My dad's main computer is an Athlon XP 1400 (I think) and is about 5 years old now. This past year it has been very flaky, resetting itself while you're using programs, crashing etc... I looked at it a few times but tried to avoid formatting as much as I can because I really really hate doing that. It's 3-4 hour job backing up their files, format, install windows, a billion updates and reboots, reinstall all the programs again, all their files, printer, cameras, etc...

At one point we realized the motherboard was a bit loose and could move around. There was also a screw behind the motherboard! If you give the computer a knock it would reboot. I got that fixed, but the computer was still flaky. Last resort is to format. My dad decided to just go out and buy a brand new computer with Vista. We went through a bit of hell getting a wireless card working but were successful in the end. I copied 2.7 GB of data from the old computer onto it,then took the old computer home. It will become my sister's computer in her bedroom.

I'm going to try a bit of an experiment with her. When she gets it back, it will have Kubuntu linux on it. I use Ubuntu at home, the first linux distribution that shocked me because of how usable it was out of the box. Ubuntu uses Gnome which is a bit minimalistic compared to KDE.. so I decided she'll get Kubuntu. I'll load it up with Firefox, an MSN Messenger client, Open Office, Flash 9 plugin, Sun Java 6 JRE, and support to access the windows printer attached to the new computer. I think she'll find it very usable, and maybe my dad will give it a try too. I hope he will realize that linux isn't what he thinks it is. He doesn't realize that after 10 years it has become so usable now that even he could use it. Even if it was usable, he would rather Windows anyway.

Putting linux on my sister's computer will almost guarantee I'll never hear from her about it again. There won't be viruses, worms, she can't really screw it up because she'll use a normal user account, etc... If she does have a problem, it will probably be a hardware problem.

One of my bbs users has been paging me a lot to discuss the Maximus bbs software, which is being ported to linux. He used to run a 36 line Maximus BBS running on OS/2 machines in Australia.

Tonight I found out he runs a linux consulting company helping companies get set up with Linux servers, training individuals and groups, and helping with maintenance. He tells me that the trend in the Linux world appears to be towards debian based distributions such as Ubuntu, since RedHat does not support desktops anymore.

A few months ago when I bought a laptop, I decided on SuSE 10 since it uses an RPM based package manager. I like RPMs because when I want to download someone's program that isn't already available in my package manager, there is often an RPM available for it. At the time I think Ubuntu was the #1 most popular distro, and SuSE was #2.

This guy says Ubuntu and Debian based distros are the future. Sun is a supporter of Ubuntu and sells it on their servers. James from work uses it, and some other people I know. I'm now thinking when my new servers arrive and I set up Solaris 10 on them, I will wipe my laptop and put Ubuntu on it. SuSE works great and the switch is almost pointless for me.. but while I'm installing OS's on two other computers I might just do the laptop to make myself happy. Plus this will be a good opportunity to get Vista Beta 2 installed on the other hard drive before installing Ubuntu so I can get GRUB booting both OS's properly.

Here is a quote from LinuxWorld : "Ubuntu is arguably one of the most important -- if not the most important -- GNU/Linux distribution on the planet and will soon blaze new trails in support for SPARC-based servers," said John Fowler, Sun's executive vice president of systems in a statement

Recently I looked into getting my wireless card working in linux. I got it working using the Windows driver + ndiswrapper fairly easily. The trouble I was having is when you unplug the network cable it doesn't automatically switch to wireless. If you manually ifup wlan0, then ifdown eth0 it could not use the network until you ifdown wlan0 then bring it back up again. After many hours of head scratching I've found out what is happening. When you ifdown eth0 (wired network) dhcpcd modifies resolve.conf and removes the DNS entries it got from DHCP earlier. It also modifies the routing table and removes the default gateway which was also loaded from DHCP earlier. If I bring up my wireless first, then shut down wired, it leaves me in a state with no DNS settings and no gateway. If I first shut down eth0 then bring up wlan0 it works.

Sooo... how can I automate this so it works flawlessly like my good friend Windows XP? For starters I was able to get something called ifplugd working which detects when a cable is plugged in or unplugged. It the does an ifup or ifdown on the appropriate interface. Two problems. 1) my keyboard has a key to turn wireless on and off. Linux detects when it goes off, but not on. 2) that still doesn't solve the problem where only the first dhcpcd instance can set the DNS and routing information.

Hours more googling... there are settings I can use that tell it that only one of the two interfaces is allowed to update routing and DNS information. They described my problem exactly and offer this is a solution?!? Useless. There are other programs out there like wparoam and more I can't remember. SuSE doesn't have packages for any of them so I'd have to install an RPM and configure it manually instead of through the GUI. This might screw up the GUI since it's no longer standard stuff.

It turns out many people have this problem and the one solution seems to be to use wpa_supplicant. You can configure a work access point, home access point, etc.. though it's only for wireless. I don't yet know if you can use that in conjunction with ifplugd or not

See this bullshit everyone has to go through with linux? Again it's 3am and I'm STILL trying to figure out this wireless crap. This is the second night I've stayed up until 3am working on it and no solution. I feel another linux rant coming but I'll try to spare you. I'll just say I WANT to love linux.. what the hell are 99% of the programmers thinking with all these crap 1980's command line/text file cryptic configuration tools that NEVER work when you follow the instructions without fiddling and googling for hours first.

What's cool about Mac's is that one company controls the hardware and OS so you never have these kinds of problems. Everything just works. And in my experience, Windows too.

"Why pay like the rest when you could settle for less" should be the motto for linux. Uh oh here comes another rant. heheh I'll keep it short. I'm in the process of making my primary desktop linux again. I do this every year or two since 1998 to see if linux has come far enough for me to accept it as my primary desktop. Here are some of the troubles I've encountered so far:

• 64 bit linux doesn't support my video card, so I get a black screen when I try to start the installer. I ended up installing 32 bit linux on my 64 bit laptop.
• I bought a webcam with built in mic hoping to use it with Skype and amsn. I read that it does work on linux with special drivers. I'm willing to spend a few hours to get that working. But now I find out Skype for linux is many months behind the Windows and Mac release and doesn't support video. aMsn has a voice and video plugin, but doesn't support MSN messenger. Also if I want to use the USB microphone (built into the webcam) I have to download the source code for a Skype patch because Skype for linux assumes your microphone and speakers are on the same card. Default install of Suse Linux doesn't come with make and the compilers etc..

• I wanted to find a simple terminal like HyperTerm that would let me see BBS's the way they were meant to be seen. Konsole supports Zmodem which is excelent, and I hear the key to displaying BBS's properly is getting the right font. Well it's not as simple as finding a TTF and installing it. The only one I found came in a bunch of weird files and instructions to put them somewhere. I look there, and similar files are stored in a different way. I won't explain. I left this for later.

• Firefox does something really weird. It seems when Im near the bottom right of my touchpad, not always, but sometimes it goes all the way back to the first page I was looking at when I opened the browser. Firefox settings are also different from the ones on Windows and the one installed with the latest Suse Linux is really old.
• Apprarently no support for the wireless card in my laptop, though I hear using ndiswrapper and half the hair on your head, you can make it work with the windows driver.

I have yet to look at samba again, though I suspect that won't be as hard since I've been working with that for years. I need to set up a dns server on my server computer because linux doesnt know about computer names, though windows does.

I'm going to work through all of this though.. I do like linux, just not as much as I like Windows XP because I have to settle for less when it comes to the quality of software I use, and hardware support is still a bitch. I remember when I was 15 or so telling my dad that Linux is going to replace Windows one day. That was almost 9 years ago. Don't blame it on me the user.. I'm not a linux newbie and have almost a decade of linux battle scars. I just don't always follow the crowd bashing Microsoft and worshiping Linux.

I sometimes ask why I bother going back to linux again and again. I WANT to love linux is the main reason. Why? Because a handful of companies embrace linux. Why again? I don't know why. I just don't understand. I do understand the benefits for a server, and my server computers have been linux since around 2000 or so. But for your main workstation, if you are a typical computer user, the $150 or whatever you pay for windows gets you fully functional software and hardware support with no hassle. Sure there's the IE and Outlook problems but I don't use either and NEVER EVER EVER have any security or spyware problems. I can go 3 years between formats easily. For those who boast about excellent uptime in Linux (not having to reboot for months), I keep my Windows computers on 24x7 rebooting only when the power fails or I install new hardware. I go months between reboots too. It seems like a brainless choice to me. However I am a computer programmer and I feel I need to keep up to date so my laptop's primary OS is now Open SUSE Linux and I'll be doing all of my non-IJW programming on here. I was going to use Sun Enterprise Studio 8 but I want Java EE 1.5 and EJB 3 support so I'm installing NetBeans Enterprise Preview 5.5 which will eventually become Sun Enterprise Studio 9.

I have an xbox media center and last weekend got linux/firefox running on it. When I turn it on it goes straight into the media center. I can click a button and it boots a lightweight linux and I get a desktop. I can run firefox and go on the web.

I bought myself a really neat wireless keyboard with a built in thumb mouse. The keyboard works, the mouse cursor moves around but it the mouse button's don't! It turns out you have to modify the linux kernel and recompile to click the f*cking mouse!!!!!! It works fine in Windows. Also apparantly in the 2.6 kernel this problem is fixed. However, the support for FATX filesystem (used by xbox) is not properly supported in linux 2.6 kernel and corrupts the partitions. So now what? -- I lose even more hair.