Ubuntu instability

[Liam Proven]

On 1 September 2013 23:32, Grant Hardy <granthardy at outlook.com> wrote:
> It certainly could have been a disaster, but I didn't give up and eventually found the solution to at least save my data.

Oh, I say! Well done!

Having thought about this over the weekend - and discussed it with the
friend I mentioned earlier, who has more experience with Bitlocker
than I do - I was going to suggest something like this: using another
copy of Windows to recover the data. The Windows-with-Windows
dual-boot idea had not occurred but it's a very good one.

> So I guess for now I'm going to say goodbye to Ubuntu

I do not know if this would be of interest, but there is a different
distro that takes a different approach. It's called Ariadne.

http://www.knopper.net/knoppix-adriane/index-en.html

It's developed by Klaus Knopper, who is the man behind the famous
Knoppix, the original Linux bootable live CD. His wife is blind and he
has been very keen to get her using Linux, and part of his efforts
have resulted in Ariadne, a text-mode Linux with a console-mode
screenreader.

I found this article very persuasive, some years ago:

http://www.eklhad.net/edbrowse/philosophy.html

As it happens, my blind friend does not like command-line environments
- he is definitely a child of the GUI era and loves menus. (He
couldn't spell his way out of a wet paper bag, which might be a factor
in this.) But C L I's certainly have some advantages from the
screenreader perspective, I think.

Ariadne is mostly driven by old-fashioned MS-DOS-style numbered menus,
but it includes an interesting suite of console-mode applications to
get a lot of functionality, and you can also drop to a shell for total
flexibility. Linux's console-mode apps are vastly more flexible than
Windows ones and there is an awful lot that you can do.

Knoppix and Ariadne are not really meant to be installed - they are
live CD environments - but you can do it, I believe, and they might
bear investigation.

The only everyday thing I had problems with was getting a wireless
connection up. I advise using a network cable, or running it inside a
virtual machine. On that front, I believe that VMware is more
accessible than VirtualBox.

-- 
Liam Proven • Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile
Email: lproven at cix.co.uk • GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven
MSN: lproven at hotmail.com • Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven
Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 • Cell: +44 7939-087884