First of all, the ATI radeon open source driver and 3D effects problems. Okay, maybe there is progress on this going by some recent posts but I still can’t enable OpenGL.
Second, so many applications just don’t start. The icon bounces around but the program doesn’t initiate. Nothing happens.
I use the Live media to give me an idea of how the distro might be. It’s like a preview. I believe this is suggested my Linux users so I hope it’s a reasonable assessment.
Programs/utilities/applications that don’t start after you click them: Yast, KPackageKit, SaX2.
This is my experience on my ThinkpadT41 laptop. I know it’s not hte speed because I am able to install software and start applications on Live media of Ubuntu 9.10, Mandriva 2010 and Fedora 12.
Anyway, sorry my experience is negative but that is my personal experience. I have tried several times and the combined problems are a deal breaker. Maybe later, I’ll try again and see if anything is changed.
On Sat, 19 Dec 2009 04:06:01 +0000, kpenguin wrote:
> I think I’m giving up.
You could try asking some questions with relation to your problems - I
see you started a thread on the video issues you had (probably related to
the fact that you’re using the OSS driver and not the proprietary driver
that has 3D support in it, at a guess).
The live media is generally best used to get a feel for the desktop
environments and to check basic hardware compatibility. It doesn’t
include closed-source components (like the fglrx drivers or the binary-
only NVidia drivers).
Yast, KPackageKit, and SaX2 are all system configuration utilities - not
“applications” in the traditional sense of the word. They’re used for
configuring the system; the nature of a live media distribution is that
you don’t have to configure it - you just start it and use it.
If you want to play around with system configuration, I’d encourage you
to install it on a system, either a physical system or a virtual machine
(something like VirtualBox or VMware).
I searched on your handle “kpenguin” and found posts related to the radeon driver, but not ONE about applications not working. Typically users typically post first asking for help, as opposed posting that they are “giving up”. This order of posts in looking for application help is a bit, … backward.
These “just work”. It reads to me that your CD is likely bad. Things that can cause a bad CD are a bad download (and not doing the md5sum comparison after downloading), burning to a CD-RW (better to burn to a non-read-write CD), burning to a bargain basement brand CD, and not burning at the slowest speed your burner will allow. Also burning on new-PC-a, but using the CD on old-PC-b can cause problems as the calibrations between the CD burner and the CD reader can be drastically different.
In many cases one need the proprietary graphic driver for this to work. For a live CD, this can be difficult to get the proprietary graphic driver working, unless one’s laptop has a lot of RAM. Did you try getting the proprietary ATI driver to work ?
IMO the main reason to try Live CD, is to see that the hardware is recognised by the kernel and gain confidence that an install will be successful. Second reason is to use Linux on a Windows only PC or for offline maintenance (partitioning etc). Only thirdly it is a quick convenient way of installing, to get to a typical desktop.
Whilst you won’t have working 3D on Live CD, the general experience ought to be faster than the Fedora CD thanks to clicfs. They are generally reasonably useful, so something is wrong as everyone else suggests.
Waste of time trying a CD that’s not had download and burn verified.