntu, then I'll get on with it tomorrow morning. I'll take your advice, and thanks for simplifying the range of choices that would have had me testing unknowns for the rest of the month.

Three or four other good suggestions should see a fair decision by the end of the week, so please provide more advice if appropriate, but I reckon you've got me off to a good start Mr Pilot. Thanks.

[FuturePilot]

AFAIK Debian is still using Gnome 2.x so you will have the old familiar Gnome desktop.

[walt.smith1960]

Have you tried Xubuntu? Some feel XFCE is comparable to Gnome2. I've not had any major problems with Natty classic but it seems everyone's experience is different depending on hardware and user expectations. There are at least a couple Gnome 3 projects afoot and it sounds like ubuntu 11.10 will have gnome-shell in place of Gnome classic.

[Sean Moran]

Thanks again to both of you. I'm running a Compaq CQ60 laptop (named Lucy) that I bought back in November 2009 and she runs Unity okay after downloading the nVidia 185 drivers from the software center, so we're not quite into our golden age as yet, but not too lavish with the desktop resolution. Should be fairly bug free with a wellknown make and model.

I did have a look at Xubuntu a few days ago, but it came back to the panel arrangement. The way it shoves everything to either the left or right of the panel is something I could learn to work around given time, but I've4 spent years now perfecting the usual GNOME panels with the left - centre - right on top, and the optional bottom panel, and it's like clockwork. So much of my daily productivity relies on having those top and bottom panels and Application - ... - System menus configured in the Intrepid/Jaunty/Karmic way, that I'd prefer Xubuntu with the GNOME I know, and then I could get on with the work.

There migbht be good cause to get used to Ice or LXDE or XFCE, but if I can stay in the tradition of Linux and Ubuntu, I'd really like to persevere with GNOME until Oneiric sees Ubuntu come to their senses.

Debian looks like the way to go, but thanks for the good suggestion on the Xubuntu side, and I'm a bit of an old fogey to be so stuck in my desktop ways. It's still a strong possibility if Debian can't be trimmed down to 350Mb on a Live-CVD like I do with Karmic, but any other good suggestions are still welcome. I'll make a start tomorrow, and it's not even 10pm here yet, so please let me know what else to test out along with Debian and Xubuntu - both good choices.


---o0o---


One possibuility on the Xubuntu option, is, perhaps, what might happen if I installed the current Xubuntu 11.04, and then added the GNOME desktop, after which I could remove certain parts of the XFCE desktop. Would that result in Unity as the default GUI for Xubuntu? I think not, but it takes an awful lot of bandwidth, and I still haven't managed to download the GNOME files to test it out.

Anyone ever tried Xubuntu 11.04 -- XFCE ++ GNOME?

[Sean Moran]

Time for me to see about putting the laptop to sleep, so thanks for both suggestions. Tomorrow I'll finish of downloading GNOME for Xubuntu, and test that out. I'll also run up a Live Debian system on a USB stick and see how that looks. I'll report back tomorrow night.

Thanks for your help and good sleep with happy dreams to you both.

[Spice Weasel]

If you were only going to try Debian with GNOME I would recommend you try Debian with XFCE/LXDE as well.

[kaldor]

If you go for Debian, get Debian Testing branch. It's more up to date than Stable.

If you don't mind deviating from Ubuntu, Scientific Linux is a very stable option.

[ikt]

Natty Unity is a bit too cumbersome for an old laptop with 1366x768

Compaq CQ60 laptop (named Lucy) that I bought back in November 2009

ehhh? I'm running Natty Desktop on a similar specced laptop no problems :s



Also I think you might have mixed up your idiom:

http://www.usingenglish.com/referenc...+contempt.html