Yesterday, I thought of getting the newest version of Parted Magic since the version of GParted in the version of Parted Magic that I have is 0.8.x, and the version in openSUSE 13.1 is 0.16.x.
To my frustration, Parted Magic is no longer free, as you have to pay $5 (USD) for it. Luckily, you're able to download it 9 times (equating to about 56 cents per download) before you have to pay again (there's also other price points that includes more downloads).
Luckily, I found a slightly older version being hosted somewhere on the net, and downloaded it this morning. I then burned it to a disk and first tested it out with the VAIO (would have been Ziggy, but you can read that other entry about him).
When it started up, I was greeted with a GRUB-like menu (GRUB1 not 2) that displayed a few options: the first two being the default 32 or 64 bit versions for computers with over 1GB of RAM (copies the entire live session to the RAM), the second two being the default 32 or 64 bit versions for computers with under 1GB of RAM (runs off of the disk), and then some other options I don't recall (there were language options after the first and second set of options, but I didn't think it was worth properly listing them).
I chose the first default 32-bit option and once it was doing copying to the RAM, it spat the disk out, which was a bit strange to me at first, but made sense. I tried opening up GParted, but it was taking far too long, as it might have been trying to scan the card reader (I'm not entirely sure, but I was too disheartened from Ziggy to do a proper testing).
I then tested in the Dell (64-bit this time) and everything worked just fine. It was nice to see it be quite snappy since there's no real lag reading from the RAM.
With this, it'll probably be the last update of Parted Magic I use. I'm not exactly sure why they decided to make the move to have users pay, but it certainly isn't something I'm happy with.
Also, I tried using MuliSystem Live (version r6) to put it on my Linux USB drive, but it gave me the same "This ISO is not supported at this time" message as I got with openSUSE 12.x and 13.1 ISOs. I'm going to download the latest version (Though I think another one comes out on the 14th? Could have also been something else I looked at.) tomorrow and see if that changes anything. If not, then at least I have the latest version.
I also decided to update Gparted Live at that same time as well.
Nonetheless, there's really not much to say about the new version, since not a whole lot has changed... All the text-based setup (keyboard/language/video) is still there when booting into Gparted Live, and the desktop is still pretty basic, but they do their best to make it look decent.
I tested on the VAIO (again, would have been Ziggy) before testing Parted Magic, since I downloaded the i686 version after researching that I wouldn't need the i486 version.
There was also a 64-bit version, but I didn't bother with it, since I wanted to test out Parted Magic first to see if my hypothesis about it being a "hybrid disk" was correct (and it was).
I may have to go with Gparted Live if I want an updated version of GParted, but I might also just buy Parted Magic (and save the other 8 downloads for future releases?) since it's cheap enough. We'll see what happens.
09 January 2014
Mei-chan 3
I realize after going back to read a couple of the posts that I never said anything about Mei-chan's case upgrade/swap (happened before I put the Zalman 9900 Max in.
The case I got was the Cooler Master Elite 335U which is a mid-tower, bottom-mounted-PSU (in either fan-up or fan-down configurations) case (and comes with a rear 120mm fan).
I bought a couple NZXT 140mm fans (one for the front and one for the lower side) and they work too well, to where they create positive pressure in the case (air escapes from wherever it can find), the good thing about that is that I won't have to worry about the USB ports or the card reader getting dirty (XD). After I upgraded to the Zalman CNPS9900 Max, the two fans are the loudest now, but it's not as bad as the Zalman CNPS9700 on full speed.
The front-panel USB isn't fixed into the case, and it's defaulted to the bottom 3.5" external slot, but due to the length of the PCIe power cord and the slight lack of space, I moved it to the top 3.5" external slot. The front panel has a "punch-out" outline for a Firewire port, but I covered it with the Phenom sticker (XP).
Behind the mesh grille front is some foam, which is restrictive enough to trap dust, but not enough to keep air from flowing (finer dust can still get in however).
The real reason for me talking about Mei-chan is that the fan for the Sapphire Radeon HD 6770 sounds like it's kinda doing the same thing as the HIS Radeon HD 6770, but only really does it when I boot her up, as it goes away after having her on for a bit. I will eventually do the same thing I did with Melty just to be safe and have cooler temps (though there isn't really any way for me to see the temps).
The case I got was the Cooler Master Elite 335U which is a mid-tower, bottom-mounted-PSU (in either fan-up or fan-down configurations) case (and comes with a rear 120mm fan).
I bought a couple NZXT 140mm fans (one for the front and one for the lower side) and they work too well, to where they create positive pressure in the case (air escapes from wherever it can find), the good thing about that is that I won't have to worry about the USB ports or the card reader getting dirty (XD). After I upgraded to the Zalman CNPS9900 Max, the two fans are the loudest now, but it's not as bad as the Zalman CNPS9700 on full speed.
The front-panel USB isn't fixed into the case, and it's defaulted to the bottom 3.5" external slot, but due to the length of the PCIe power cord and the slight lack of space, I moved it to the top 3.5" external slot. The front panel has a "punch-out" outline for a Firewire port, but I covered it with the Phenom sticker (XP).
Behind the mesh grille front is some foam, which is restrictive enough to trap dust, but not enough to keep air from flowing (finer dust can still get in however).
The real reason for me talking about Mei-chan is that the fan for the Sapphire Radeon HD 6770 sounds like it's kinda doing the same thing as the HIS Radeon HD 6770, but only really does it when I boot her up, as it goes away after having her on for a bit. I will eventually do the same thing I did with Melty just to be safe and have cooler temps (though there isn't really any way for me to see the temps).
30 December 2013
openSUSE 13.1 Part 3
I forgot to mention all the shared programs (VLC, Filezilla, and such) ended up with weird themes after I installed KDE. I found that it was, for some reason, partly using KDE's theme for certain spots of each affected program, so I found a KDE theme I liked, then modified the colour values to match the GNOME ones. I found the colour theme file, so it'll be easier to reset it when necessary.
And now, I'm trouble-free XD
And now, I'm trouble-free XD
29 December 2013
openSUSE 13.1 Part 2
I searched for the error a bit ago to find a few people having the same problem with Rhythmbox (in Arch Linux), and the solution was to view the album art; it worked for me. It's kinda stupid that it was something simple as that, but it does make sense, since all the songs that it crashed on had album art. I'm so glad to have Rhythmbox back, since I never really felt right with Amarok.
One thing though is after installing the restricted format support, it splits off the shared libraries between KDE and GNOME, meaning without installing the KDE desktop, I can't use K3b and Filezilla (Amarok used to count XD). Filezilla was weird though, since I installed it before I installed the KDE desktop, and it got kinda weird. Luckily, I thought of reinstalling Filezilla, and it worked!
I don't think I'll have any other troubles, since those were really the only ones. (I really ought to start dating my edits...)
One thing though is after installing the restricted format support, it splits off the shared libraries between KDE and GNOME, meaning without installing the KDE desktop, I can't use K3b and Filezilla (Amarok used to count XD). Filezilla was weird though, since I installed it before I installed the KDE desktop, and it got kinda weird. Luckily, I thought of reinstalling Filezilla, and it worked!
I don't think I'll have any other troubles, since those were really the only ones. (I really ought to start dating my edits...)
26 December 2013
Restricted Formats
Wasn't quite sure how to title this entry, but I guess it's just best to make it easy. This does have to do with Linux, so it does belong here and not in the Miscellany category.
It started a couple weeks ago after I updated Mei-chan, I was unable to play the video in mp4 format that I watched a couple days before that, I found it really strange, but didn't really look into it that much, so the next day, I converted what I was watching. Afterwards, I tested some other formats and was unable to play them. After some research, it was because all I wanted to play was under the "restricted format" category, so (I'm guessing) they were removed during that update. I tried to follow the guide I found, but I failed to notice a certain, crucial part of the instructions and ended up not working for me.
I decided to attempt to reverse what had been done, but ended up breaking GNOME and was met with ICEWM upon reboot. I looked for other GNOME Linux distros, as Ubuntu was Unity, and I've had troubles installing Debian properly (with GUI). I let Sabayon 13.08 download (Sabayon is now a rolling distribution, since Gentoo is) as I slept, and the next day, attempted to test VLC out, but Rigo decided to update Sabayon as a whole, which wasted a few hours and ran out of RAM. I did a slight retry, trying to make sure I was only doing VLC, but no luck, so I moved on to trying a test install on a "spare" hard drive. Something happened, to which I'm not sure of, but I think I can blame Sabayon for it, but GRUB kept saying a disk wasn't present and just stopped there.
I scrapped the test install, and went with a blind install, but was met with the same message. Since I was frustrated, I decided to scrap Sabayon and try to find something else. Then I remember finding Ubuntu GNOME while I was digging around the previous night, and downloaded it. After doing some testing, I found it worked well enough for what I wanted and was using Rhythmbox 2.99 instead of 3.0, which made me happy; I wasn't too ecstatic about GNOME 3.8, but it was better than 3.6, and so I went with it (I turned off the shell for the user menu that added the sleep and hibernate options).
I did the install, and came to the same GRUB error; I tried installing again and no change. I unplugged the other two drives (music drive and files drive), and was able to boot. I then plugged the drive under it, booted, and met with the same error. I then unplugged that drive, and plugged in the drive under that one, booted, and had no problems. I then use Parted Magic to look at the drive some, and found that it somehow got flagged as boot (along with the root drive that should have been the only one), so I remove the boot flag, and reboot with all three drives, but still had the problem.
I booted into Ubuntu GNOME live (because the lack of GParted on openSUSE live was against my better judgement) transferred all the music over to the files drive, recreated the partition table twice in GParted (just to be safe), formatted, then put the music back on. I rebooted, and then sat at a black screen with a blinking cursor. I decide there's probably some problem with the files drive as well since I formatted that drive way back with openSUSE 11.3, so I backed up whatever I wanted to keep handy or didn't have on the music drive, did the same as the music drive (minus one partition table recreation), then put everything back on. Booting up gave the same result.
As I went to bed, I thought of what could be different, why I was able to boot to live, but not to the hard drive, and eventually, before I fell asleep, I figured I should look in BIOS. The next morning, it took me a bit to remember, but I looked in BIOS, and it turns out that the drive order was completely backwards (files->music->root), so I fix it and double check the boot device order was correct before exiting. Sure enough, it's what was it and I was greeted with GNOME.
So I've been decently content up until this past Sunday (22nd) when I was unable to really do anything on the internet with Windows on Triela (I'm not going into all that much detail on this) at my friend's place and the next day after (making it Tuesday, since I was sick Monday) at home, I was still having problems, and I reinstalled Windows. I didn't really feel like doing much else, so I left it and worried about it yesterday (Wednesday the 25th), after all said and done, I went and looked up how to reinstall GRUB2 and was successful on the third attempt (first one I found gave me an error with no workaround, second one didn't actually install, and the third time I combined the two solutions).
Quite happy I didn't have to reinstall 13.1 at all. I decided to give the restricted format installation a try, since I had went over the page again a bit more thoroughly this past Sunday out of boredom and noticed I missed a step. I removed VLC, removed the repository for it, then proceeded with the instructions and rebooted. It worked!
Today, I decided to test with Melty, to see that it played before upgrading, then seeing it couldn't play after upgrading, both results were to my expectation. I then preformed the installation and then rebooted and was successful in playing the video.
So, I will be reinstalling 13.1 on Mei-Ren again and preforming the restricted format installation to be able to watch videos. While I love Rhythmbox 2.99, I'll still stick with Amarok because I know how to use zypper a lot better than apt-get, and I'm a lot more comfortable doing the upgrade with zypper than to wait for the software updater to pop up telling me there's stuff to install. I'm also giving up the fact that I can use hotkeys on the video window of VLC in Ubuntu GNOME, but it's not that big of a deal to me, since I've been dealing with it for quite sometime now.
Was quite a long journey that kinda ended where it started (?), but maybe it's a good thing. Few things I've learned:
It started a couple weeks ago after I updated Mei-chan, I was unable to play the video in mp4 format that I watched a couple days before that, I found it really strange, but didn't really look into it that much, so the next day, I converted what I was watching. Afterwards, I tested some other formats and was unable to play them. After some research, it was because all I wanted to play was under the "restricted format" category, so (I'm guessing) they were removed during that update. I tried to follow the guide I found, but I failed to notice a certain, crucial part of the instructions and ended up not working for me.
I decided to attempt to reverse what had been done, but ended up breaking GNOME and was met with ICEWM upon reboot. I looked for other GNOME Linux distros, as Ubuntu was Unity, and I've had troubles installing Debian properly (with GUI). I let Sabayon 13.08 download (Sabayon is now a rolling distribution, since Gentoo is) as I slept, and the next day, attempted to test VLC out, but Rigo decided to update Sabayon as a whole, which wasted a few hours and ran out of RAM. I did a slight retry, trying to make sure I was only doing VLC, but no luck, so I moved on to trying a test install on a "spare" hard drive. Something happened, to which I'm not sure of, but I think I can blame Sabayon for it, but GRUB kept saying a disk wasn't present and just stopped there.
I scrapped the test install, and went with a blind install, but was met with the same message. Since I was frustrated, I decided to scrap Sabayon and try to find something else. Then I remember finding Ubuntu GNOME while I was digging around the previous night, and downloaded it. After doing some testing, I found it worked well enough for what I wanted and was using Rhythmbox 2.99 instead of 3.0, which made me happy; I wasn't too ecstatic about GNOME 3.8, but it was better than 3.6, and so I went with it (I turned off the shell for the user menu that added the sleep and hibernate options).
I did the install, and came to the same GRUB error; I tried installing again and no change. I unplugged the other two drives (music drive and files drive), and was able to boot. I then plugged the drive under it, booted, and met with the same error. I then unplugged that drive, and plugged in the drive under that one, booted, and had no problems. I then use Parted Magic to look at the drive some, and found that it somehow got flagged as boot (along with the root drive that should have been the only one), so I remove the boot flag, and reboot with all three drives, but still had the problem.
I booted into Ubuntu GNOME live (because the lack of GParted on openSUSE live was against my better judgement) transferred all the music over to the files drive, recreated the partition table twice in GParted (just to be safe), formatted, then put the music back on. I rebooted, and then sat at a black screen with a blinking cursor. I decide there's probably some problem with the files drive as well since I formatted that drive way back with openSUSE 11.3, so I backed up whatever I wanted to keep handy or didn't have on the music drive, did the same as the music drive (minus one partition table recreation), then put everything back on. Booting up gave the same result.
As I went to bed, I thought of what could be different, why I was able to boot to live, but not to the hard drive, and eventually, before I fell asleep, I figured I should look in BIOS. The next morning, it took me a bit to remember, but I looked in BIOS, and it turns out that the drive order was completely backwards (files->music->root), so I fix it and double check the boot device order was correct before exiting. Sure enough, it's what was it and I was greeted with GNOME.
So I've been decently content up until this past Sunday (22nd) when I was unable to really do anything on the internet with Windows on Triela (I'm not going into all that much detail on this) at my friend's place and the next day after (making it Tuesday, since I was sick Monday) at home, I was still having problems, and I reinstalled Windows. I didn't really feel like doing much else, so I left it and worried about it yesterday (Wednesday the 25th), after all said and done, I went and looked up how to reinstall GRUB2 and was successful on the third attempt (first one I found gave me an error with no workaround, second one didn't actually install, and the third time I combined the two solutions).
Quite happy I didn't have to reinstall 13.1 at all. I decided to give the restricted format installation a try, since I had went over the page again a bit more thoroughly this past Sunday out of boredom and noticed I missed a step. I removed VLC, removed the repository for it, then proceeded with the instructions and rebooted. It worked!
Today, I decided to test with Melty, to see that it played before upgrading, then seeing it couldn't play after upgrading, both results were to my expectation. I then preformed the installation and then rebooted and was successful in playing the video.
So, I will be reinstalling 13.1 on Mei-Ren again and preforming the restricted format installation to be able to watch videos. While I love Rhythmbox 2.99, I'll still stick with Amarok because I know how to use zypper a lot better than apt-get, and I'm a lot more comfortable doing the upgrade with zypper than to wait for the software updater to pop up telling me there's stuff to install. I'm also giving up the fact that I can use hotkeys on the video window of VLC in Ubuntu GNOME, but it's not that big of a deal to me, since I've been dealing with it for quite sometime now.
Was quite a long journey that kinda ended where it started (?), but maybe it's a good thing. Few things I've learned:
- Sabayon ships with FGLRX on the disk and uses it by default for AMD/ATI GPUs (had to xdriver=radeon at boot)
- Ubuntu GNOME is an okay fall-back distribution
- Make sure drive order is good
- Boot flags have to be "formatted" away
- Read the entire instructions and follow verbosely to the end
- Rigo does things in ways I don't like
- I gave up on openSUSE too early
21 November 2013
Melty 1
I was doing a deep clean earlier today, and I booted her up afterwards, opened the hardware monitoring program from CPUID, noticed the GPU temperature rising from about 49-50C; I looked at the fan, thinking I accidentally unplugged it when cleaning, and it wasn't spinning, but after taking the card out, the fan was plugged in. I then tried to spin the fan by hand, but it was much harder to do so than it should have been.
I played with the fan a bit to try to get it to spin better, but wasn't horribly successful. I got it to the point where it should spin okay. Tried it again, and it kinda worked, but the temps weren't really stable, so I took the card out again.
I decided to take the plastic heat-sink shell off and use the Vantec Spectrum Fan Card from Ziggy to put underneath the graphics card. I was worried that it wouldn't hold well, seeing as the fan card was made to be inserted into a PCI slot and not a PCIe x16, but after testing it out, the PCIe slot seemed to stabilize the card enough.
When I turned Melty on, and opened up the hardware monitor, I saw the GPU temperature at 32C! I was so surprised, but then again, it made sense, since the fans are cooling majority of the heat-sink. I haven't seen the temps go higher than 50C, but I'll let time run the course and see what happens.
I was wanting to email HIS and request a replacement fan, but on the site they posted that they will not send out a replacement cooler/fan because the user can damage the graphics card if done by themselves (obviously voiding the warranty). The fan mounts to the plastic shell - the fan being easily removable without removing the shell - and the fan's power cable is pretty free, so to be honest, I think it's a bit much to say they won't send out a replacement fan (I can understand the concern with the heat-sink though). Needless to say, I'm not going to bother and I'm going to stick with Sapphire's video cards like I have been. (By the way, the shell is screwed into the heat-sink, so removal of the shell requires removal of the heat-sink, of which I did without any problems.)
After letting the fan sit face-up for a while, the fan seemed easier to spin, but also still didn't spin right, leaving me to think it's a problem with the bearing. I think the bearing uses oil instead of grease and the oil flowed out of the bearing area and caused it to lock up. Only reason I can think as to why oil was used instead of grease is the cost (I'm assuming oil's cheaper than grease). Even though I'm sure that's the problem, there's not exactly a way for me to fix it, as I'm not sure how to separate the PCB of the fan from the mounting bracket (where the axle access probably is).
When I'm able to, I think I'm going to upgrade Melty to a 7770, since I won't have to upgrade the PSU to compensate. We'll see though.
I played with the fan a bit to try to get it to spin better, but wasn't horribly successful. I got it to the point where it should spin okay. Tried it again, and it kinda worked, but the temps weren't really stable, so I took the card out again.
I decided to take the plastic heat-sink shell off and use the Vantec Spectrum Fan Card from Ziggy to put underneath the graphics card. I was worried that it wouldn't hold well, seeing as the fan card was made to be inserted into a PCI slot and not a PCIe x16, but after testing it out, the PCIe slot seemed to stabilize the card enough.
When I turned Melty on, and opened up the hardware monitor, I saw the GPU temperature at 32C! I was so surprised, but then again, it made sense, since the fans are cooling majority of the heat-sink. I haven't seen the temps go higher than 50C, but I'll let time run the course and see what happens.
I was wanting to email HIS and request a replacement fan, but on the site they posted that they will not send out a replacement cooler/fan because the user can damage the graphics card if done by themselves (obviously voiding the warranty). The fan mounts to the plastic shell - the fan being easily removable without removing the shell - and the fan's power cable is pretty free, so to be honest, I think it's a bit much to say they won't send out a replacement fan (I can understand the concern with the heat-sink though). Needless to say, I'm not going to bother and I'm going to stick with Sapphire's video cards like I have been. (By the way, the shell is screwed into the heat-sink, so removal of the shell requires removal of the heat-sink, of which I did without any problems.)
After letting the fan sit face-up for a while, the fan seemed easier to spin, but also still didn't spin right, leaving me to think it's a problem with the bearing. I think the bearing uses oil instead of grease and the oil flowed out of the bearing area and caused it to lock up. Only reason I can think as to why oil was used instead of grease is the cost (I'm assuming oil's cheaper than grease). Even though I'm sure that's the problem, there's not exactly a way for me to fix it, as I'm not sure how to separate the PCB of the fan from the mounting bracket (where the axle access probably is).
When I'm able to, I think I'm going to upgrade Melty to a 7770, since I won't have to upgrade the PSU to compensate. We'll see though.
20 November 2013
openSUSE 13.1 Part 1
Well, nothing I noticed different from RC2, but that's probably a given, though I did notice that the network configuration changed a lot since 12.3, allowing you to configure IP/DNS/etc. separately (the old version required you to input a DNS if you were configuring the IP manually.
I've done 5 installs so far... Three on Triela and two on Mei-chan. First install on Triela was on the test partition to make sure VLC could be installed; the second was an install with BTRFS, which I found out halfway through the installation (after the reboot, before touching the manual configuration) that ext4 performs better than BTRFS; so the third installation was, obviously, with ext4. The first install on Mei-chan failed because a couple packages were broken (I was going to install XFCE and KDE along with GNOME), and so I tried again (without the XFCE and KDE) and it worked just fine.
I used the live disk to test VLC installation and 1080p playback on Mei-Ren (at the same time when I was testing on Triela), and didn't have any hiccups. And as usual, the hot keys don't work on the video window. Oh well.
I think I forgot to mention that after logging out of root after editing
I also found a separate program for additional trackpad options that aren't in the settings.
Fstab is also a lot cleaner, as it only contains physical partitions/drives (the proc and stuff like that aren't there any more).
I think that's all that I can really think of... Besides Rhythmbox being a bit weird on Triela and crashing when trying to play certain songs. I may write more, but I can't be certain, as I'm pretty tired, physically.
Lie-chan was easy and mostly uneventful (only problem I had was a slight glitch with the fonts after logging back in after changing the theme, which worked itself out); Melty on the other hand.... While trying to boot into GNOME live, something happened and it stalled or got stuck in some sort of loop, so I was forced to do a blind install on Melty. Luckily, nothing happened.
Another thing I forgot to mention is that the menu for certain programs (Rhythmbox, as that's the only one I've really seen so far) is interesting. Each "section" of the menu has its own arrow, which releases the sub-menu once clicked upon.
Well, I think that's it. I won't update for the next 3 years or until the next good LTS is released. I'll still continue to test the later releases as they come out.
(edit)
Seems that it's Rhythmbox itself that crashes when trying to play certain songs, but it changes what songs it crashes on per computer. When I open Rhythmbox via terminal and play a known song to make it crash, it gives me an undecipherable error maybe having something to do with
Amarok works decently, but doesn't have a separate "now playing" list like Rhythmbox or Banshee. While it keeps the song it was playing, the next random song is random. Luckily, there's an option to shift the randomization, which I set to "Not Recently Played" to avoid hearing a song that I heard not too long ago (iTunes is horrible for it). Amarok does have a queue, but it's very lacking, only allowing you to move songs up and down and to delete the song from the queue or clear the queue. If they program it further to have it become the "now playing" section, I'd probably migrate to Amarok without a second thought. I'll use Amarok for the time being and keep an eye on Rhythmbox.
While this is annoying, it's no real reason to go back to 12.3. Not to mention, I really prefer 13.1, considering all the features I was looking forward to. It's just kinda sad I can't really do much but wait and play things by ear.
I've done 5 installs so far... Three on Triela and two on Mei-chan. First install on Triela was on the test partition to make sure VLC could be installed; the second was an install with BTRFS, which I found out halfway through the installation (after the reboot, before touching the manual configuration) that ext4 performs better than BTRFS; so the third installation was, obviously, with ext4. The first install on Mei-chan failed because a couple packages were broken (I was going to install XFCE and KDE along with GNOME), and so I tried again (without the XFCE and KDE) and it worked just fine.
I used the live disk to test VLC installation and 1080p playback on Mei-Ren (at the same time when I was testing on Triela), and didn't have any hiccups. And as usual, the hot keys don't work on the video window. Oh well.
I think I forgot to mention that after logging out of root after editing
fstab, fstab's reloaded on login instead of boot.
I also found a separate program for additional trackpad options that aren't in the settings.
Fstab is also a lot cleaner, as it only contains physical partitions/drives (the proc and stuff like that aren't there any more).
I think that's all that I can really think of... Besides Rhythmbox being a bit weird on Triela and crashing when trying to play certain songs. I may write more, but I can't be certain, as I'm pretty tired, physically.
Lie-chan was easy and mostly uneventful (only problem I had was a slight glitch with the fonts after logging back in after changing the theme, which worked itself out); Melty on the other hand.... While trying to boot into GNOME live, something happened and it stalled or got stuck in some sort of loop, so I was forced to do a blind install on Melty. Luckily, nothing happened.
Another thing I forgot to mention is that the menu for certain programs (Rhythmbox, as that's the only one I've really seen so far) is interesting. Each "section" of the menu has its own arrow, which releases the sub-menu once clicked upon.
Well, I think that's it. I won't update for the next 3 years or until the next good LTS is released. I'll still continue to test the later releases as they come out.
(edit)
Seems that it's Rhythmbox itself that crashes when trying to play certain songs, but it changes what songs it crashes on per computer. When I open Rhythmbox via terminal and play a known song to make it crash, it gives me an undecipherable error maybe having something to do with
cairo? If I was able to install the older version of Rhythmbox, I would, but since 13.1 ships with 3.0.1, there's not a whole lot I can do. Banshee works very similarly to Rhythmbox, but is very slow (probably because I have a lot of songs in my music library. It's slow enough, where I really can't use it.
Amarok works decently, but doesn't have a separate "now playing" list like Rhythmbox or Banshee. While it keeps the song it was playing, the next random song is random. Luckily, there's an option to shift the randomization, which I set to "Not Recently Played" to avoid hearing a song that I heard not too long ago (iTunes is horrible for it). Amarok does have a queue, but it's very lacking, only allowing you to move songs up and down and to delete the song from the queue or clear the queue. If they program it further to have it become the "now playing" section, I'd probably migrate to Amarok without a second thought. I'll use Amarok for the time being and keep an eye on Rhythmbox.
While this is annoying, it's no real reason to go back to 12.3. Not to mention, I really prefer 13.1, considering all the features I was looking forward to. It's just kinda sad I can't really do much but wait and play things by ear.
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