Another Opinion Among Many

RT Cunningham recently wrote about his woes with Windows and his desire to kick Microsoft and its encumbered software to the curb. He is going to try and replace Windows with Ubuntu Linux.

I think that this is great, sort of.

You see, I’ve been using some form of GNU and Linux (or *Bsd) on my desktop compute since I first tried that Storm Linux 2000 disk that a neighbor gave me to play with. I had a hard time with it, as I couldn’t get my Wintel modem to connect to the internet.

Lately, although I am still a true distro-hopper, I have been using Ubuntu as my desktop of choice. The computer I currently have has not had Windows installed on it since I put the parts together. My hard drive was not new when I acquired it and has developed a few bad sectors, so I replaced it. I was running Ubuntu 8.04 LTS, the long term support stable release, on my computer, which had bee upgraded from 6.10 or 7.04, as the releases arrived.

On the new hard drive, I put on Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope), which was sometime around September or October. This was just before the release of 9.10 in November. All of the bugs that had presented themselves in the early months seemed to have been ironed out, except for a sound/video issue in which the sound would totally crap out on me for no apparent reason, freezing up .avi videos. I resolved that by changing a configuration file to not choose the frequency (44,100 or 48,000) and set it at one. Taking the auto off seemed to fix the problem.

9.04 had Firefox 3.0, though, and I really prefer Firefox 3.5, so for that reason alone, I “upgraded” to 9.10 (Karmic Koala). I don’t know why I did this, as I had already tried to install Karmic on its own partition to test it, along about beta 1 or so. It began with sound, but now it has no sound. The desktop is stunning and the themes are improving. Everything seems to work with a nice, fluid flow, but it has no sound. This time I can’t fix it.

The “upgrade” had preserved the sound, but I’ve found a few little glitches that I don’t like at all and, even with diligent googling for the cure, I cannot solve these issues.

• sound and video skip, hiccup, and race or freeze at random times
• flash is unplayable on it
• logging out so another user can log in can cause X to produce a black screen that requires a REISUB or reset to get out of.

This is unacceptable, so my 9.10 spare test distro is now being upgraded to the alpha of 10.4 Lucid Lynx so that I can see if it can be repaired by “progress”. Its happening underneath this browser, as I type. I hope nothing breaks too badly before I submit the article. So far, its down to “about 4 minutes remaining”. I began this about 1/2 hour ago. That is amazing. The time that I upgraded to 8.04, it took all night (as in many hours). Of course, the new policy on upgrades is to disable 3rd party repositories during the upgrade, which likely makes it a lot tidier.

We’ll see. Hopefully, this experiment bears the fruit that I am looking for. Then I might be able to watch a video from beginning to end again.

Update: This didn’t work at all. Lucid Lynx totally broke and now kernel panics when booting into multi user mode. I’ve been updating, hoping that there will be some fix that will miraculously fix it, but I don’t have much hope.

What I did to work around it

After coming up against a stumbling block, such as it was, I looked elsewhere as a temporary fix. I must say that the newest Mepis is well-appointed, sporting a KDE4 desktop that is beginning to show the shine that we once saw in the older versions. I can view and hear video well and outputting the video to my TV set is resolve in a slightly nicer way, with a “widened” desktop, like Twinview did, but without fullscreen windows stretching across both screens.

Ubuntu did do a kernel update with 9.10 and it didn’t seem to have made any difference.  Video seemed to play a bit longer before the sound got lost, but that is all.  What did make a difference, though, was removing pulse audio from my system. Now, without that buggy piece of crap on my machine, video plays from beginning to end without problem.  There’s still an issue with Flash freezing up the browser, but Flash is buggy and a resource hog anyways.

Wow. I missed out on the announcement. World of Goo (the game) is 1 year old as of the 13th of this month. They’ve decided to celebrate with a DRM free version for Mac, Windows, and Linux (gets the newest version,woo!) at a price that you decide. They want to have all of the copies out there actually paid for. Its an addictive, fun game. Go grab it at http://2dboy.com before the 19th. The sale will be over then.

A relative approached me about helping to repair their computer. They have an old IBM Netvista. It had just stopped booting up, and the way that they described the problem to me over the phone, it sounded like the CPU may have died.

When they brought it over, though, it actually was booting to the BIOS screen, but crapping out after when it tried to start the operating system.  This machine had an originally installed copy of Microsoft Windows XP Home edition. The license key was on a sticker on the computer case, which is completely normal.

After a bit of research, I found that others had this same problem, and it had been something that might go wrong with some versions of this model. The solution was to reinstall Windows and claim your machine back. So, I sourced out a copy of Windows XP Home Edition, as I don’t run Windows on my computer at all. A friend lent me his XP Home CD and I proceeded to install the operating system.

I chose a “repair”, as I wanted to try and save the data on the hard drive, since my relatives are perfectly normal and don’t have backups (I bet they’ll make one this time).

As usual, the installation took over an hour to do, but it went without much of a hitch. I got to the screen where Microsoft wants you to enter the license key for your purchased product and it wouldn’t accept the valid key on the computer sticker. This made me angry. Why would they not accept a paid for license key? Continue reading ‘What good is that license key?’ »

Look out, Skye, this is a geeky post!  :lol:  I thought that I’d share a few nice things that have happened to me regarding my experience with Linux.

First, as many know, I have been using a Creative Muvo V100 as my MP3 player lately.  I still really like this player.  It does what its supposed to without any really amount of effort on my part.  This is a good thing.  Since my hard drive dies on the Windows machine, I’ve not installed the software that came with my MP3 player on it.  That’s because I have been using it with my Linux machine.

At first, it was just a drag and drop experience, but now its a bit more interactive. I’ve found a way to ensure that I can at least “see” my player in Rhythmbox, and am downloading Amarok and Exail as I write this.  So, I may have more good news as far as this player goes.

The secret is to put a small hidden file, known as a “dot” file under *nix, on the player itself.  The dot-fil0 is empty. as the name is the only important descriptor.  So, if you have a Creative Muvo V100 1GB MP3 player and its not recognized by your favorite music manager, try placing a file on the player itself called .is_audio_player and you’ll be pleasantly surprised that it is then recognized as a device when you plug it in!

Also, I have to advise that I have been successful in printing to my Epson CX1500 from my Linux machine to the printer hosted by a Windows XP machine.  To ensure that you have this type of success, ensure that you have enabled unix printing support on your XP box and configured your /etc/samba/smb.conf file to use “share” under “security” so that you can print to your printer without having to enter a silly password.

It looks like the Windows machine has died for good.  I was trying to swap over files from my Debian install to the Windows machine so that I could wipe my drive and replace Debian with Ubuntu.  About 1/2 way through the file transfer (over 100mbps ethernet, which is never any where near that, ever), the Windows machine unexpectedly rebooted.  It stopped at the spot where Windows would begin to load, complaining about an unrecoverable error and that I was to hit CTRL+ALT+DEL.  This did not help.

Under the Recovery Console, which I go to by insterting my Windows CD and booting from it, I did a CHKDSK and it also complained about an unrecoverable error.  A DIR request yeilded  no directory but a complaint about an unrecoverable error.

Without any other recourse, I am going to try and reinstall Windows.  So far, after it prechecked the “not quick” install, the installation has been stuck at 39% for the last 45 minutes.  So, its trying to do a bad block check and work around those, I guess.  Its not doing it very quickly, though.

I guess that I’ll have to admit it and work out getting another drive installed.  The DiamondMax 8 that is in there  is the same drive that’s installed in the workstations at work, and our IT guy has replaced most of them already.  Its just time, I guess.  Time to play Taps.

After trying to save my Windows XP installation as it was, I decided that its just ttoo hard on the head to figure out what’s wrong, since I don’t have all the problems layed out to me in a nice little /etc directory that I can edit with my text editor (going to learn vi some day, too).  I’m sure that its as simple as that if you know where to look, but Windows makes it far too cryptic to really figure out what’s going on inside your computer.  So, I’ll do what their own techs would have recommended as a fix after soaking me for several hundred dollars on my credit card over the phone with someone who’s command of my own language would be limited and their command of Windows XP even more limited.  I’m wiping the whole drive and reinstalling Windows.  Lets see if this will fix the issues.

…and why you should think of switching away from Microsoft.

In the last Windows Secrets newsletter, I read about a recent sneaky update that Microsoft has placed on XP and Vista machines.  If this behavior scares you, then go get Linux now.