[MOVED] Impressed, but dazed & confused

So far, so good - I installed Zoris OS (ver 8, 32-bit) today for the first time ever and I like it a lot. It has a nice, clean look & feel that emulates Windows but improves on it. And despite being installed on an ancient computer (HP Compaq dc7100, P4, with 1.5 GB RAM) the performance is not bad at all.

But as with all new OS environments, despite looking at every menu option I can find I'm just not seeing some that I feel must be there, *somewhere*, and are just eluding me.

For instance I can't remember clearly what computer name I specified at install time, and I want to look at (and possibly edit) it. Where??? Also it apparently has a default workgroup name of "WORKGROUP", and I should surely be able to change that too. But the machine doesn't show up on a browse list on any of the Windows computers on the network, so I can't really verify anything.

Another bunch of settings I felt must be configurable is the date & time formats. Am I really stuck with the Officially Designated yyyy/mm/dd that it defaults to when I said use South Africa as the location? and time with AM and PM instead of the less shouty am and pm? That would be disappointing. I'd also want to remove leading zeroes in dates and times...

Apologies if these questions are answered in the forums before - I searched, and no matter how I structured or worded my search I kept getting 62 pages of results where I am told that the words "computer" and "change" have been ignored, and the search is based only on the word "name". Seems a bit unnecessarily general...

Hi Chris and welcome to Zorin! (Bear with - back in due course unless someone else beats me to it! )

Well, 'workgroup' settings are in 'dconf Editor' - if not installed under 'System Tools' ( org | gnome | system | smb - you will see 'workgroup' with no value - enter your workgroup name to the right by left clicking the field - explanatory notes in the bottom field.

To get 'dconf Editor' if not installed, open a terminal ( Accessoires | Terminal ) and enter:

Code:

sudo apt-get install dconf-tools

- once installed you will find it in Menu | System Tools | dconf Editor :



Back later with other bits unless I get stuck!

To find out what you called your machine, just open a terminal and you will see your 'username@[name of computer]$:'

To rename it follow this guide:

http://ubuntuhandbook.org/index.php/201 ... ntu-13-10/

You won't get the same output in Zorin as in that tutorial - just the name in 'gedit' (text editor) - just overtype, save and reboot but before you do reboot, to see change has taken place, repeat the exercise after you have saved and closed.

With regards to AM PM - is this what you are after in the screenshot? (bottom right):



As for the date and time settings you could follow the technical guide on that page or check out your language and locale settings in Menu | System Tools | System Settings.

Please get back if I have not covered everything/anything!

Hi,

see the post install guide "Adding other users" and it will tell you how you can manage the groups your users belong to by clicking on the link and doing some reading!:

viewtopic.php?f=5&t=2054

See also:

http://askubuntu.com/questions/66718/ho ... and-groups

Many thanks Swarfendor - I appreciate your taking the time to be so thorough.

1. I got an interesting (but cryptic!) error message (E: Could not get lock /var/lib/dpkg/lock - open (11: Resource temporarily unavailable)) when trying the apt-get command so I thought I'd just see what the Software Centre says. Searched for and found dconf editor, told it to install, and then I noticed that the "Progress" indicator had a number "5" next to it. Sure enough, there are a number of package installations that I started last night which haven't completed. VLC media player, GeoGebra, FileZilla, and now dconf Editor are all "Waiting". Also two instances of "Searching" are waiting, and "Applying Changes" is - er - applying changes. That's 4 packages, and either 6 or 7 processes - dunno where the number 5 comes from

Now the Software Centre History lists a whole horde of updates which were apparently successful as well as 7 installations likewise (time stamp for all of those is last night, approx 17 hours ago). So why would the above installs not be working?

Update: After rebooting, all 4 of those packages I tried to get are gone from the Software Centre "Progress" screen. In fact the Progress button doesn't even exist any more. But none of those packages have been installed, according to History.

Oh wait! I tried again, and they all installed this time. Yayyyyyy...

2. Computer name: Yes, thanks, when I opened the Terminal window to type the above command I saw that! Also, the "Gear Wheel" icon at bottom right | About this Computer (same as System Settings | Details) gives the name (without allowing it to be edited).

3. Data/time settings - yes, thanks, that's exactly what I'm referring to - the format you have on your machine is much closer to what I'm looking for - I've bookmarked that reference to use it later because System Settings is inadequate - what I'm looking for is the kind of customisation that both WIndows and the Mac allow you to do which I was sure must be possible here too!

I've long been a fan of Linux in general, if only because it can often (or, is rumoured to be able to) get great performance from hardware that WIndows won't even run on, and have installed many releases of many distros, but because it's been limited in terms of the packages you can run on it AND some of those distros seem to be abandoning their roots in favour of requiring high-end hardware, I haven't ever gone very far with any of them. Looks like Zorin might be the general-purpose desktop I have been looking for, and if only things like the dconf editor and regional settings customisation can be included in the System Settings screen it would be perfect

Thanks again. Have a great weekend

Thanks Wolfman

I don't know why I didn't think of looking in the Ubuntu documentation / forums when I discovered Zorin is based on that distro. Duh, and thanks for shortcutting me to the right start page!

After rebooting, I discovered I'm logged on in a "Guest session". With no option as to user name when I do log on. And no access to the User accounts (as you might expect of a guest account), but more importantly no access to the log out or restart buttons. Wh-a-a-a-a-a-a-t...

Oh, and I no longer have the "All Items" or whatever it was called on my Zorin Menu.

Hi Chris, just use your cursor keys (up and down arrows) a few times when you get to the login - usually after first boot after install and you do this 'manoeuvre' your proper 'user name' should stick. You can disable the 'guest account' after installing Ubuntu Tweak!

That 'lock' when you tried to run 'dpkg' is because you were carrying out an install through Software Centre - life is so much quicker at the command line or synaptic than Software Centre. If you are looking for a distro for old kit that runs hot, then it has to be LXLE (http://lxle.net) or any of the light weight distributions that either have LXDE or XFCE desktop environments!

Many thanks. Tips like this are always welcome... I'm not great with reading the intructions (that's for users ;P) so always looking for shortcuts to knowledge. I know, I know, it leads to gaps...

I just discovered that the .ISO that I used to install has a completely different MD5 hash from the expected value given on the download site, which makes me wonder why anything works at all. I can also not get a bootable USB from that image which is very odd considering I created a bootable and installable DVD from it. So maybe before I get too involved and customised I should redo the installation from a freshly downloaded ISO file. Which should be concluded in... another 13 hours and 20 minutes...ZZZZzzzzz

Where are you downloading from? And try to avoid any accelerators like 'down them all' add-on for Firefox (I know, I need to update my post on that!)

Just going back to the 'lock' issue, similar to Windows - remember when you used to try and install more than one thing you got the message, wait until the current install has been completed before installing a new application?

From the official source, zorin-os.com/free8.html

But I did use Speedbit's DAP which is usually reliable - whereas my Internet connection isn't, and without a manager (resumer) I don't have a hope of ever completing a download of even a couple of hundred MB let alone 1.5 GB. It worked for the version 6 (zorin-os.com/free6.html) image that is currently available, so I'm holding thumbs for the repeat of ver 8. It's down to 3 h 30 min now at a breakneck speed of 20.4 KB/s! South Africa is at the end of a long, long, l-o-o-o-o-o-n-g piece of wire.

Hi Chris,

if your internet breaks down again, try downloading from here, it is fast and reliable:

http://linux.softpedia.com/get/System/O ... 7533.shtml

Be sure to use Firefox with no extras as Swarf already pointed out!.