Per the advice of Nathan Marz and Dan Vega, I will try to blog more often.
I got a new laptop. At least new to me. My main laptop was starting to use the battery even if the charger was still plugged in. I took it to Discount Electronics, and they couldn’t find anything wrong. But I saw a used Dell for a good price. I asked how much would it cost with more memory and a 500GB hard drive, and it was still a good price. Cheaper than a new one.
From what I understand, UEFI and Secure Boot have made installing Linux a bit trickier than before. It used to be that you could just go to Best Buy, get a random laptop, put in an install DVD, and keep hitting “Next” until you had Linux installed. This seems like a step backwards. Some admins say “all you need to do is hit F$RANDOM_NUMBER, so into the BIOS and disable Secure Boot.” I am tired of going into the BIOS. That reminds me of what installing Linux used to be like.
If I buy a laptop with Linux pre-installed, I will probably go to System 76.
After installing, I locked myself out of my laptop because the GUI would not start. I went with Ubuntu, and usually one of the first things I do is get rid of Unity. I have never liked it. I ran a few commands to get rid of it, but when I rebooted I got a black screen. So I had to re-install and try again.
Now it looks like Ubuntu is dropping Unity. Fine with me.
For future reference, the magic command is:
apt-get install gnome-session-flashback
You’re welcome.
Image from “Evangelia quattuor [Évangiles de Lothaire] (3v-207r). Capitulare evangeliorum (207v-221v)”, a 9th century manuscript housed at the Bibliothèque nationale de France. Source gallica.bnf.fr / BnF; image assumed allowed under Fair Use.