Help. I Thought Ununtu Was Supposted To Be Perfect And Simple.

[OnOff]

Acer are not the best but they are well priced, we have two Aspire 5742G laptops and they fly, however they must be on a wedge or they can overheat when streaming full screen. Other than that they have been really good. Stuck a 1TB SSD in and its even better.

We did buy the 3-fan Cooler Master thing after the GPU was repaired but it died again. Too late I guess. Was half considering getting a second hand card off eBay and having a go.

 

[ProDave]

That's interesting on the cooling.

when running Vista the fan used to come on regularly and boy was it a noisy fan.

All the time I have been playing with in on ubuntu the fan has never come on at all.

Question.  Is the fan just on a temperature sensor? in which case it's not working very hard running ubuntu?

Or does the operating system monitor the cpu temperature and control the fan? if so that function is not working with ubuntu

To "solve" the wi fi problem, would buying a USB wi fi adapter work? You can get them for £5 on fleabay.  Would ubunta recognise that and work? or would we be into driver issues for that as well? (the two I have looked at claim to support "linux"

 

[ProDave]

Yes I can open a terminal 

Tell me what to type.

(I've actually just bought one from fleabay but only £3.58 wasted if I don't need it)

 

[steptoe]

I've never had an EDIMAX dongle not work in any flavour of Linux. 

 

[ProDave]

 

[ProDave]

I've tried those commands before. But here is what happens:



It never does anything and the command prompt never returns from that last command.  Have to kill the terminal window and open a new one to do anythig else

 

[ProDave]

Done and re booted.

Way hey.  I'm connected to t'internet wirelessly.

As simple as that.

I'll go and give you some scoobs now.

One further question.

When I shutdown, I get a screen with UBUNTU and scrolling red and white dots. Some hdd activity for a while, then that stops. But the computer does not turn itself off.  I have to wait until i'm sure all hdd activity is finished then push and hold the power button.

So somehow it's not talking to the power controls.

I have to go out in a minute and earn some money, so might have to leave that one for later

 

[Steve3948]

:Applaud   :Applaud   :Applaud   :Applaud   :Applaud

One of the issues with Vista was it was always file swapping and grinding away at the cpu, so loads of HD activity.

I think on the Acer the probe for the fan is on the cpu, so if the cpu is working away the fan is running to demand.

If I stream full screen the air out of the exhaust is hot, and if you restrict the airflow underneath it will start acting weird before shutting down or crashing. Since it's been on a wedge is not been a problem, mine has no fans its just a wedge, but my son has one with 2 fans, his has also been fine since.

I think with Ubuntu Dave you will have a much better OS system as Vista was pants, however W8.1.1  :innocent

 

[steptoe]

Dave, next time you want to shut down open a terminal and type

sudo poweroff

see if that actually shuts it down.

 

[ProDave]

The power off thing has put itself right.

Could it have been hanging because it thought it was busy still trying to do something with the wi fi driver that wasn't working?  Now that's fixed the power down works properly.

Now just to finish loading all her software onto it.

 

[ProDave]

Next question. How to get Itunes working.

I tried installing the same version she had on the lappy when it was running Vista (mainly because it saved me downloading another big file)

It seemed to install okay.

but when you try to run it, after a couple of seconds a message box pops up saying something to the effect you do not have enough access privileges to run this application.

HELP.

I can't seem to find a linux version of Itunes so it seems it has to be a windoze version, so how do I fix this permission issue?

 

[Sidewinder]

Good luck with that one, apparently it's not a very good app to run under Ubuntu!

Have you installed Wine?

Or, you could try PlayOnLinux, which apparently might be better?

 

[ProDave]

Yes installed wine.

I just found some more stuff saying you should install it using playonlinux.

Perhaps I'll try uninstalling it and install it again with playonlinux.

 

[steptoe]

Play on Linux is basically a front end for wine with more privileges.

PD, I would forget about iTunes tbh, I can't remember it now, but there is a compatible substitute for Linux,

 

[ProDave]

Gave up trying to get itunes working under ubunta.  googled the issue and there's problems getting itunes version 10 working (that's the one we have)

So a bit of analysis WHY she wanted itunes?  Mostly so she can "play her music" on the lappy.

So the lappy now has VLC media player on it and she can play all her stuff on that.

I've put itunes on an old XP desktop we have as a "spare" machine, just for the occasions she might want to load something new onto her ipod, and for no other reason.  God that was a pain restoring all her media back into a new install of itunes and getting it back into the right playlist. god I hate Apple and why they have to be awkward, do things different to every body else, and make it hard for you to do something quite logical like restore your music after a computer crash and rebuild.  Thank god for third party software.

 

[ProDave]

The "problem" was not getting the music back into itunes, but organising it into the playlists she had set up.

itunes will import any music it finds on the pc (and we had it all backed up), but won't put it into your playlists.  Neither will itunes export your playlists (or in fact ANYTHING) FROM the ipod to itunes.

Further more, if at that point we had synce'd the ipod to itunes, it would have deleted all the play lists.

It took some third party software to download the playlists from the ipod back to itunes, a function I believe should be a standard part of the package.

That has nothing to do with using apple hardware or not, and everything to do with itunes being written to be awkward. I presume they do it this way to prevent anyone just copying your music? but if so that's a lame excuse for omitting an essential function, as in any case someone else just writes a program to do it.

Personally I would never buy an ipod because I don't want anything so restrictive. If I really had to have a portable media player I would buy a different make that is much better supported without such silly restrictions.

 

[NozSpark]

You can get stuff back off the iPod back onto the PC... I just had to do that on my daughters... She lost all he music off iTunes but retained it on her iPod.... Thankfully I got it all back

 

[steptoe]

Rythmbox is a good itunes substitute, or for something a lot simpler, try  gtkpod , I believe these are both available in the software centre.

and,,,,,,,,

I just found this  

 

[ProDave]

One more question.

The mouse is too sensitive.  By that I mean the mouse pointer on the screen moves too far for a small mouse movement.

In setup, the mouse sensitivity is already set as low as it will go.

Are there any tweaks that can be done to reduce the mouse sensitivity further?

 

[OnOff]

One more question.

The mouse is too sensitive.  By that I mean the mouse pointer on the screen moves too far for a small mouse movement.

In setup, the mouse sensitivity is already set as low as it will go.

Are there any tweaks that can be done to reduce the mouse sensitivity further?

Try here:

http://askubuntu.com/questions/205676/how-to-change-mouse-speed-sensitivity