I think some of the comments deserve a reply. For what it's worth, after the post above, I would have tried to update the whole megilla, but the system was
completely hosed. The only option was to completely delete it and start over. Again, fwiw, I looked at another derivative of Mandrake, and didn't like it.
When I found out that it was impossible to run installed programs from a command line--a trick you have to use to run, say, Dolphin from root--I decided
that it wasn't for me. Another distro download failed to boot altogether. So I suppose it's back to pclos.
However: Firstly, the cold install this last time left me with the disappearing wallpaper problem. Nothing else customized or anything at that point.
Secondly, anyone who has ever tried to network anything--I have three computers--knows that you need to have unique hostnames. Why PCLOS should
make it difficult to implement that is beyond me. At least one other distro has it built into the install routine.
Thirdly: I wound up using the NVidia driver in the distro, but it had not been immediately obvious that it applied to my card. So it should not have impacted
anything that I reported as problems. The problem there was insufficient documentation in the system. Typical, I'm afraid.
Fourth: Epson provides a driver for their printer which pclos is apparently too far behind the times to list, and that always worked in the past--because of
various other difficulties, there's no way to tell whether or not it caused problems this time. One should remember that the original distro was a continuously
upgraded version from early 2011, not the fresh 2012.08 version. Some may say "same thing" but I doubt it.
Fifth: It has always been my impression that Linux was a system designed so that users could customize it, not a system like MIcrosoft, or worse, Apple,
where you take it like it is, and if you aren't satisfied, you lump it.
Finally, what I was actually trying to do--two things: get a system that worked as well as my system did two months ago, before you broke KSnapshot,
and second, solve a problem with some apps--one native Linux (Dosbox) and one Wine implementation of MS Pinball, that scrambled the widgets in the
display. this second problem I was attacking based on input from the forum, and that input, from here, certainly offered in good faith, didn't work, and
I was attempting to fix it. So that was before I to try and install 2012.08, not after! That's why I was trying to install 2012.08, and ran into all
this difficulty, just trying to get back to approximately where I was two months ago.
I will try again. I'm used to pclos, and I do not want to start with something completely alien, like Ubuntu, and the one system I looked at just doesn't cut it.
One more time. --doug
