Where is my photo screensaver?

I had a slideshow screensaver that made use of the photos stored on my computer.

One day it stopped working. I wonder why that was? All I get now is a blank screen where it should be.

Maybe I should post a question on one of those helpful Ubuntu forums.

Then again, life's too short.

Perhaps I'll just forget it and choose a different screensaver.

News from Textmaker

Textmaker tells me it has a new shopping system. This means, apparently, that they cannot process and fulfil my education-based order. At least not for a while.

Great new shopping system.

My panel's stuck

Have I read this right? Click and drag an empty space on a panel to move it to a new location? Sounds great. I can't make it work, though. The panels are stuck rigid.

That wonderful, warm, cuddly Ubuntu community

I've discovered that Ubuntu exists in a world of myth and mantra.

One of these speaks of the wonderful community that can't wait to answer your problems and queries.

Well, it can wait, and so can you or I. I've found that my questions just languish. I've posted a few. Only one of them has had any kind of answer, and that one missed the point.

Tick, tock, tock, tock, er, tock...

The Ubuntu clock looks nice at the top of my screen. There's just on problem.

It shows the wrong time.

Yes, I have installed the thing that synchronises it with an internet clock, and it sometimes rights itself.

But a lot of the time, it is SLOW.

Maybe it's the battery in my computer, but maybe that internet clock could be consulted a bit more frequently.

Textmaker... Hello!?

I hate OpenOffice Writer. A program that forces styles upon you that you don't want... Well, I've already written about that.

So I downloaded TextMaker. Because for all those confident statements about the 'thousands' of wonderful programs available for Linux, it turns out that OpenOffice and TextMaker are the only two full-featured word processors. (Forget AbiWord - it's a Mickey Mouse program that can't even manage smart, curly, quotes.) Yeah, that's right. Two word processors. TextMaker seems quite good to me. It's easier to fathom than OpenOffice and its attitude to styles is similar to that of Word - but with easier access to them than most versions of Word have provided.

The downloadable version is hobbled: no saving, no printing. You have to pay if you want it to work properly. It is quite pricey - cheeky, when you consider that its competition is entirely free of charge. However, there is a cheaper way to get it if you are a student or teacher. I am one of the latter and I duly emailed off a scanned document to prove this. All TextMaker have to do now is email me a code to unlock the missing features in their program.

I'm waiting. And waiting. And waiting...

Jaunty, or not so Jaunty?

I was scared of updating to Jaunty. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Never go for version 1.0, etc., etc. But, after all, this is 9.04 not 1.0, so I clicked the update button. A mere matter of hours later, and Jaunty was operational. Why does it take so long? My broadband might not be the world's fastest, but still.

Well, it's working now, and, you know what, I can tell virtually no difference. The volume control is now horizontal. You get a countdown message when you shut the computer down. Wow!

On the downside, Tracker went bananas (but seems to have calmed down again now), and playing DVDs is not a happy experience. In fact, it's barely doable.

I'm not sure if this is due to Jaunty, but in Movieplayer, the video plays, as long as you don't try to touch any controls, such as skip forward or back. As soon as you do, it crashes. VLC works, but, for some reason, it changes my 4 x 3 home-made DVD (from television) into a shape like a piece of A4 or letter paper in portrait mode. In despair, I installed Mplayer (confusing "front ends"), which does sort-of work, but you can't get at the controls while it's playing. Well, not easily. I want something like PowerDVD, which, on the dreaded Windows "just works". I shall try never to watch a DVD again on Ubuntu.