2011-02-20

Featured Comments: Week of 2011 February 13

I was getting a little scared that I wouldn't write this post for this week because I didn't post that much this past week, but thankfully, neither of those things happened. There was only one post that got a handful of comments this week, so I'll post all of those.

Not All is Fair in Linux

Reader dick had this to say about issues in Linux Mint: "I had the problem with Linux Mint that I did an Opera update from the normal method. The update went fine and all seemed to be well. I logged off. Next morning I was unable to log back in. I can't get back in with fail safe Linux Mint or any of the older versions either. Just totally blocks me out. I don't want to replace this if I can help it because I have some old photos of my grandfather, grandmother, and baby photos of my mother that I got from a distant relative who has since died and they are irreplaceable and since my grandfather was born in 1838 and grandmother 1878 and mother in 1902 they are missing from my immediate family as well. Any ideas on how to log in when you can't get there from here? Is there any way to easily get the home files from a different distro and put there some where safe? I realize I should have backed up before the update but have never had a problem with Linux Mint before. This is Linux Mint 8. Shame because this is essentially the first real problem I have had with Linux Mint and I had grown to depend on it just working without problems." I do believe that as with Ubuntu 9.10 "Karmic Koala", Linux Mint 8 "Helena" had quite a few problems of various kinds, so a system upgrade might be in order.
An anonymous reader had this suggestion: "If you have a problem with Ubuntu or Mint you can't say you have a problem with Linux (as a whole). Please, change the title of your post." I responded to this with the fact that this is an ongoing debate in the wider Linux community, so by saying "Not All is Fair in Linux", I was also implying the presence of strife in the community.
Reader revdJenk said, among other things, "I have LinuxMint 10 64bit, running on my LinuxCertified brand laptop with GM45 Intel video, and running compiz on advanced setting. I haven't experienced any of the issues you or the other commenter are mentioning."
Another anonymous commenter said, "Missing font issue you run into all the time. These days I just do PDF if I have to print else where. compiz has had issues for years. The closed source nvidia driver is not really compatible with it. But due to the type of incompadible you could go many months to years before its shows itself." Yes, but unfortunately, I needed to make a couple last-minute edits before printing; my original course of action was to just send myself a PDF file and print that out.
Reader NotZed said, among other things, "For printing - i'd recommend creating a pdf file locally and then taking that to another machine if you have to print on it. No matter what environment, missing fonts, software version differences and so on are always an issue. This is basically what PDF was invented for."

Thanks to all those who commented on posts from this past week. Due to things like exams, I may not be able to post too frequently. (If you see posts coming later this week, it probably means I wrote it much earlier and made the post automatically get published at a set time.) Once again, if you like what I write, please do keep subscribing and commenting!