I recently
posted some frustration over my 4-year-old daughter’s XP machine freezing while I tried to do something as simple as open an .mpg file with VLC. In all honestly, it has been about a year since I reformatted the hard drive but the machine hasn't gotten any heavy use since October. The frustration of the “not responding” XP freeze caused me to yank the plug on the machine and finally come to the conclusion that the instability of XP had pushed me over the edge. It was time for “the orange one”, as my daughter calls Ubuntu.
As an uber nerd, my house is filled with a laptop in the living room, a Macbook in the kitchen, a desktop in this room, an older desktop in that room...computer parts and pieces in pretty much every closet and drawer in the house. My wife, as you might imagine, hates this. Needless to say, at any given moment, you might find yourself bouncing around in Leopard, Windows, or one of the many, many Linux distros I’ve downloaded over the past few years depending on what room your in at the time you find yourself needing a connection to the interwebs.
Anyway, my 4-year-old daughter’s machine, a 5-year-old Dell, has been the primary beast in our home until my October unibody Macbook purchase. So primary, in fact, that when I put the machine in her bedroom for her visits to www.pbskids.com, Netflix streaming, and watching the .mpg files I created as backups for her scratched-beyond-repair DVD collection, the machine was still a triple booter. XP, Vista, and Ubuntu, spread out nicely over a 160GB hard drive.
So in that moment of rage described in a previous post, I made the decision to format the HD removing all remnants from M$ and go completely Ubuntu. 8.10 to be exact. Having installed so many different distros over the past few years, this was supposed to be a walk in the park. Plop in Ubuntu’s live CD, choose install, walk through 7 screens and POW...you’re set. This held true but something this time was different. When Ubuntu came up, I had no wireless connection. How odd! I Google bombed “Ubuntu 8.1 wireless dlink driver” and after hours, really got nowhere. Giving up on that temporarily, I thought “Well if I can at least get the movie library to play in Linux, that’ll make my daughter happy until I can figure out the wireless card thing.” I tried to load an .mpg from my external drive, Ubuntu froze! This, I must say, I have never seen before! I rebooted, tried again, and it froze. I rebooted again, and thought this time I'd copy over the .mpg from the external hard drive to the desktop and play it right from the desktop. Amazingly Ubuntu froze again!!! I've never seen Ubuntu do this before. Actually, I've never seen any Linux distro freeze XP style. Isn’t one of the reasons to switch over to Linux stability?
Frustrated yet again at the world of computers, I went through my distro stack and chose to try out openSUSE. This time, the exact same thing happened, which you can see in a Qik stream I recorded on my Motorola Q,
http://qik.com/video/897059 .
I then continued to go through my
distro CDs trying to find one that would find my wireless card and solve 99% of my problems but none worked. In even more frustration, I pulled out my dreaded XP CD, reformatted the hard drive, and put XP back on the damn thing. And guess what? Surprise, surprise. As soon as XP was back on the machine, the same sort of crazy freezing, non-responsive BS continued. Here’s another Qik stream taken last night as my daughters bounced all over the room and I and my 4-year-old had an OS discussion.
http://qik.com/video/899482
By the time I ended the night last night, I had found the Dlink driver that worked for my wireless card in XP and got connected to the world, downloaded all of the Microsoft updates I could, installed Firefox and VLC, set a "Restore" point so I don't have to go through all this crap again in 6 months when the machine decides to "have an attitude", and that was it. I have not yet had a chance to test whether this install of XP (after multiple CTRL+ALT+DEL “end task” selections on browsing to the external hard drive where the kids movies reside, what you saw in the second Qik video above) actually will let me play a movie or not. I will find out this evening.
So even though we went Ubuntu for a day, and spent another 24 hours or so trying different Linux distros, we went back to XP temporarily...and my daughter wants a Macbook of her very own. Ah, what to do, what to do….
-Corby-