I felt very secure inside of my Fedora KDE spin. I’ve used it for a few months now and felt very happy. I only ran into a snag last night when I discovered that I can’t play a DVD on my computer.
Now I am no newbie to Linux, and naturally I searched the internet and tried all different sorts of things to get Fedora to work. I installed dozens of programs, codecs and read lots of advice. But alas I was unsuccessful. That’s when I started thinking about Ubuntu Studio. Now I have it booting on my DVD drive and I am about to install it. I have already backed up all of my programs that I’m going to need on the other side, and it’s not that I haven’t reinstalled Linux a few hundred times in my lifetime.
The first thing I notice as I start the installer is that my mouse is really slow and pokey! It took me quite a while to get it to move over to the continue button. That is unusual.
In fact moving the mouse during the entire install program is quite tedious. I have to pick up the mouse and then slide it across my mousepad repeatedly just to get it to move from one option to the next.
However, I have used Ubuntu Studio before, so I think the end product, after the installation is complete, will allow me to move my mouse around the screen easily enough.
Fedora gave me an option to combine my 3 hard drives into one giant home directory. I liked that and I miss it here in Ubuntu. Here I install my Swap and boot directory on my 400 meg drive my home directory on a terabyte second drive and my everything else directory on my terabyte third Drive. It’s a total of 3.4 terabytes of space. Most of it is being wasted.
While I’m waiting for Ubuntu Studio to copy files to my hard drives, I’m thinking about what I want to do once I get inside my new operating system. I’ve become quite a fan of the KDE desktop environment and I know Ubuntu Studio uses the xfce desktop environment. Although I really like xfce I think I’m going to install KDE on top of it. We’ll see.
Since I’ve compressed and backed up my files to the cloud I’m going to want to install Firezilla so I can FTP download my important files again. And of course I’m going to want to see if I can play DVDs off the bat or whether I have to fiddle with it as I expect. There are plenty of instructions how to play DVDs on an Ubuntu system. Hopefully it will work better for me then Fedora 28 did.
By the way, just in case you wondered, this installation is being done to my actual hard disks not inside of a virtualbox window. I’m writing this article by dictating it into my Pixel 2 XL phone.
Now that the files are finished being copied the system is being installed. One program after another is flashing on my screen. Now Thunderbird is installed. Now USB storage is installed. Now it’s configuring hardware. The mouse still moves painfully slowly. Now grub is being installed. You need grub to get your system up and running in the first place. All of this is par for the course in any standard Linux installation.
The screen now says “Installation is complete. You need to restart the computer in order to use a new installation.” Oh boy, here we go. I struggle to get my pokey mouse pointer over to the Restart Now button and click.
Characteristic of Ubuntu based systems the computer then ejects my DVD and prompts me to press enter to restart. (My installation media was burned to a DVD.)
Before long I’m prompted to enter the password I selected during the installation program. However painfully and disappointingly my mouse is still incredibly slow and I have to figure out how to solve it right away.
After a few minutes of struggle I find I can change my mouse cursor and change the acceleration of the mouse pointer none of which has any effect whatsoever on correcting this incredibly difficult problem. Even searching the web for a solution at this point will be difficult if I have trouble moving the mouse pointer from one side of the screen to the other! Immediately I’m thinking I may have to go back to what I was using before, Fedora 28!
Still I am downloading some updates and we’ll see what happens.
I found an idea on Linuxquestions.Org that I should try xset mouse <acceleration> <threshold>. That does nothing despite whatever values I put in there. Someone else is saying I should try apt-get update.
After repeated tries, I’ve come to a conclusion. Ubuntu Studio, at least for me on my computer at this point in time, is a mistake. I’m going to have to go with something else since I’ve already wiped out Fedora 28!