Grub Rescue

Understood, that is about as far as I have used it, but probably less, because up till now, my experience with it has been in Windows, where I never got it working well enough to depend on, even for my HTPC.

I wonder how familiar you might be with Tellico? I've done nothing more than to install it and very briefly look it over. The thing that interests me is that apparently it has the ability to import data via xml. I thought that I had read somewhere that it could use csv also, but when I tried that, the import window didn't seem to have that as an option.

I have zero interest in using it to build a database from scratch, but I'm hoping to find a way to export my data from Movie Collector to it. Regardless of the format that will have to be used, I'm very uncertain how to do it, because I'm assuming that the data would have to be placed in an exact sequence, so that Tellico would know where to put it. That would require me to have a much better understanding of both programs, to be able to impliment the operation.

seekermeister said:

Understood, that is about as far as I have used it, but probably less, because up till now, my experience with it has been in Windows, where I never got it working well enough to depend on, even for my HTPC.

I wonder how familiar you might be with Tellico? I've done nothing more than to install it and very briefly look it over. The thing that interests me is that apparently it has the ability to import data via xml. I thought that I had read somewhere that it could use csv also, but when I tried that, the import window didn't seem to have that as an option.

I have zero interest in using it to build a database from scratch, but I'm hoping to find a way to export my data from Movie Collector to it. Regardless of the format that will have to be used, I'm very uncertain how to do it, because I'm assuming that the data would have to be placed in an exact sequence, so that Tellico would know where to put it. That would require me to have a much better understanding of both programs, to be able to impliment the operation.

Click to expand...

Yeah never used Tellico.
Sorry

There's another one of those dangling threads that I need to tie up...Kmail. Even though I have it set with the proper username and password, it still isn't capable of retrieving email from my Gmail account. It goes through the motions of doing so, but even when I know there is email awaiting, it doesn't find it.

Lack of email access is a major barrier to being able to use Kubuntu on a regular basis.

EDIT: Never mind, I couldn't get Kmail to work, but I did get Evolution working. The only thing about it I'm not sure that I care for is that it is working via imap by default, and I didn't find a means to reset it to pop. However that is a very small wrinkle that I can probably get used to.

seekermeister said:

There's another one of those dangling threads that I need to tie up...Kmail. Even though I have it set with the proper username and password, it still isn't capable of retrieving email from my Gmail account. It goes through the motions of doing so, but even when I know there is email awaiting, it doesn't find it.

Lack of email access is a major barrier to being able to use Kubuntu on a regular basis.

EDIT: Never mind, I couldn't get Kmail to work, but I did get Evolution working. The only thing about it I'm not sure that I care for is that it is working via imap by default, and I didn't find a means to reset it to pop. However that is a very small wrinkle that I can probably get used to.

Click to expand...

I personally find kmail a little lacking.
Evolution is better as is Thunderbird.

The only thing I don't particularly like about it, is the imap aspect. While it is actually better than pop, it makes me feel compelled to organize my Gmail inbox, which I haven't done in a very long time, so it is a bit of a chore.

Something I'm looking for is a means to download videos in Kubuntu. I already can download YouTube with an extension I use in Opera, but it doesn't work on websites using rtmpe. In Windows I use a program called GetFLV that works very well, but it isn't Linux compatible. I've Googled a bit, but didn't see anything that would appear to work, other than one page with some instructions on how to do it by command line. Surely there must be a program for this designed for Linux...?

seekermeister said:

Something I'm looking for is a means to download videos in Kubuntu. I already can download YouTube with an extension I use in Opera, but it doesn't work on websites using rtmpe. In Windows I use a program called GetFLV that works very well, but it isn't Linux compatible. I've Googled a bit, but didn't see anything that would appear to work, other than one page with some instructions on how to do it by command line. Surely there must be a program for this designed for Linux...?

Click to expand...

Not as far as I know, but maybe you can still get GetFLV working in linux with WINE.
I never tried it but it is possible to try and install windows programs under linux with a little help from WINE.
WINE is in the repositories and you can install it, download your .exe, then in the folder you saved the .exe in you can right click the .exe and select "open with wine" and it should work, at least the installer.
The actual app itself?
Thats a bit of a pot luck I'm afraid, there is no way of knowing if it will run until you try it, WINE is far from perfect.
Now if there are commandline tools you can use then use them, I know its not point and click but sometimes when there is no GUI its still easy to use if you have the commands written down somewhere.

I started out to try this:

Link Removed

But I got lost on setting the permissions. I went to the file's properties, and didn't find any place that looked as though the given parameters belonged.

EDIT: Thinking about it, I doubt that I would use it even if I could make it work, because it sounds as though it would be impossible to start it at precisely the right time, because it couldn't be coordinated with a playing video. It would be like operating in the dark.

I just took a shot at running the GetFLV installer with wine, but it missed the target by a mile. Not only did the installation fail, but it popped a dialog saying that it failed to initialize the installer's GUI.

That stinks.
The only other thing I can think of is installing firefox and getting the downloadhelper extension, at least it works for me in most cases.

I can believe that you can download some videos with Firefox, because I do also with Opera, but I doubt that any of those you downloaded were rtmpe. That requires something more than a simple extension.

Another Kubuntu foible I ran into, I tried to find a game I like, called Nethack. The Ubuntu Software Center did have that, plus a couple of versions of Slash'em, of which I installed all 3, but none of them have a Gui anything similar to that to which I'm accustomed to in Windows. That seems ironic, because I believe that it is actually a Linux game that was simply adapted to Windows. If that is so, then it should be at least as good in Linux as it is in Windows.

EDIT: Also, after exiting the game, the System Tray is totally empty. I imagine that a reboot will fix that, but that will deter me from playing the versions that I have installed now.

EDIT 2: Alas! I was wrong, rebooting didn't restore the tray, and I also found that when I selected to restart, that the confirmation window didn't appear. I just had to wait until it timed out and rebooted.

EDIT 3: I just tried a KDE reset, but it didn't help

EDIT 4: Come to think of it, even the KDE reset didn't work as it should, because previously when doing one, I had to make a series of minor adjustments to restore everything to the way that it was, like the wallpaper, power setting, mouse speed, etc. This time none of that was necessary.

EDIT 5: I just tried another KDE reset, and noticed that when I deleted the KDE folder, that it was automatically restored just a moment later, without rebooting.

The silence to my last post is echoing ominously. Should I take it that you don't have any ideas on how to deal with the problem? Is things such as this the reason that you previously suggested that I might at some time decide I would be happier with some other distro?

seekermeister said:

The silence to my last post is echoing ominously. Should I take it that you don't have any ideas on how to deal with the problem? Is things such as this the reason that you previously suggested that I might at some time decide I would be happier with some other distro?

Click to expand...

Yeah another distro may be in your future.
It seems strange these issues are coming all of a sudden though.

If you want KDE here are my faves:

SolydXK: Very solid, very stable as it implies.
Here is a review:

ZevenOS Neptune:
Has some similarities to Kubuntu as in using Muon as its software installer.
Comes with codecs and chromium as its default browser:
(its the distro I use)

openSUSE: openSUSE has definately become a shining light in the development department.
Only bad thing now is that openSUSE is about ready to upgrade from 12.3 to 13.1, if you can wait about 4 more days it will be out.

Of course you cannot go wrong with linux mint, but it has not come out with its new release yet and I dont know when it will come out.
It does have a debian respin though, very nice one too.

I will link you the distros here soon, but i will let you watch the videos about them first.

I definitely appreciate the videos, but they don't make my decision too much easier. While it is good to know something about the scope of the software that is included in each, my main concern is finding a distro that I won't run into a dead end with, like i have apparently done with Kubuntu. This means that in order of importance to me starts with reliability. A reliability that is not too dependent on the user's level of understanding. Obviously, the user's understanding is also of great importance, but I feel that importance should have more to do with avoiding creating problems, than with fixing them. The reason for this is that past experience has taught me that when it comes to Linux (in any of the flavors that I have tasted), I never had the time to develop my understanding, before something would occur that would make whatever distro that I was using at the time to be unusable. The effect of that was that the discouragement that I felt caused me to stay away from Linux, until the feeling subsided, but that interval also caused me to forget what little that I had already learned, so that each new distro was like starting over from scratch. This is the cycle that, if it is possible, I want to end. This desire is going to make what I do next take some time, as I don't want to go on first impressions and impulses.

Of the two distros you have provided videos on, I "think" that Solyd XK is the most likely candidate, but neither video really answered my main question...which is better than the other in terms of reliability, and whether that best is the actual best of all distros?

One thing I find curious is that you said that OpenSuSe is about to upgrade from 12.3, but the last version of it I had installed was 12.4. Was there something about 12.4 that didn't make it qualify as a true release? Also your comparison of it to a shining light worries me some, because I had a lot of problems with it just getting it configured to work properly with my hardware and to perform certain basic tasks. I realize that you would probably consider the problems that I had as being minor, but as perspectives are subjective, I have to go with my own, unless there truly has been a great amount of change recently in how it is configured and functions?

You are the closest thing to a Linux guru that I have ever come across, so I'm very interested in how you might respond to these thoughts?

P.S. I would still like to fix Kubuntu, if it is possible without starting over from scratch again?

The problem disappeared. After deciding to try a command line fix I found Googling, I rebooted into Kubuntu and found that the last KDE reset had worked, but I hadn't rebooted, because I thought that since the KDE directory had been restored before rebooting, that something went awry. It seems strange to me that what didn't work one time, did on another. Still I'm very happy that it did, because now all that I have to do is to restore some minor changes that I had made, which were deleted by the reset.

These things aside, do you know anything about the Nethack portion the questions at the top of post #173?

Nah never really did nethack.
As for openSUSE and your issues, i find that a little surprising as openSUSE is generally very good at being stable and reliable, but perhaps its your hardware at work.
And opensuse 12.4?
There is no such bird, here is the release cycle for openSUSE:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SUSE_Linux_distributions

So I am wondering if you got an official version of it.

As for my distro suggestions I say both Neptune and SolydXK are great so I cannot say what one is truly "better"
For a beginner though I say SolydXK inches it out in terms of the installer, its got a great community and has a very nice way of updating the system.
I would not say that using SolydK is "starting over" as even though yeah none of your appps will transition over there is no real new thing to learn with it.
There are differences yes between it and Kubuntu but nothing earth shattering that I dont think you will have issues with.
Whatever you learned in Kubuntu will for the most part transition into SolydK except in general software installation and updating.
But installing software in Solyd is dead easy:


You will not need to redownload opera or anything, Solyd like Kubuntu is based on the .deb installer something both Ubuntu and debian share.
Same news with Neptune here, so no need to download brand new packages from opera.

As for openSUSE and your issues, i find that a little surprising as openSUSE is generally very good at being stable and reliable, but perhaps its your hardware at work.
And opensuse 12.4?
There is no such bird, here is the release cycle for openSUSE:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SUSE_Linux_distributions

So I am wondering if you got an official version of it.

Click to expand...

I can't remember exactly where I got it, so I can't swear that it was official, but I felt that it was. When I Googled for it, I got a number of returns for 12.4, so it's not just my imagination. I don't think that the problems I had with it were simply hardware compatibility, because the problem had more to do with configuring SuSe than anything else. It seemed as though I had to manually configure everything myself, instead of the OS doing it automatically, like Kubuntu has done. For a person versed in the Linux way of doing things, my complaints would probably seem trivial, but then that is still the state that my understanding is in.

Huh, never had that in openSUSE.
Plus you talking about SuSe makes me think this was an old version.
Modern versions of SUSE and openSUSE dont use that kind of spelling anymore.

The spelling I used was of my own preference, nothing to do with the official manner in which it is spelled now. It wasn't an old version that I last used.