A Few Days With Ubuntu

So I have spent a few days now with Ubuntu Linux, and to be honest I have only used it for about 3-5 hours total - 95% of which has been spent trying to figure out two issues. First, my video card problems, and second - how to get the VPN client to connect to my corporate VPN. What a PITA! I tried everything I could think of for about an hour to no avail. It just would refuse to connect with no helpful error message at all - even with debug info turned on. Finally, after some more in-depth Googling I found that some other guy had a similar problem and he solved it by setting the MTU and MRU to 1500 (instead of the default 1416). I did the same, and all of a sudden it worked. Hrmph. The funny thing is, the debug information in the system logs looked like it was using an MRU of 1500 anyway - even when it was set to 1416.

I also wasted a bunch of time trying to play a simple .mp3 file using Totem. It simply would not work. It kept giving me an error about not being able to allocate a screen buffer - even after I turned off visualizations. However, after installing Elisa Media Center (which I always wanted to play with but it did not seem function at all on my machine either), all of a sudden .mp3 playback started working in Totem. Weird. So now I need to figure out why Elisa doesn't work. It runs, but slows down my computer big-time, and none of the keystrokes do anything. All I can do is kill it.

Enough bad stuff. The good stuff so far?

- Opera installed like a champ. I don't remember Linux ever installing something that easily.

- The mysterious lack of automatic update notifications. It's like when my 10 year old daughter goes for a sleep-over at a friend's house. It's so quiet! It's awesome! ;o)