It’s not so bad. Didn’t think you’d hear me say that but it’s true. Not that it’s my ideal desktop, far from it. But it can be used.

At first I didn’t like how I don’t have immediate visual access to my system’s ‘tree’ – the structure that allows me to see where everything is via folders and sub-folders. But I quickly got used to the search feature. Right at the top of the Unity dock is a grey box, click it and you can search your system for anything. I especially like it because I can find those things I install too quickly and then ask myself where the heck I installed it to…

BUT.

Yes, there is a but.

I still feel like there is a layer between me and my system. As if Unity is somehow laying there between us, hiding us from each other.

I’m going to test out ElementaryOS Jupiter – based on Ubuntu 10.10. It’s downloaded, just need the time to make my install disk and install. The only catch is I believe they are releasing a new version in April, which will be based on Ubuntu 12.04. Unity may just rear its ugly head.

As I wrote in my last post, I decided to reinstall Ubuntu 11.10 via live CD. I had to do this because I tried to be fancy and modify the installation I already had and really messed things up. Luckily, it proved to be easy to reinstall.

Once I made the CD (easy-peasy – follow the instructions on the Ubuntu website), I popped it in and restarted my computer. It whirred up and I was quickly greeted with 2 options:

1. Try out Ubuntu with the live CD – this allows you to play with Ubuntu without making any changes to your system
2. Install Ubuntu

I chose to install and was pleasantly surprised with 4 options that made the installation process easy and worry-free

1. Erase Ubuntu 11.10 and reinstall – this option included a warning that all existing files and settings (on Ubuntu) would be erased
2. Upgrade Ubuntu 11.10 to Ubuntu 11.10 – sounds redundant but this allows you to update the installation without erasing your files and settings
3. Erase everything and reinstall – this option also included a warning that everything on the whole system would be erased, not only on the part of the system that Ubuntu currently lives (remembering I have Windows 7 and Ubuntu 11.10 living side by side on this system)
4. Something else – this allows you to resize the partitions on your system if you want to

So I chose the first option and after a few questions

• Location (for date & time)
• Keyboard layout
• Name and password
• Login options

the installation began at 8:25 and completed at 8:51 with a prompt to restart.

Voila. Ubuntu 11.10 has been reinstalled alongside my existing Windows 7.

And yes, I am not removing Unity (yet ) So far, I like that it hides. I seem to remember it not auto-hiding on earlier versions, taking up too much valuable screen-space – especially on my Dell mini 9. So the auto-hide is a good thing.

Ok. I’m about to reinstall Ubuntu 11.10 and, as promised, try Unity for a full month!

I’m doing it via live CD (so easy to do, just follow the instructions here).

I’ll let you know how it goes and if we can reclaim the notion that no, Ubuntu is not scary

I’m finally getting around to reinstating my blogs after the account suspension fiasco. Lesson learned – be extra vigilant about blocking spammy comments, I believe this is how some malicious code wormed its way into one of my blogs resulting in the shutdown of ALL of my blogs.

Luckily my hosting company, HostPapa, sent me a copy of my cpanel (the previous backup I had made would not open!) and I’m slowly slogging through the MySQL databases to recover my posts. Good thing this blog is a newish one with relatively few posts, I was able to go through each of the tables and files in the database to ensure that nothing out of the ordinary was there so I could safely use it. With some of my other places it is proving to be more complicated.

So…what’s new? I am now using a desktop as my primary computer. It’s new to me, my father bought himself a new one and so I inherited his old one. It has a nice solid motherboard and he even gave me a 750 gig hard drive. We formatted it with Ubuntu 10.10 and I have now updated that to the 11.04 Beta.

You may be surprised that I like 11.04, given that it uses Unity and I have been pretty clear about how I feel about THAT. What a waste, BUT luckily you can switch between Gnome and Unity at the login screen. Even as a beta, everything has worked smoothly from the get-go. No problems setting anything up so far. I like that RythmBox is no longer the default music player, it used to always crash for me and wasn’t intuitive at all. I haven’t yet fully explored Banshee, though I’m not so thrilled with the amazon mp3 link that comes as a default on it’s homepage. In general, I’m not really a fan of music players that automatically scan your folders and such. I usually use something simpler like VLC but that is just my preference.

I’ll update the blog as I explore 11.04 further, maybe I’ll wait until the full release is out since things can definitely change between beta and full release. In the meantime, does anyone have any 11.04 opinions they’d like to share?