Elementary ?

[MidnightWizard]

OK so I went ahead and installed
Up and running but I am finding it hard to find ways to "tweak" stuff.

I previously had Mint 18 installed which seemed to be a lot easier to customise
I also have Mac OS Sierra installed on my Mac Mini
Windows 7 and MS Server 2003
So
Some little experience with seeing what different stuff looks like.

What ticks me off is when magazines do articles and you see beautiful pictures of different distros
( Elementary included )
BUT
Only later you discover how much tweaking and customisation went into producing the picture of the beautiful desktop
which
Is NEVER discussed in the article or as a footnote.

So
Bearing in mind I have installed the Elementary tweaks , Plus Icons and a few other things ( not always sure how they all work )

Question 1.
How do you get the OS to change desktop backgrounds automatically ( could do it on Mint )

Question 2.
How do you change the time display on the log-in screen to 24hr format

I was not able to find as much --"How-To" for Elementary as for Mint
I am afraid I am an eye candy addict and control mad -- have to optimise and customise every damn thing

 

[CamiKaze]

My mint got royally effed last night.
My apt cache is corrupt and I can't change to a different mirror.
I cleaned, updated, upgraded, deleted lists from sources.list.d, updated and everything I could think of but still couldn't fix my package manager...

Oh well, not to worry; I see that the new version of Mint has been released.

It doesn't help your question but I'm going to stick with Mint.

 

[Binary_Bark]

So having bit of trouble, mine is refusing to update apps or download, it just hangs on "starting" with a new download
In updates it shows blank though a notification has been shown

 

[garyc]

With Ubuntu based distributions (e.g. Elementary and Mint) the update manger can sometimes misbehave. I found that most of time this can be fixed by just doing it from the command line. If there is a real problem you may get a suggestion in the terminal giving the command to use to fix it.

 

[Binary_Bark]

tried:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
restart

Did not work, will try this next

1.sudo apt-get purge appcenter
2.sudo apt-get purge packagekit
3.Restart
4.sudo apt-get install packagekit
5.sudo apt-get install appcenter
6.Restart

First use of Elementary, normally use Open Suse

 

[Binary_Bark]

Got it working. But a locking file error came up

sudo apt-get update
/ Could not get lock /var/lib/apt/lists/lock - open (11: Resource temporarily unavailable)

Got it solved by removing the files:

sudo rm /var/lib/apt/lists/lock
sudo rm /var/cache/apt/archives/lock
sudo rm /var/lib/dpkg/lock

Going now

 

[garyc]

Thanks for the share on the locking error, that is useful to know.

 

[ginggs]

Got it working. But a locking file error came up

That could be automatic updates running in the background.

 

[Binary_Bark]

That could be automatic updates running in the background.

Deleting the lock file worked

 

[Binary_Bark]

Some help for the First Time users on how to install Google Chrome. (Not available from the appCenter)
Need to use the terminal:

Add key:

wget -q -O - https://dl-ssl.google.com/linux/linux_signing_key.pub | sudo apt-key add -

Set repository:

sudo sh -c 'echo "deb [arch=amd64] http://dl.google.com/linux/chrome/deb/ stable main" >> /etc/apt/sources.list.d/google-chrome.list'

and install:

sudo apt-get update 
sudo apt-get install google-chrome-stable