Last Saturday was one of the rare occasions when I was free to come to
a ManLUG meeting. I did, and thoroughly enjoyed it.
I picked up the Ubuntu CDs, and thought I'd install it on a spare
partition on my machine. I was very impressed with the default design
of the desktop, sounds etc. Of course it's all cosmetic, and can
easily be changed, but first impressions are very important, and I
thought "with this I might persuade a few people to change to Linux".
My first target was going to be my ex-girlfriend, who I am going to
see later in the week to help her buy a new laptop. That was until I
realized that any machine she is likely to buy will probably have a
"winmodem" (she doesn't use broadband), and it would probably be a
complete nightmare to set it up. Even if I was confident of getting
it right in the end, the fact that I would probably have spent hours
doing it is hardly impressive when you're trying to convince someone
that Linux will make their life easier! I find it extraordinary that
Ubuntu don't mention the modem problem in any obvious place, but try
to kid you that it'll all work "out of the box", when it clearly won't
unless you're networked. Advocacy and honesty - I think not!
Anyway, now to my actual question:
I have used RedHat and Fedora systems, with KDE, since I became 100%
Linux, and I'm not familiar with Debian-based systems or Gnome. So
perhaps I'm being dense here. But the "Update Notifier" on the Gnome
toolbar tells me that there are 56 updates available, yet I can't get
it to do anything useful. When I click on anything (such as "Install
all updates" or "Show updates") either nothing whatsoever happens, or
(depending on what I am trying to do) I get a box asking for my
password. I put my user password in, and then it goes into
doing-nothing-whatsoever mode.
I even reinstalled everything, but got exactly the same result. Can
someone give me an explanation of this?
