dthable's Journal: Ubuntu Is Installed & My Thoughts

First, thanks to all who helped out with my grub problem. I finally let it loose on the MBR and everything still works. That solved a major problem because I could now boot into my new installation. After that, I had to solve a couple more problems:

• WiFi and WPA - Ubuntu correctly installed and loaded the ipw2200 driver for me, which was great. I had a lot of problems when I tried Fedora. Fedora just didn't like something with my hardware. Yet, I struggled to find information about getting it to work with WPA. I finally found that I should get network-manager and gnome-network-manager. After a quick reboot, I had this wonderful applet control that let me select all available networks and even remembered the passwords. Why that doesn't ship as part of the standard install is stupid.
• Bluetooth - I use a Logitech MX200 bluetooth mouse with Windows and it's a freaking nice mouse. Ubuntu installed the correct packages for bluetooth, but I couldn't figure out how to get the mouse to work. After hours of time with Google and the Ubuntu forums, I found that the answer is as simple as executing hidd --search. Duh.

Now for the complaining. If there are solutions, I would love to hear them. I'm not claiming to be anywhere near expert status.

• Bluetooth - Why do I need to run the command by hand? And even so, why do I need to turn on the mouse and then run the search? I would rather see a daemon that scans every so often or handles signals from devices when they start. Kind of like Windows.
• NTFS - I have a lot of data on NTFS drives and I need the information visible on both Linux and XP. I found very buggy methods (and none of them worked for me) for trying to mount a NTFS drive. For 100% compatibility, I need to go back to FAT32? It's not like Windows just broke onto the scene either.
• apt - I get strange messages about packages missing yet I find them in the stable package catalog. Why?

That's it for now. I haven't given up but those are the biggies on my list preventing me from going to Ubuntu for development.

My thoughts

[jawtheshark]

• Bluetooth: I have no bluetooth enabled system, but you are right... This ought to be in a deamon. Add it to your startup scripts (but don't ask me where that is on an Ubuntu system... I could say you where they are on OpenBSD though ;-) )
• NTFS: I once lost a partition because I mounted it writable. I haven't done that ever since and I just mount readonly. Works fine. Go the inverse way: add ext2 (ext3 is an extention of ext2) to Windows. First hit on google [fs-driver.org]. No I never used it, but I heard it's g

Re:

[dthable]

I did find the ext2 module for Windows and it worked out pretty good when I installed it. My only concern was that iTunes uses that partition for it's catalog and who knows what wacky IO operations Apple tried with the latest version. Maybe I'll just back everything up, bite the bullet and go for it.

Re:

[jawtheshark]

My experience with iTunes isn't that bad. It's been pretty consistent. iTunes 7 was bad, only had problems and I only have it on my work computer. No flaky I/O operations that I know of, though. All my home computers stayed on iTunes6, and I always disable "autoupdates" in any software I have installed.

If you've got the space (or an external USB disk), backup your MP3s and keep them in a safe place. Mine are on jawtheshark.com (but not downloadable without authentication, evidently) So if iTunes fuck