Ubuntu just said it wanted to update...

[ffutures]

...for the fourth time in three days.

The previous times I said no, I was busy doing other things. This time, like an idiot I said yes. The result was catastrophic - previously I was told the "unity" desktop wouldn't work, this time it installed it but it wouldn't work properly on the netbook's small screen; I couldn't seem to get rid of the top bar, and the side menu thing is grotesque. Every program started off small and narrower than it should be.

So I tried to get rid of unity, and suddelly nothing worked - I was in terminal mode and couldn't get out of it. I've just wasted two hours trying to sort this mess, with total lack of success.

So I'm reinstalling 11.04 again, and will resist any attempt to update. And the last week or so of tweaking and installing software is completely wasted.

Meanwhile, I'm open to suggestions on alternatives to Ubuntu that work well on netbook-sized screens and do not do this sort of thing...

Comments

[vicarage.livejournal.com]

Linux Mint. They take Ubuntu, remove the Unity crap and add the multimedia stuff everyone wants. They release 1 month after Ubuntu.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

OK, if I need to reinstall I'll give it a try. For the moment I'm OK, since I've now done it a couple of times I know what works.

BTW, can you recommend a big screen clock for Ubuntu? I wanted to try The Big Green Clock but the Ubuntu installer says it's defective.

[pengshui-master.livejournal.com]

The obvious answer is the scalable xclock. But it a little simple and doesn't exactly look pretty. It's a does the job applet.

If your looking for something more fancy just search for clock in aptitude (or syntapic) there are a whole pile of different clock packages in debian (so I'm sure ubuntu has many of them)

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Surpringly, nothing I like the look of. Xclock seems to be part of the standard Ubuntu install, but now I've looked at it I can't say I'm terribly impressed.

I really just need something to show the time (preferably as a digital count down) in fairly large digits if I'm giving a talk or something, stop me running over time.