061128 00:09 by iDRMRSR

Yes, I've decided to try something which for me is UTTERLY PERVERSE.

I'm right now downloading UBUNTU 6.10 for installation on one of these spare PC's I have cluttering up the place. The Windows ME which formerly ran it is now no longer supported by Myqrocopht. I could just take the HD out and plop it into my XP box, but this seems such a waste.

Especially since the old machine is actually a nice 1GHZ plus Pentium.

I already know it won't accept XP, and I won't accept spending $100 for another licence...and I hate to throw the thing in the trash, so I'm doing the only other thing that seems sensible.

I am RAPING it with Linux.

Please note that this is an admission on my part that...I abhor Apple something terrible...I'm not that impressed with Vista by any means...and this will give my idle hand(s) something to do in my dotage. That is, keep up to date functionally without expense of any real money.

I can't see how I would turn that old box into my main squeeze BUT you never can tell, I might be closet-gay for Linux after all. So let's just say I'm bi-curious.

Prolly gonna SHIT all over the nVidia video card, though...and I'll be up scouring the net for install hints all night...and end up throwing the thing out in tomorrow's trash anyhow, like I did the last time I futzed with Linux back in 1996.

Wish me luck...

061128 03:57

Already I'm finding out how much UBUNTU SUX for your average Windoze dude.

So, OK, I managed to install it to HD and still keep around my ole windoze partition with all the data. Didn't scrog it all as I thought I would. Dual boots nicely.

Then I got into a catch 22 with the fucking video card driver. It's NVIDIA TNT2 M64. I go to the application installer (graphic) and lo and behold, there is NVIDIA LEGACY DRIVER on the list. I check it off and a nasty message comes back that THIS IS NOT SUPPORTED ON YOUR HARDWARE.

Two more hours of sifting through Google searches and I find some clown who actually wrote a program which you run in Terminal that goes out to Nvidia and yanks their proprietary driver and installs it and configures all the other ninety seven layers of crap between TTY and your monitor which linux imposes.

Well, it worked, and got me into 1280 by 768 mode just as my wide ass monitor required.

Then I go to my MySpace page and I get an error message:

TOTEM cannot play //fd//0

or some such crap like that. Because there is an embedded MP3 file, and UBUNTU is all FREE software but MP3 is proprietary and so...gasp gasp...

FUCK IT. It's too fucking late to deal with this, I need some sleep. I'll have to wait until tomorrow, or maybe the next day if Google is slow, JUST to get Firefox to play a fucking MP3 embedded in a web page.

This is why I say Linux SUX. No bells and whistles work right out of the box. I thought this would be a little better by now.

Yeah, if I was putting up a database server or something gray and odorless like that, yeah, Linux would be OK.

I dunno.

I was going to say "the night is YOUNG", but for "Bob"s sake, it's 4 AM and I just got the screen resolution working.

PS it's slower than Windows ME was, sigh, on the same hardware.

061128 14:58

Well, I give UBUNTU Edgy Eft one half kudo.

My camera flash card reader...JUST WORKED!

My old scanner...JUST WORKED!

I also got the MP3's to play and satisfy TOTEM, whatever that is.

BUT...my WEBCAM...arrgh.

I'm being held hostage by a lone French developer somewhere who has written an application which works for SOME Logitech cams, but mine (device ID 046d:0869) of course fails. I'll have to wait until he finds time not bathing and not changing his underwear, and in that interval I'll prolly grow as much armpit hair as he has, while he codes up a new version.

It gives me great pleasure to install something with the UNSTABLE repository option, too. This cam is stacked up to the ceiling at WalMart. I guess they don't have une WalMart en France, eh?

So I can't post a YouTube video of me running UBUNTU here in the Condo of Solitude just yet. Oh, there's another method (always is) which requires me to cut and paste 35 different commands into a terminal window, covering three and a half pages of text, which might yield a working driver in the end as it attempts to compile every line of C code written by humankind.

Didn't Linux ever hear of INSTALLSHIELD?

Heh, that and Linux is CaSeSeNsItIvE to boot, which to my Windows eyes is grotesque.

Right now I'm about as likely to embrace Linux as Islam, sigh.