Lubuntu 11.10

It's been a while, mostly because nothing new was happening. My ubuntu computer was running along smoothly. However, there were two problems. First, VNC performance was crappy. This happened soon after the switch to the unity desktop, and it turns out to be related to the desktop effects settings, which cannot be turned off in version 11.10. I rely heavily on VNC so this was a dealbreaker for me. Actually, the 11.10 update did make VNC slightly faster, but it was still a pain to use. Secondly, I did not like how unity worked. It took extra steps to get to my programs and files.

Then I heard about lubuntu, the flavor of ubuntu for low performance machines. Since I was running this on a nettop, this sounded perfect. However, the switch from ubuntu to lubuntu was less than perfect, and I ended up with a garbled loading screen (it turned out that this was a login screen, so I probably could have gotten past it and fixed everything) so I started a fresh lubuntu install. At this point I also knew exactly how I wanted everything to work (e.g. VNC, Samba), so I also wrote everything down that I changed after the installation...