Let's just say my ace new job is 'not an immediate start' and leave it at that for now. In the meantime, much twiddling of thumbs would ensue, were it not for the fact that other stuff is quite happily managing to fill up all my available time. In the last weekannabit I've managed to get Mars on a walk round the park, which I thought would never happen. I've been to see Tool and Mastodon, cured Lee's laptop to the tune of 42 spywares and 19 virii, dismantled 2 PCs (I PII 233 with 64 meg onboard (Alan's old machine I gave him) and one PIII 330 with 256 onboard), using those bits made one WinXP mainbox (with Firefox, MediaMonkey and installed modem for when Alan is ready (thus bringing the machine he uses up to the same OS spec everyone around him is at, and giving him the plug and play functionality he needs for his new media players) and one miraculous little Xubuntu Dapper box (which needs a keyboard and display badly as Mars will want her mainbox's periphs back eventually) that I can't believe is running in 64 megs. It is lush. Granted, I can't do anything with it because I'm still halfway through learning how to confgure WPA-PSK authentication over my 802.11g network but I've noted the following so far:
1: In Ubuntu (any flavour) they've got an OS that installs for me with less hassle and in less time than WinXP.
2: The UI is every bit as good
3: When something goes wrong on the install on XP, you try every combination of settings imaginable until it works, or you reformat the universe and start again with a new cup of tea. In Linux, you f2 into the console and command it to stop wasting its time on the little thing (and it tells you which!) that is halting progress and deal with it later from the comfort of a GUI.
4: Using Xubuntu I feel like I'm directly using any given aspect of the computer. Take this wifi config - still not working but when I was teaching myself wifi on Win32 platforms I read and read and clicked stuff and got advice and so on - lots of 'have you tried?' and 'what did it do when...?' and such. With Linux, you 'sudo' into the text editor from the command line, you look at the script for networking and see what it says. Every problem I've solved so far has involved looking at the actual process the computer is following and giving it a better one, not hoping that this or that util or wizard is going to do things properly for you. I'm not a logical bloke, but computers run on logic and this OS seems to be allowing me to apply logic to get results. It is liberating, but I've a long way to go. My mainbox remains WinXP. Well, that's a whole 'nother paragraph....
Hello. You made it. Shall we go on? Right - I 'b0rked' my mainbox 'through teh face'. Really hard. By trying to dual boot Ubuntu. I believe the term is 'lol'. It wouldn't have been a problem but my main HD is a tad old and has had the same FAT32 main partition on it since 2001. As such, when the Ubuntu installer hit a glitch at the GRUB installation point, my master boot record was nuked. My Winstallation (see what I did there?) was still on the drive and mercifully my media drive was intact in glorious 'other disk entirely' NTFS sanctity, but my bootable XP installer disks (wot I made myself and everyfink - because I bloody had to, to get it on Alan's new PC) weren't allowing me to repair it properly, nor to repartition, nor to reformat, nor anything. Mercifully, I'd just built the other one for Alan and a hasty Usenet raid later I had an ME boot installer in my mainbox's drive, ran that, got to the old-style command line (why remove that from XP? Scared someone might take control of their own machine, Bill?) and did a proper job on my old c: drive, nuking my XP install and repartitioning into one big, new, gleaming NTFS 40 gigs fresh for Windows, which has reinstalled and is running like a dream, as 4 years of software which never quite left the registry or hard drive during uninstallation have no actually gone, and (just like Linux) half my data isn't comprised of useless libraries no application wants, lying around the backstreets of my system like yesterday night's kebab wrapper.
Also, I went to a party and it was good.
1: In Ubuntu (any flavour) they've got an OS that installs for me with less hassle and in less time than WinXP.
2: The UI is every bit as good
3: When something goes wrong on the install on XP, you try every combination of settings imaginable until it works, or you reformat the universe and start again with a new cup of tea. In Linux, you f2 into the console and command it to stop wasting its time on the little thing (and it tells you which!) that is halting progress and deal with it later from the comfort of a GUI.
4: Using Xubuntu I feel like I'm directly using any given aspect of the computer. Take this wifi config - still not working but when I was teaching myself wifi on Win32 platforms I read and read and clicked stuff and got advice and so on - lots of 'have you tried?' and 'what did it do when...?' and such. With Linux, you 'sudo' into the text editor from the command line, you look at the script for networking and see what it says. Every problem I've solved so far has involved looking at the actual process the computer is following and giving it a better one, not hoping that this or that util or wizard is going to do things properly for you. I'm not a logical bloke, but computers run on logic and this OS seems to be allowing me to apply logic to get results. It is liberating, but I've a long way to go. My mainbox remains WinXP. Well, that's a whole 'nother paragraph....
Hello. You made it. Shall we go on? Right - I 'b0rked' my mainbox 'through teh face'. Really hard. By trying to dual boot Ubuntu. I believe the term is 'lol'. It wouldn't have been a problem but my main HD is a tad old and has had the same FAT32 main partition on it since 2001. As such, when the Ubuntu installer hit a glitch at the GRUB installation point, my master boot record was nuked. My Winstallation (see what I did there?) was still on the drive and mercifully my media drive was intact in glorious 'other disk entirely' NTFS sanctity, but my bootable XP installer disks (wot I made myself and everyfink - because I bloody had to, to get it on Alan's new PC) weren't allowing me to repair it properly, nor to repartition, nor to reformat, nor anything. Mercifully, I'd just built the other one for Alan and a hasty Usenet raid later I had an ME boot installer in my mainbox's drive, ran that, got to the old-style command line (why remove that from XP? Scared someone might take control of their own machine, Bill?) and did a proper job on my old c: drive, nuking my XP install and repartitioning into one big, new, gleaming NTFS 40 gigs fresh for Windows, which has reinstalled and is running like a dream, as 4 years of software which never quite left the registry or hard drive during uninstallation have no actually gone, and (just like Linux) half my data isn't comprised of useless libraries no application wants, lying around the backstreets of my system like yesterday night's kebab wrapper.
Also, I went to a party and it was good.
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