Top Ten Reasons Why Sunni Will Never Become a Linux Über-Geek

Since I need to upgrade my software in bits and pieces, and I have no idea how a lot of these packages interplay, I’ve had a few interesting situations develop. I seem to have borked my screensaver; and today’s adventure is in progress—the Synaptic package manager asked me a question, I responded, but now it doesn’t seem to be doing anything further and every time I navigate away from that window it complains that it wants my attention. I don’t see a way to get out of the situation. I also haven’t found a way to get a proprietary nVidia driver working. It’s installed, but when I try to enable it via the “system settings” interface I get a complaint. Maybe I should have just waited for the Heron OS.

That thread is an interesting cautionary tale; thanks for bringing it to my attention.

I hadn’t intended my list to be taken as a quiz, but your treating it as one is amusing. I bet if you were to take one of those “real” geekitude quizzes, you’d score higher, Presto. I didn’t even touch subjects like gaming, Star Trek, scifi, and dietary preferences!

I knew that you didn't mean your list as a quiz, but I thought that it would be fun to treat it as if it was. If you had asked me when I was 20, I would have scored much higher on the standard geek scale, since my fascination with all things computer has worn off somewhat over the years. On the other subjects you mentioned, just for fun, here goes:

1. Gaming: I prefer simple games. I prefer Solitare and Asteroids to the harder computer games, and I played the geek classic Dungeons and Dragons only once. It was much too complex for me. I like simple games because in my work and in my other pursuits I do such complex stuff that I need a simple game as a break.
2. Star Trek: I watched Trek a great deal as a kid, because it was better than most of the crap that was on TV. Give me anything better, and I will watch that instead. I do like Star Trek: New Voyages because it shows that high-quality TV can be made outside the studio system on a relatively limited budget.
3. Sci-fi: I like sci-fi, but not for the same reasons that most of the geeks that I know like it. The spaceships and tech don't fascinate me. I like sci-fi because if often asks questions about philosophy and ethics that your standard mystery or romance doesn't ask. I will read stories in any genre that asks these questions and shows how people confront these issues.
4. Diet: What is a geek diet? Do geeks prefer Asian food, like I do?

Not to disparage your mother, H.C., nor you—and I am happy that your experience was much better than mine—but I wonder how much of that success is due to a lucky alignment of hardware and software that played nicely with the Linux OS you chose. [Edited to add:] In re-reading your comment I see that your PC “came with its own flavor of Linux”. No wonder it worked so smoothly!

And I think I should point out for those nonplayers reading this that my problems aren’t entirely Linux’s fault. Some companies are much better at supporting Linux and the open source model than others. I’m not a codehead, so I know nothing about the details, but my understanding is that Microsoft can still be an impediment to developing open source solutions, too. I am willing to take the Linux headaches in order to avoid Microsoft as completely as possible.

Although you have to do a bit of digging on the Dell website, you can actually order a new Dell with Linux preinstalled on your pc/laptop (usually Ubuntu). The Ausus eeePC (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASUS_Eee_PC) is what I bought for the librarians at my university to take to meetings and conferencees.

I'm glad not to be blurry.

Hooray for Sunni! If you figure out how you did it, let me know! It'll be good for reference.

Now my ability to see flash files—well, the ones I want, like YouTube vids; the ads seem to work just fine, oddly enough—is borked.

Presto, I tried so many different things that I couldn’t begin to retrace my steps, let alone distinguish progress from superstitious behavior. What I did do just before getting it to work was this: I uninstalled Envy (which had many dependencies that weren’t automatically flagged), then entered “System Settings”, got admin privileges, and tried (for the hundredth time, it seemed like) to enable the nVidia driver. And that time it worked. It hadn’t worked before I attempted to install Envy, so why going through that sequence made any difference is beyond my comprehension. I don’t think I downloaded anything else that might have helped, but that’s possible.

About half the time I manage a fix, I have no idea what I actually did to make it work, and I do it for a living...

I just tell people that I have a rapport with the gremlins.