Wednesday, July 07, 2004
Tales from a war-torn hard drive
Last night marked the first skirmish in my war against Linux: the battle against Mandrake. It was basically a spur-of-the-moment thing spawned by getting a huge lag spike in City of Heroes. Since I know my computer is capable of running the game, but Windows frequently informs me that it has virtual memory issues while running City, I am thinking my lousy performance is the result of either Windows or my net connection. I have DSL through Bell/Sympatico, so I should be ok on that front, which re-enforces Windows as the culprit, or at the very least points to Windows inflating what might be an otherwise minor problem.
So I resized my partitions and installed Mandrake all right, but a bunch of my hardware decided to show that it set up fine during install but not work when the system was running. Things like my CD drives, which irked me, as they are somewhat important. Also, despite putting its best foot forward, KDE is still the devil. See, it's all because it tries to be a happy, all-encompassing desktop environment, just like Windows. Since it emulates Windows in a lot of things, I tend to expect it to work like that for everything, and when it doesn't and I have to struggle to fix things, I don't like it. If, however, I use something like fluxbox where the majority of interaction with the system is though terminal windows, I know I am on Linux and I know more of what to expect. I think this is all a result of being firmly entrenched in the Microsoft camp for so long, and while it annoys me, I am somewhat resigned to it. Therefore, having been forced to retreat from using Mandrake*, I will reattempt to install Gentoo, this time armed with documentation and a previous attempt to install it! I will be victorious, now if only out of spite. I am still leery of some of the more in-depth configuration options though, but I'll tackle those as I get to them.
* I find it ironic that it is Mandrake's attempt at newbie- and user-friendliness that is causing me to not use it. That, and the fact that it didn't work flawlessly from the get-go and I was not willing to wrestle with it. It is even more ironic since I will likely have to do even more wrestling with Gentoo than with Mandrake.
Nothing has jumped out at me from the Internet to share, so I am wanting in the links category. I might have some later though, as I haven't gone through my Bloglines clippings in a while. I tend to save some of the more media-intensive ones like movies and Flash apps for viewing at home (can't look like I'm slacking too much at work...).
Otherwise, this day is being interminable, and I should go back to being tortured by it.
¶ 2:26 p.m.
Last night marked the first skirmish in my war against Linux: the battle against Mandrake. It was basically a spur-of-the-moment thing spawned by getting a huge lag spike in City of Heroes. Since I know my computer is capable of running the game, but Windows frequently informs me that it has virtual memory issues while running City, I am thinking my lousy performance is the result of either Windows or my net connection. I have DSL through Bell/Sympatico, so I should be ok on that front, which re-enforces Windows as the culprit, or at the very least points to Windows inflating what might be an otherwise minor problem.
So I resized my partitions and installed Mandrake all right, but a bunch of my hardware decided to show that it set up fine during install but not work when the system was running. Things like my CD drives, which irked me, as they are somewhat important. Also, despite putting its best foot forward, KDE is still the devil. See, it's all because it tries to be a happy, all-encompassing desktop environment, just like Windows. Since it emulates Windows in a lot of things, I tend to expect it to work like that for everything, and when it doesn't and I have to struggle to fix things, I don't like it. If, however, I use something like fluxbox where the majority of interaction with the system is though terminal windows, I know I am on Linux and I know more of what to expect. I think this is all a result of being firmly entrenched in the Microsoft camp for so long, and while it annoys me, I am somewhat resigned to it. Therefore, having been forced to retreat from using Mandrake*, I will reattempt to install Gentoo, this time armed with documentation and a previous attempt to install it! I will be victorious, now if only out of spite. I am still leery of some of the more in-depth configuration options though, but I'll tackle those as I get to them.
* I find it ironic that it is Mandrake's attempt at newbie- and user-friendliness that is causing me to not use it. That, and the fact that it didn't work flawlessly from the get-go and I was not willing to wrestle with it. It is even more ironic since I will likely have to do even more wrestling with Gentoo than with Mandrake.
Nothing has jumped out at me from the Internet to share, so I am wanting in the links category. I might have some later though, as I haven't gone through my Bloglines clippings in a while. I tend to save some of the more media-intensive ones like movies and Flash apps for viewing at home (can't look like I'm slacking too much at work...).
Otherwise, this day is being interminable, and I should go back to being tortured by it.
¶ 2:26 p.m.
