I clicked the “Install” button at 16:35. By 14:35 a message was already shining at me saying the installation was done, so it was really lightning fast. While the installation was still running, I figured out the reason why I had always given up on working with Linux. It was because you can’t type programming brackets in it – the curly braces.
I couldn’t think of a better term. So I can forget right away about any programming in a C-like language there, and I think these {} brackets (I’m typing this on Windows now) are needed in PHP too.. π Right after the installation I tried to turn on the HW switch with fn+F12 for Wifi. It didn’t work; whenever it did turn on, it switched off immediately. So I went to the 2 arrows in the panel and picked the network SSID name.
I entered the WPA key, which I copied from the router, and moved on. I decided that no browser other than Google Chrome will get the login credentials to my main GMail. I will also find it hard to hand my credentials over to some chat client. I have these options:
- Give them to a third-party app and hope that nobody steals them. I will try with all my might to avoid this. It would have the advantage of automatically notifying me about new emails as well. I believe GMail supports OAuth authentication, so why don’t these programs use it to look more trustworthy?
- Register an ICQ transport on my Linux Gmail. The problem with this is that I will have to add some GTalk contacts manually.
- Install Google Talk through Wine, if it works. But I think it won’t, even though GTalk isn’t a particularly complex or WinAPI dependent program.
- Chat only from the Gmail web interface. Gmail has some kind of desktop notifications, but I expect that will work only on Win and only for emails.
Interestingly, in Digsby I logged in just fine to my main Gmail. It’s a pity that the makers of Digsby have been promising for at least 2 years that a Linux/Mac OS version is coming, but we’ll probably never see it. π Then I wanted to download Chrome. I typed Chrom into the search in the Ubuntu Software Center, but as always it found only Chromium, so I told myself I’d at least install that one this way. But whoops, after about 20s of downloading it reported a “Download error” and it wouldn’t start again – well, it did, but it showed me the download error every time right away as soon as I clicked Install.
So in Midori I went to chrome.google.com, chose the 64bit Chrome for Ubuntu, and got another mild shock. Not only did no download manager pop up, it also couldn’t be opened with ctrl+j and wasn’t in any menu, from which I concluded that this browser simply can’t do that yet, it’s still in diapers. So you can’t see how the download is progressing, you can’t cancel it, pause it, resume it, etc… While it was downloading, I typed “download chromium linux” into the address bar.
What a surprise it was for me when it started searching via duckduckgo.com .. nevertheless it found what I needed (I don’t know where it took its results from, probably from Google). Fortunately there was no 64bit version here, so I downloaded the right one, but I’ll get to that later, or rather now. A moment later a notification popped up that Chrome had been downloaded, and then Chromium too. I couldn’t install Chrome because I found out I have a 32-bit OS. OK, so I downloaded it once more for 32bit.
I managed to install both. Then, I no longer know why, the whole Linux froze! The keyboard worked only in gedit, the mouse only moved around, buttons didn’t work. I tried alt+f4, the window I wanted appeared but nothing could be selected.
I kept clicking reset there but nothing happened..and then after about 2 minutes the whole thing miraculously came back to life; the only thing it asked me was whether I wanted to save the unfinished document in gedit, so I said YES and then it mercilessly reset. After the next boot, however, the bottom DOCK disappeared, programs run in fullscreen apart from the top panel, and even google probably doesn’t know what to do about it :-(.