On 01/12/15 22:02, wrote:
Vir Campestris wrote:
On 01/12/2015 14:54, David Paste wrote:
There are a few silly things in Ubuntu that I found not
idiosyncratic but down-right annoying: the main one being that
clicking an application's button on the vertical sidebar didn't
minimise the open application. I sorted the fix out and on the way
found out that that was apparently a deliberate choice made by
some honcho in one of the companies. Silliness.

I use Ubuntu on my work machine. Corporate choice, not mine.

Some plonker in Ubuntu has decreed that the task bar will be on the left
hand side of the monitor. That's the long edge on mine, and it takes up
a stupid amount of space.

So one edge is longer than the other edge? Must be a strange monitor!


What? Not square...

On 01/12/15 21:33, Vir Campestris wrote:
On 01/12/2015 14:54, David Paste wrote:
There are a few silly things in Ubuntu that I found not
idiosyncratic but down-right annoying: the main one being that
clicking an application's button on the vertical sidebar didn't
minimise the open application. I sorted the fix out and on the way
found out that that was apparently a deliberate choice made by
some honcho in one of the companies. Silliness.

I use Ubuntu on my work machine. Corporate choice, not mine.

Some plonker in Ubuntu has decreed that the task bar will be on the left
hand side of the monitor. That's the long edge on mine, and it takes up
a stupid amount of space.

Andy

Can you not alter the desktop settings and drag it to where you want it?

On 02/12/2015 07:29, Tim Watts wrote:
On 01/12/15 22:02, wrote:
Vir Campestris wrote:
On 01/12/2015 14:54, David Paste wrote:
There are a few silly things in Ubuntu that I found not
idiosyncratic but down-right annoying: the main one being that
clicking an application's button on the vertical sidebar didn't
minimise the open application. I sorted the fix out and on the way
found out that that was apparently a deliberate choice made by
some honcho in one of the companies. Silliness.

I use Ubuntu on my work machine. Corporate choice, not mine.

Some plonker in Ubuntu has decreed that the task bar will be on the left
hand side of the monitor. That's the long edge on mine, and it takes up
a stupid amount of space.

So one edge is longer than the other edge? Must be a strange monitor!


What? Not square...


A trapezoidal monitor? ;-)

--
Bod

---
This email has been checked for viruses by Avast antivirus software.
https://www.avast.com/antivirus

On Wed, 02 Dec 2015 07:30:00 +0000, Tim Watts wrote:

Some plonker in Ubuntu has decreed that the task bar will be on the
left hand side of the monitor. That's the long edge on mine, and it
takes up a stupid amount of space.

Can you not alter the desktop settings and drag it to where you want it?

Yes, you can - albeit with the installation of a couple of additional
packages from the repo. A quick google finds all.

On Tuesday, 1 December 2015 21:33:52 UTC, Vir Campestris wrote:

Some plonker in Ubuntu has decreed that the task bar will be on the left
hand side of the monitor. That's the long edge on mine, and it takes up
a stupid amount of space.


Daft, isn't it? Luckily for me I quite like the vertical menu bar
on the left, but it should be moveable out of the box for others
that want something else.

On Sat, 28 Nov 2015 08:18:29 +0000, The Natural Philosopher wrote:

On 28/11/15 02:09, Johnny B Good wrote:
I'm rather disappointed to see that Ubuntu and its derivatives
resorting to the madness of a single huge partition for the /boot and
/home folders and using the creation of a swap file instead of a
dedicated swap partition space.

Well I dont remember deliberetaly creating it, but this linux mint
(Ubuntu derivative) has a swap partition.

That's interesting. I did admit to not being *entirely* sure whether or
not this would still be the case (automatic swap partition creation). I
must try a test install using the default partitioning option some time
just to see what happens. :-)

Ghod knows, I got enough practice manually partitioning the disk drive
on each "practice run". :-(

--
Johnny B Good

On 03/12/15 17:49, Johnny B Good wrote:
On Sat, 28 Nov 2015 08:18:29 +0000, The Natural Philosopher wrote:

On 28/11/15 02:09, Johnny B Good wrote:
I'm rather disappointed to see that Ubuntu and its derivatives
resorting to the madness of a single huge partition for the /boot and
/home folders and using the creation of a swap file instead of a
dedicated swap partition space.

Well I dont remember deliberetaly creating it, but this linux mint
(Ubuntu derivative) has a swap partition.

That's interesting. I did admit to not being *entirely* sure whether or
not this would still be the case (automatic swap partition creation). I
must try a test install using the default partitioning option some time
just to see what happens. :-)

Ghod knows, I got enough practice manually partitioning the disk drive
on each "practice run". :-(

Thinking about it, this is more a function of the installer, and Mint is
not the standard Ubuntu installer.



--
the biggest threat to humanity comes from socialism, which has utterly
diverted our attention away from what really matters to our existential
survival, to indulging in navel gazing and faux moral investigations
into what the world ought to be, whilst we fail utterly to deal with
what it actually is.

On Tue, 01 Dec 2015 22:34:17 +0000, polygonum wrote:

On 28/11/2015 02:09, Johnny B Good wrote:
What's worse are the invented pagefile options available of which the
worst one (adjust pagefile size automatically - on the fly, both
upwards and downwards), is the default setting on new installs -
including every major OEM setup I've ever seen.

The other options are "System Managed" (whatever the **** that means)
and setting a minimum and a maximum size limit (there may be another
one but I'm just remembering this off the top of my head). On an HDD
installation, this default is really bad news since the constant
resizing activity magnifies the effect of file fragmentation as well as
adding extra overhead to the paging algorithm.

The other day I was somewhat surprised to find a PC with about 40 GB of
page file. I doubt anyone would have anticipated that high a usage - so
in that particular case, allowing it to grow might have prevented the
system falling over. (Though whether that would have been just once, or
repeatedly, is difficult to guess.) However, given the scale of hard
disc drives, even allowing 100 GB dedicated wouldn't have much impact on
most modern machines not using SSDs. (Also questions your suggestion
that the default OEM install would end up adjusting the page file size
downwards. This was a default OEM install. Page file still vaster than
needed.)

For a desktop PC, it does seem to be an example of "overkill". I didn't
imply the 'downward adjustment', the min/max option suggested *that*. :-)


I have many times set up a partition exclusively for paging (in
Windows). From memory, if you have two page files, traffic goes to the
one with most space left. So a small C: drive page file just to get
going and a large paging partition ends up using the partition for most
swaps.

I've seen several claims that NT versions of windows will make
intelligent use of multiple pagefiles but have never seen a convincing
description of how it 'intelligently' decides which one is the best one
to hit at any one time.

What makes me question the 'intelligence' is the fact that you could
have a pagefile on each of a disk volume space created on a single
physical disk drive (primary partition spaces and logical disk volumes in
an extended partition) which, of course, doesn't address the head
contention issue that only a one (pagefile) per physical disk arrangement
can alleviate.

When I was running win2k, I created an 8GB primary partition on the
first 1TB HDD just for the OS, using the next 20GB for application
software installs and the rest for the "My Documents" folder (MSFT's
version of /home) and other large data storage, including a few GB sized
games software packages to save burning up space on the "D Drive"
designated for the secondary "Program Files" folder.

The second 1TB (upgraded to 2TB a year or so later) was partitioned as
an extended partition with a logical 8GB FAT32 (forced to 4KB allocation
units size) to hold a 4095MB fixed size pagefile at the beginning of the
partition space (highest performance portion of the disk space) and
another two logical disk volumes for yet more data storage and working
folders that were best kept on seperate physical disk drives for the sake
of best performance when working with video processing software.

If I'd thought that multiple pagefiles were processed as you've
described, I'd have created a modest 512MB swap on drive C (I always turn
system dumps off completely anyway) since it could have simplified things
somewhat when doing more radical disk volume restoration tasks. If I ever
dabble again with a win2k/XP install on real hardware, I'll keep that in
mind.

--
Johnny B Good

On Tue, 01 Dec 2015 06:54:42 -0800, David Paste wrote:

On Friday, November 27, 2015 at 8:59:54 AM UTC, Tim W wrote:

I also am testing linux for about the 10th time and I think I am going
to stick with it this time and finally rid myself of Windows. Ubuntu
has got a lot better with each release, while windows is slightly
worse.

When I read up about Ubuntu on the various websites and forums, the
biggest gripe I hear is about the use of Unity as a desktop. I like it
though! I have a friend who chooses Mint Linux because he wants his
desktop to look like Win 2000.

A laudable desire imo but I can't imagine he'd have been too impressed
with the reality.

Each to their own. I can't help but think
that the lack of a consistent desktop has managed to put many people off
Linux in the past. Majority of people won't care, I'd bet, but those
that do can modify their own to their heart's content.


I chose Linux Mint KDE because I read that it approximated the win2k
desktop (or could be configured to do so). I'm afraid to say it has
absolutely no resemblance to the classic win2k desktop nor its 'feel' and
I haven't been able to track down a 'Howto' in regard of achieving this
happy state of affairs. :-(

The best I can say is that it's "usable" if you're prepared to put up
with the rather clumsy UI that seems to owe more to Vista / win7 UIs than
it does to the much cleaner and efficient classic desktops of win95 and
win2k.

Despite the many (inexcusable imo) shortcomings with most *nix distro
DEs, I put up with them since the MSFT alternative is totally
unthinkable. I think Charleton Heston's character expresses almost the
same sentiment in the final beach scene of "Planet of The Apes" as mine
when I look at all the nonsense going on with windows 10 today (and the
backporting of the same rubbish into win7).

I often used to see this quotation used in at least one regular usenet
poster's sig file:

"One OS to rule them all, One OS to find them, One OS to bring them all,
and in the darkness bind them"[1]

This hearkened back to winXP which seemed to be a spot on observation[2]
of MSFT's strategy for World Domination. Today, with the advent of
Vista / win7 / win8 / win8.1 and finally, win 10, such a comparison seems
barely adequate to describe the truth of the matter.

[1] Based on the "Ring Verse" from "The Lord of The Rings" which, in its
original form, goes like this:

"One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them, One Ring to bring
them all, and in the darkness bind them"

[2] XP was, and still is imho, a Festering Pile of ****e. Win2k was the
last of the user orientated OSes. WinXP was merely the first tentative
step into the rapid descent into Consumerisation Hell we now call windows
10.

--
Johnny B Good

On 03/12/2015 18:21, Johnny B Good wrote:
On Tue, 01 Dec 2015 22:34:17 +0000, polygonum wrote:

On 28/11/2015 02:09, Johnny B Good wrote:
What's worse are the invented pagefile options available of which the
worst one (adjust pagefile size automatically - on the fly, both
upwards and downwards), is the default setting on new installs -
including every major OEM setup I've ever seen.

The other options are "System Managed" (whatever the **** that means)
and setting a minimum and a maximum size limit (there may be another
one but I'm just remembering this off the top of my head). On an HDD
installation, this default is really bad news since the constant
resizing activity magnifies the effect of file fragmentation as well as
adding extra overhead to the paging algorithm.

The other day I was somewhat surprised to find a PC with about 40 GB of
page file. I doubt anyone would have anticipated that high a usage - so
in that particular case, allowing it to grow might have prevented the
system falling over. (Though whether that would have been just once, or
repeatedly, is difficult to guess.) However, given the scale of hard
disc drives, even allowing 100 GB dedicated wouldn't have much impact on
most modern machines not using SSDs. (Also questions your suggestion
that the default OEM install would end up adjusting the page file size
downwards. This was a default OEM install. Page file still vaster than
needed.)

For a desktop PC, it does seem to be an example of "overkill". I didn't
imply the 'downward adjustment', the min/max option suggested *that*. :-)


I have many times set up a partition exclusively for paging (in
Windows). From memory, if you have two page files, traffic goes to the
one with most space left. So a small C: drive page file just to get
going and a large paging partition ends up using the partition for most
swaps.

I've seen several claims that NT versions of windows will make
intelligent use of multiple pagefiles but have never seen a convincing
description of how it 'intelligently' decides which one is the best one
to hit at any one time.

What makes me question the 'intelligence' is the fact that you could
have a pagefile on each of a disk volume space created on a single
physical disk drive (primary partition spaces and logical disk volumes in
an extended partition) which, of course, doesn't address the head
contention issue that only a one (pagefile) per physical disk arrangement
can alleviate.

When I was running win2k, I created an 8GB primary partition on the
first 1TB HDD just for the OS, using the next 20GB for application
software installs and the rest for the "My Documents" folder (MSFT's
version of /home) and other large data storage, including a few GB sized
games software packages to save burning up space on the "D Drive"
designated for the secondary "Program Files" folder.

The second 1TB (upgraded to 2TB a year or so later) was partitioned as
an extended partition with a logical 8GB FAT32 (forced to 4KB allocation
units size) to hold a 4095MB fixed size pagefile at the beginning of the
partition space (highest performance portion of the disk space) and
another two logical disk volumes for yet more data storage and working
folders that were best kept on seperate physical disk drives for the sake
of best performance when working with video processing software.

If I'd thought that multiple pagefiles were processed as you've
described, I'd have created a modest 512MB swap on drive C (I always turn
system dumps off completely anyway) since it could have simplified things
somewhat when doing more radical disk volume restoration tasks. If I ever
dabble again with a win2k/XP install on real hardware, I'll keep that in
mind.


To be as clear as I can, I am pretty darned sure that Windows (at least
of that generation) takes no notice of where on the disc, speed of the
device/controller, etc. Just space. And, on the basis that it finds a
page file on C:, it uses that until it finds the big page file on (say)
D:. After that, NEW use of page file will go to D: until the "free
space" drops to the the same or below that of C: - but the rate of
access thereafter may not be easily predictable.

--
Rod

On 01/12/2015 22:02, wrote:
Vir Campestris wrote:
On 01/12/2015 14:54, David Paste wrote:
There are a few silly things in Ubuntu that I found not
idiosyncratic but down-right annoying: the main one being that
clicking an application's button on the vertical sidebar didn't
minimise the open application. I sorted the fix out and on the way
found out that that was apparently a deliberate choice made by
some honcho in one of the companies. Silliness.

I use Ubuntu on my work machine. Corporate choice, not mine.

Some plonker in Ubuntu has decreed that the task bar will be on the left
hand side of the monitor. That's the long edge on mine, and it takes up
a stupid amount of space.

So one edge is longer than the other edge? Must be a strange monitor!

You have a square monitor?

The bottom edge is 1080 pixels. The side edge is 1600. It's mounted
portrait fashion - a better match for a standard piece of paper.

Andy

On 02/12/2015 07:30, Tim Watts wrote:

Can you not alter the desktop settings and drag it to where you want it?

Nope.

https://bugs.launchpad.net/unity/+bug/668415

Andy

On 03/12/2015 21:20, Vir Campestris wrote:
On 01/12/2015 22:02, wrote:
Vir Campestris wrote:
On 01/12/2015 14:54, David Paste wrote:
There are a few silly things in Ubuntu that I found not
idiosyncratic but down-right annoying: the main one being that
clicking an application's button on the vertical sidebar didn't
minimise the open application. I sorted the fix out and on the way
found out that that was apparently a deliberate choice made by
some honcho in one of the companies. Silliness.

I use Ubuntu on my work machine. Corporate choice, not mine.

Some plonker in Ubuntu has decreed that the task bar will be on the left
hand side of the monitor. That's the long edge on mine, and it takes up
a stupid amount of space.

So one edge is longer than the other edge? Must be a strange monitor!

You have a square monitor?

The bottom edge is 1080 pixels. The side edge is 1600. It's mounted
portrait fashion - a better match for a standard piece of paper.

Andy

Your wording made it read as if the LH edge has a different size to the
RH edge - not that RH/LH are different to Top/Bottom.

--
Rod

On 03/12/15 21:23, Vir Campestris wrote:
On 02/12/2015 07:30, Tim Watts wrote:

Can you not alter the desktop settings and drag it to where you want it?

Nope.

https://bugs.launchpad.net/unity/+bug/668415

Andy

This is what annoys me with opensource desktops - these are basic solved
problems.

And every time a new desktop comes out, it is missing half the core
basic configurations.

On 01/12/15 14:54, David Paste wrote:
On Friday, November 27, 2015 at 8:59:54 AM UTC, Tim W wrote:

I also am testing linux for about the 10th time and I think I am going
to stick with it this time and finally rid myself of Windows. Ubuntu has
got a lot better with each release, while windows is slightly worse.

When I read up about Ubuntu on the various websites and forums,
the biggest gripe I hear is about the use of Unity as a desktop. I
like it though! I have a friend who chooses Mint Linux because he
wants his desktop to look like Win 2000. Each to their own. I can't
help but think that the lack of a consistent desktop has managed
to put many people off Linux in the past. Majority of people won't
care, I'd bet, but those that do can modify their own to their
heart's content.

There are a few silly things in Ubuntu that I found not
idiosyncratic but down-right annoying: the main one being that
clicking an application's button on the vertical sidebar didn't
minimise the open application. I sorted the fix out and on the way
found out that that was apparently a deliberate choice made by
some honcho in one of the companies. Silliness.

I am still trying to sort out the scuppering of the WiFi when the
laptop comes out of hibernation or suspend or whatever it's
called, but it's not so important at the moment.

I also copied a load of fonts over from the Windows computer
which helps with many little display quirks, one for instance, the
display of text on TNP's Gridwatch website. It now displays
perfectly in FireFox on Ubuntu using the Windows-pilfered fonts. It
doesn't display correctly on FF under Win 8.1 using the same
fonts, by the way!

The most important thing I did to make the desktop more
comfortable was to change the desktop background to my favourite
picture of the night sky! ha, simple things, eh?


I am using an acer chromebook off ebay with chrome os replaced by a full
install of Ubuntu.

Was that a difficult thing to do? Did you have to fettle any of
the innards - I have some vague notion that newer computers have
a special BIOS that can really bugger up swapping OSes.


An excellent slim, light, portable notebook for a very low price thanks
to a bit of diy.

What is the screen like? There was a Chromebook which was renowned
for it's high quality screen.

Cheers!

The chromebook (an Acer c720) - not entirely straightforward to replace
the OS but there are good instructions online, and isos prepared
specifically for the task. It isn't a uefi problem but it's a bios
written only for booting chromeOS and requires a work-around.

Since ChromeOS is linux based all the hardware works. There is no need
to open the back unless you want to put a larger ssd in. totally optional.

The screen seems good as long as it is facing you directly, not at an angle.

My previous expeditions into linux use foundered on the lack of linux
software, not on the os or desktop. I don't work with CAD files any more
or sketchup and never cared for MSOffice, plus opensource software gets
better and better so I may be happy. Then again who knows when I find I
have to do something just a bit clever like extract vector graphics from
a pdf or something I might be trying to get wine working.

Good luck!

Tim W

On Thu, 03 Dec 2015 21:09:59 +0000, polygonum wrote:

On 03/12/2015 18:21, Johnny B Good wrote:

====snip====


If I'd thought that multiple pagefiles were processed as you've
described, I'd have created a modest 512MB swap on drive C (I always
turn system dumps off completely anyway) since it could have simplified
things somewhat when doing more radical disk volume restoration tasks.
If I ever dabble again with a win2k/XP install on real hardware, I'll
keep that in mind.


To be as clear as I can, I am pretty darned sure that Windows (at least
of that generation) takes no notice of where on the disc, speed of the
device/controller, etc. Just space. And, on the basis that it finds a
page file on C:, it uses that until it finds the big page file on (say)
D:. After that, NEW use of page file will go to D: until the "free
space" drops to the the same or below that of C: - but the rate of
access thereafter may not be easily predictable.

Ok Rod, my bad for reading more into your description than was there.
Thanks for clarifying that. I rather thought it was more a case of
aggregating multiple pagefiles to increase the size of the virtual memory
pool (especially useful if you're using FAT32 disk volumes with a 4096MB
minus one byte limit for whatever reason - my choice of FAT32 in this
case being the slightly lower cpu overhead compared to NTFS and 4095MB
being more than ample for my 3GB of installed RAM).

I figured that I'd be better off using a single pagefile located on the
outer tracks of the 2nd HDD to minimise contention with the 1st HDD where
the OS and the majority of my apps resided.

I know it's bad news, performancewise, when *any* OS is forced to hit
the pagefile to run resource hungry apps but it's better than suffering,
at its best, "insufficient resources" pop up messages from an app that
needs more space than the ram alone can provide, or worse still, an
inexplicable lockup if not an outright crash[1].

The pagefile provides a form of safety net as well as a means for the OS
to deal with any outrageous pre-emptive memory allocation demands by
badly written apps. Whilst on the face of it, it would seem better to
install more ram to save creating a pagefile, this isn't necessarily as
good an idea as it seems. The pagefile can help improve performance by
shoving low priority demands into the pagefile, freeing up ram for more
productive purposes. The benefit of optimising the pagefile for best
paging performance is to reduce the impact of pagefile thrashing from
extremely glacial to merely glacial. :-)

[1] NT versions of windows handle 'dynamic' pagefile operations much more
gracefully than the DOS based windows OSes ever did. A classic symptom of
dynamic pagefile and low disk space in win98 setups was a crashed and
corrupted system that often needed a repair install after running scandisk
to fix the FS errors.

This was the main reason why I'd reconfigure the pagefile to a fixed
size to prevent the rug from being pulled out from under an app that
thought it could rely on the free disk space figure remaining true
between checking and committing its trust that by the time it had
something to send to the disk, the free space would still be available.

It seemed a case of "The left hand not knowing what the right hand was
up to." Setting the pagefile (swapfile in this case) to a fixed size
eliminated such fatal crashes once the consumer had managed to let his
disk get clogged up yet again with years old temporary files on a disk
large enough to support a File System that could land up storing all
those sub 1KB sized files in 32KB chunks of disk space as a result of the
classic "All your eggs in one giant basket" single huge partition space
so favoured by OEMs from the days of FAT16 through FAT32 and well into
the NTFS era with HDD capacities exceeding 500GB.

I don't have a very high regard for the competence of OEMs in creating a
reasonably optimised pre-installed windows OS. The classic example of
such cunning stuntery being exemplified by Toshiba some 16 or 17 years
ago when my brother brought his recently purchased laptop to show off to
me.

It had come with windows 98 installed on its 2GB HDD which had been
formatted using FAT16 (2047MB drive C using 32KB clusters) rather than
the, by then, standard FAT32 FS. The 16MB drive D that I'd initially
assumed to be a RAMDisk turned out to be the leftover disk space!

I could hardly believe my eyes when I realised what the cunning stunts
at Toshiba had done. If they'd split the disk 49/49 and ignored the left
over 16 or 17MB using FAT16, their customer (my brother) would likely
have been better off by an effective 300MB or more of usable disk space
(C and D disk volumes both set to 1023MB). However, since it was a win98
pre-installed OS, the use of FAT16 over the supported FAT32 FS was
totally inexcusable (and, quite frankly, totally inexplicable[2]).

With the laptop being a brand new machine, I merely voiced my 'concerns'
since I didn't want to 'dick around' with a machine still under the OEM's
warranty (and I think my brother had a similar 'warranty concern'). I
don't recall 'converting the FS' and I can't recall whether my brother
pursued this option on his own either, even though win98 included a fat16
to fat32 converter utility which would have facilitated this action.

[2] Possibly Toshiba had an excess of 2GB laptop drive inventory left
over from earlier stock intended for win95 specced models, predating the
OSR2 release, which had been pre-formatted using FAT16 to cater for
win95's lack of FAT32 support at that stage. Just a wild guess, otherwise
I can't make any sense of Toshiba's choice of FS in this instance.

--
Johnny B Good

On 03/12/15 22:17, Tim Watts wrote:
On 03/12/15 21:23, Vir Campestris wrote:
On 02/12/2015 07:30, Tim Watts wrote:

Can you not alter the desktop settings and drag it to where you want it?

Nope.

https://bugs.launchpad.net/unity/+bug/668415

Andy

This is what annoys me with opensource desktops - these are basic solved
problems.


They are on Mate or cinnamon, yes. So don't use UNITY that's all.


And every time a new desktop comes out, it is missing half the core
basic configurations.

so stick to an older one.


--
the biggest threat to humanity comes from socialism, which has utterly
diverted our attention away from what really matters to our existential
survival, to indulging in navel gazing and faux moral investigations
into what the world ought to be, whilst we fail utterly to deal with
what it actually is.

On Thu, 03 Dec 2015 21:34:37 +0000, polygonum wrote:

On 03/12/2015 21:20, Vir Campestris wrote:
On 01/12/2015 22:02, wrote:
Vir Campestris wrote:
On 01/12/2015 14:54, David Paste wrote:
There are a few silly things in Ubuntu that I found not
idiosyncratic but down-right annoying: the main one being that
clicking an application's button on the vertical sidebar didn't
minimise the open application. I sorted the fix out and on the way
found out that that was apparently a deliberate choice made by some
honcho in one of the companies. Silliness.

I use Ubuntu on my work machine. Corporate choice, not mine.

Some plonker in Ubuntu has decreed that the task bar will be on the
left hand side of the monitor. That's the long edge on mine, and it
takes up a stupid amount of space.

So one edge is longer than the other edge? Must be a strange monitor!

You have a square monitor?

The bottom edge is 1080 pixels. The side edge is 1600. It's mounted
portrait fashion - a better match for a standard piece of paper.

Andy

Your wording made it read as if the LH edge has a different size to the
RH edge - not that RH/LH are different to Top/Bottom.

I don't believe anyone, including yourself, thought for one instant that
he was referring to anything other than a widescreen monitor rotated into
a portrait orientation. Chris just attempting to inject a bit of levity
into this thread. :-)

In all of the history of electronic display devices, including the round
faced CRT tubes[1] masked off to an initial experimental 5:4 aspect ratio
(only to be resurrected some 7 decades later with LCD screens) then a 4:3
aspect ratio which became the de-facto standard in the earliest of 405
line "High Definition" TV sets surviving the transition to 625 line "Even
Higher Definition" TV sets through into the late 80s / early 90s before
the advent of digital terrestrial broadcast services arrived in the late
90s to usurp the 70 year old 4:3 de-facto aspect ratio, shared by both TV
sets and computer monitors alike, with a plethora of 'widescreen'
formats, there have never been any display devices using other than a
rectangular display area.

Having laid out those historic reasons as to why *nobody* would have any
reason whatsoever to think that Andy's description of long and short
sides of a display device could be interpreted any other way than he had
intended, he didn't need to elaborate any further since his own and
everyone elses collective experience that computer displays are only
ever rectangular implied the *one and only* reason for the left hand side
being used for the task bar proving to be a waste of usable area was that
the display had been rotated into portrait mode.

HTH & HAND :-)

[1] The original round faced CRTs were specified by the diameter of the
tube face. Naturally, when masked off to create a rectangular 4:3 aspect
ratio display area, the diameter became the diagonal measurement which,
for a standard aspect ratio picture tube, conveniently became the single
metric required to reliably describe the size of any TV set's picture
tube.

It's only with the advent of widescreen aspect ratios (and there are a
few different ones still around) that the utility of such a single
'diagonal metric' has become compromised as a reliable 'figure of merit'.

--
Johnny B Good

On Friday, 4 December 2015 01:21:12 UTC, Johnny B Good wrote:

In all of the history of electronic display devices, including the round
faced CRT tubes[1] masked off to an initial experimental 5:4 aspect ratio
(only to be resurrected some 7 decades later with LCD screens) then a 4:3
aspect ratio which became the de-facto standard in the earliest of 405
line "High Definition" TV sets surviving the transition to 625 line "Even
Higher Definition" TV sets through into the late 80s / early 90s before
the advent of digital terrestrial broadcast services arrived in the late
90s to usurp the 70 year old 4:3 de-facto aspect ratio, shared by both TV
sets and computer monitors alike, with a plethora of 'widescreen'
formats, there have never been any display devices using other than a
rectangular display area.

I might be wrong but thought there were round CRT displays on some very much pre-PC computers.


[1] The original round faced CRTs were specified by the diameter of the
tube face. Naturally, when masked off to create a rectangular 4:3 aspect
ratio display area, the diameter became the diagonal measurement which,
for a standard aspect ratio picture tube, conveniently became the single
metric required to reliably describe the size of any TV set's picture
tube.

It's only with the advent of widescreen aspect ratios (and there are a
few different ones still around) that the utility of such a single
'diagonal metric' has become compromised as a reliable 'figure of merit'.

it was compromised when thick faced CRTs came in, removing the need for a separate glass shield - the efficacy of which I doubt. Suddenly you got 1.5-2" less picture per given screen inches. It then changed again with LCDs, which give more picture per inch than thick faced CRTs.


NT

On 04/12/2015 02:24, wrote:
I might be wrong but thought there were round CRT displays on some very much pre-PC computers.

I am pretty darned sure that some early radar displays were round. Given
the basic fact that the range of the radar system itself was often
simple distance from a point, a disc shape display made sense.

--
Rod

On 03/12/2015 21:34, polygonum wrote:
On 03/12/2015 21:20, Vir Campestris wrote:
On 01/12/2015 22:02, wrote:
Vir Campestris wrote:
On 01/12/2015 14:54, David Paste wrote:
There are a few silly things in Ubuntu that I found not
idiosyncratic but down-right annoying: the main one being that
clicking an application's button on the vertical sidebar didn't
minimise the open application. I sorted the fix out and on the way
found out that that was apparently a deliberate choice made by
some honcho in one of the companies. Silliness.

I use Ubuntu on my work machine. Corporate choice, not mine.

Some plonker in Ubuntu has decreed that the task bar will be on the
left
hand side of the monitor. That's the long edge on mine, and it takes up
a stupid amount of space.

So one edge is longer than the other edge? Must be a strange monitor!

You have a square monitor?

The bottom edge is 1080 pixels. The side edge is 1600. It's mounted
portrait fashion - a better match for a standard piece of paper.

Andy

Your wording made it read as if the LH edge has a different size to the
RH edge - not that RH/LH are different to Top/Bottom.

That would be a trapezoidal shaped monitor ;-)

--
Bod

---
This email has been checked for viruses by Avast antivirus software.
https://www.avast.com/antivirus

wrote
Johnny B Good wrote

In all of the history of electronic display devices, including the round
faced CRT tubes[1] masked off to an initial experimental 5:4 aspect ratio
(only to be resurrected some 7 decades later with LCD screens) then a 4:3
aspect ratio which became the de-facto standard in the earliest of 405
line "High Definition" TV sets surviving the transition to 625 line "Even
Higher Definition" TV sets through into the late 80s / early 90s before
the advent of digital terrestrial broadcast services arrived in the late
90s to usurp the 70 year old 4:3 de-facto aspect ratio, shared by both
TV sets and computer monitors alike, with a plethora of 'widescreen'
formats, there have never been any display devices using other than a
rectangular display area.

I might be wrong but thought there were round
CRT displays on some very much pre-PC computers.

Yes, but not CRTs the the normal sense.

[1] The original round faced CRTs were specified by the diameter of the
tube face. Naturally, when masked off to create a rectangular 4:3 aspect
ratio display area, the diameter became the diagonal measurement which,
for a standard aspect ratio picture tube, conveniently became the single
metric required to reliably describe the size of any TV set's picture
tube.

It's only with the advent of widescreen aspect ratios (and there
are a few different ones still around) that the utility of such a single
'diagonal metric' has become compromised as a reliable 'figure of merit'.

it was compromised when thick faced CRTs came in, removing the
need for a separate glass shield - the efficacy of which I doubt.
Suddenly you got 1.5-2" less picture per given screen inches.
It then changed again with LCDs, which give more picture
per inch than thick faced CRTs.

On Thu, 03 Dec 2015 18:24:37 -0800, tabbypurr wrote:

On Friday, 4 December 2015 01:21:12 UTC, Johnny B Good wrote:

In all of the history of electronic display devices, including the
round
faced CRT tubes[1] masked off to an initial experimental 5:4 aspect
ratio (only to be resurrected some 7 decades later with LCD screens)
then a 4:3 aspect ratio which became the de-facto standard in the
earliest of 405 line "High Definition" TV sets surviving the transition
to 625 line "Even Higher Definition" TV sets through into the late 80s
/ early 90s before the advent of digital terrestrial broadcast services
arrived in the late 90s to usurp the 70 year old 4:3 de-facto aspect
ratio, shared by both TV sets and computer monitors alike, with a
plethora of 'widescreen' formats, there have never been any display
devices using other than a rectangular display area.

I might be wrong but thought there were round CRT displays on some very
much pre-PC computers.

That was true enough of the earlier mainframes where having such a
display was a novelty feature rather than a Glass Teletype terminal. Some
of them might well have used a vector graphics display with a very long
persistence phosphor tube allowing the full freedom of the whole display
area whilst others, using a raster scan display, would limit themselves
to the classic rectangular area bounded by the circular tube face, with
or without a matching rectangular mask.



[1] The original round faced CRTs were specified by the diameter of the
tube face. Naturally, when masked off to create a rectangular 4:3
aspect ratio display area, the diameter became the diagonal measurement
which, for a standard aspect ratio picture tube, conveniently became
the single metric required to reliably describe the size of any TV
set's picture tube.

It's only with the advent of widescreen aspect ratios (and there are a
few different ones still around) that the utility of such a single
'diagonal metric' has become compromised as a reliable 'figure of
merit'.

it was compromised when thick faced CRTs came in, removing the need for
a separate glass shield - the efficacy of which I doubt. Suddenly you
got 1.5-2" less picture per given screen inches. It then changed again
with LCDs, which give more picture per inch than thick faced CRTs.


Details, dear boy, details! :-)


--
Johnny B Good

On Fri, 04 Dec 2015 07:30:02 +0000, polygonum wrote:

On 04/12/2015 02:24, wrote:
I might be wrong but thought there were round CRT displays on some very
much pre-PC computers.

I am pretty darned sure that some early radar displays were round. Given
the basic fact that the range of the radar system itself was often
simple distance from a point, a disc shape display made sense.

It made *more* sense when they started to use these repurposed
oscilloscope tubes to display PPI radar plots rather than show just the
distance as blips along a horizontal oscilloscope trace.

--
Johnny B Good

On 04/12/2015 07:50, Bod wrote:
On 03/12/2015 21:34, polygonum wrote:
On 03/12/2015 21:20, Vir Campestris wrote:
On 01/12/2015 22:02, wrote:
Vir Campestris wrote:
On 01/12/2015 14:54, David Paste wrote:
There are a few silly things in Ubuntu that I found not
idiosyncratic but down-right annoying: the main one being that
clicking an application's button on the vertical sidebar didn't
minimise the open application. I sorted the fix out and on the way
found out that that was apparently a deliberate choice made by
some honcho in one of the companies. Silliness.

I use Ubuntu on my work machine. Corporate choice, not mine.

Some plonker in Ubuntu has decreed that the task bar will be on the
left
hand side of the monitor. That's the long edge on mine, and it
takes up
a stupid amount of space.

So one edge is longer than the other edge? Must be a strange monitor!

You have a square monitor?

The bottom edge is 1080 pixels. The side edge is 1600. It's mounted
portrait fashion - a better match for a standard piece of paper.

Andy

Your wording made it read as if the LH edge has a different size to the
RH edge - not that RH/LH are different to Top/Bottom.

That would be a trapezoidal shaped monitor ;-)

It would - and that was the gentle amusement of interpretation.

--
Rod

On Thursday, 3 December 2015 20:08:09 UTC, Johnny B Good wrote:

A laudable desire imo but I can't imagine he'd have been too impressed
with the reality.

He still has it. Uses the linux laptop for general
use, has a Windows 7 laptop for video games.


"One OS to rule them all, One OS to find them, One OS to bring them all,
and in the darkness bind them"

I am not a professional computerist, just a lowly end user
for 'the usual' nonsense. I have said for a long time - and
still am of the opinion - that all OSes are equally as
awkward to use. They try; they get close; they fail.

Such is life! ;-)

On Thursday, 3 December 2015 23:14:49 UTC, Tim W wrote:
On 01/12/15 14:54, David Paste wrote:
On Friday, November 27, 2015 at 8:59:54 AM UTC, Tim W wrote:

I also am testing linux for about the 10th time and I think I am going
to stick with it this time and finally rid myself of Windows. Ubuntu has
got a lot better with each release, while windows is slightly worse.

When I read up about Ubuntu on the various websites and forums,
the biggest gripe I hear is about the use of Unity as a desktop. I
like it though! I have a friend who chooses Mint Linux because he
wants his desktop to look like Win 2000. Each to their own. I can't
help but think that the lack of a consistent desktop has managed
to put many people off Linux in the past. Majority of people won't
care, I'd bet, but those that do can modify their own to their
heart's content.

There are a few silly things in Ubuntu that I found not
idiosyncratic but down-right annoying: the main one being that
clicking an application's button on the vertical sidebar didn't
minimise the open application. I sorted the fix out and on the way
found out that that was apparently a deliberate choice made by
some honcho in one of the companies. Silliness.

I am still trying to sort out the scuppering of the WiFi when the
laptop comes out of hibernation or suspend or whatever it's
called, but it's not so important at the moment.

I also copied a load of fonts over from the Windows computer
which helps with many little display quirks, one for instance, the
display of text on TNP's Gridwatch website. It now displays
perfectly in FireFox on Ubuntu using the Windows-pilfered fonts. It
doesn't display correctly on FF under Win 8.1 using the same
fonts, by the way!

The most important thing I did to make the desktop more
comfortable was to change the desktop background to my favourite
picture of the night sky! ha, simple things, eh?


I am using an acer chromebook off ebay with chrome os replaced by a full
install of Ubuntu.

Was that a difficult thing to do? Did you have to fettle any of
the innards - I have some vague notion that newer computers have
a special BIOS that can really bugger up swapping OSes.


An excellent slim, light, portable notebook for a very low price thanks
to a bit of diy.

What is the screen like? There was a Chromebook which was renowned
for it's high quality screen.

Cheers!

The chromebook (an Acer c720) - not entirely straightforward to replace
the OS but there are good instructions online, and isos prepared
specifically for the task. It isn't a uefi problem but it's a bios
written only for booting chromeOS and requires a work-around.

Since ChromeOS is linux based all the hardware works. There is no need
to open the back unless you want to put a larger ssd in. totally optional.

The screen seems good as long as it is facing you directly, not at an angle.

My previous expeditions into linux use foundered on the lack of linux
software, not on the os or desktop. I don't work with CAD files any more
or sketchup and never cared for MSOffice, plus opensource software gets
better and better so I may be happy. Then again who knows when I find I
have to do something just a bit clever like extract vector graphics from
a pdf or something I might be trying to get wine working.

Good luck!

Tim W

Cheers Tim!

My main reservations now are a lack of a program equivalent
to EAC for ripping CDs. I know there are native alternatives,
but they either have crap UIs or flat-out don't have the
same capabilities that EAC have.

I could run it through WINE, apparently. I'll have a look
at that.