revisiting windows xp

My Linux install finally gave up the ghost. After a foolish attempt to try the Banshee music player from the nrpms repository, I managed to wreck most of the operating system. Random errors about /dev/null would appear on startup, many programs began crashing, a few panel applets just disappeared (presumably they’re crashing too), the screensavers no longer work and Nautilus has taken to hanging at random intervals. It’s quite “old” now in that when FC4 came out I upgraded from FC3, and of course I have fiddled with it plenty over the course of the years (year?), but still, it worked OK before nrpms tried to upgrade me to GNOME 2.12. So I’m going to have to reinstall.

My current dilemma is – FC4 again, or Ubuntu? The ‘Core has ticked me off many times in the past, most notably with their absolutely blind refusal to do anything about software I actually like and use such as the nVidia drivers, or Mono based apps. Meanwhile they bloat it up with Java related crap like Jonas which I’m sure is important for enterprise servers but not for me. On the other hand, I like the security features in FC4, and my dissertation project is likely to be a lot easier with SELinux around. Still, I can always use a chroot/user jail to “pretend” the process is sandboxed and my markers are unlikely to know the difference. So I’m likely to go with Ubuntu.

I know before I start that it won’t be particularly enjoyable. The Badger will introduce as many problems as it solves. Synaptic is better than yum in most respects, but it’s also more fragile. It’s based on Debian too, which means replacing the lovely Anaconda for Debian Installer, and having to deal with the “Debian Attitude”. It also means losing the system-*-config tools that I’ve become used to. The replacements are sometimes better, sometimes worse and sometimes non-existant. Still, only time will tell whether it’s an improvement or not.

on windows

As my last XP install had been toasted by the Bagel virus, and I felt like GAMES!, I decided to blow it away and reinstall. This was a good chance to see how the Fedora and Windows XP installs compared. Short story: Linux does very well here. Long story: Windows is very easy to set up, but bodged detection of my audio hardware, which Fedora dealt with flawlessly. It also has some whacky usability issues in the installer, like not installing Japanese fonts unless you go through about 5 different dialogs and the default recommendations on computer/user naming leading to a mysterious error message.

Windows Update is a much more pleasant experience than yum is – it’s graphical for one, for another yum likes to fail at random and spew HTTP errors to the console. It’s also very slow, and uninterruptable a lot of the time. Going with yum over apt was still one of the biggest mistakes Fedora has made IMHO, and to do it because “Python > C++” is even sillier. Proven software is proven software, regardless of what language it’s written in. Version 6 of Windows Update is also quite advanced technically: it downloads binary deltas in the background when your connection is idle. Something like that for autopackage would be good.

The biggest downside of Windows Update is that it’s only for Windows. I’ve been expecting Microsoft to produce an API for this for years now, yet they never have. It’s a mystery why not: Microsoft survive primarily because everybody uses their APIs and they rarely miss the opportunity to create a new one.

The rest of my setup journey was just as uneventful:

• First stop, install all updates, including SP2 and Windows Media Player 10. Reboot a few times. See that it tried to install an audio driver for me – impressed that online update includes hardware detection and driver installation – unimpressed that it installed the wrong one – even more unimpressed when I find the uninstaller for this driver doesn’t work.
• Next, grab Firefox and Thunderbird. I love Thunderbirds junk mail filtering.

• OK, now I need an MSN Messenger client. I try the official one – BIG mistake – I felt like I was being mugged by marketing executives. Heard good things about Trillian, let’s go try that ….. wow this is pretty ….. now how do I change my display name ….. (15 minutes pass) ….. you have to click the envelople icon wtf.

• Hurrah! Time for some gaming. I’ve heard good things about Second Life, so I grab that and run it. It tells me to upgrade my drivers (twice) so this is when I go get the nVidia and SiS packs. The SiS drivers are a bit confusing, they rely a lot on opaque model numbers. Fortunately they have an ActiveX control that tells me what I need.

• Play SL for a while. Time passes. Lots of time. After a few days I got bored of it, but I’ll write more about SL later. It’s a fascinating thing.

• OK, now I need something to code with and IRC. On Linux I use emacs and ERC for that, so I find a build of emacs CVS for Windows and install it – nicely integrated, spiffy. I install an ext3 filesystem driver so I can access my Linux drive as drive L:, copy across my emacs settings, install PuTTY and away I go.

• Luna is a bit ugly. ReLuna is much nicer, let’s go grab that theme. I have to binary patch uxtheme.dll to install it – second wtf. Even though the theme signing code was cracked almost as soon as XP came out, Microsoft apparently never bothered to remove it. Great. Amazed once again by the atrociously crappy hack that is Windows File Protection.

• Final thing – need a command line. Heard interesting things about Monad, the next-generation .NET command line Microsoft is producing. Read about it, the theory seems sound, replace text based piping with a true object oriented data stream between commandlets, great! Install it (manually resolving the .NET2 dependency) and run it …… argh! It still uses the magical console windows of doom, the ones that you can’t resize by dragging the borders, that don’t support colour or transparency, and which look ugly as hell. It seems in their quest to build the most theoretically asskicking command line ever the boys and girls at Microsoft forgot that you need both a good command line AND a good terminal emulator for a good experience. So I use the “eshell”, which is a UNIXy command line implemented entirely in Emacs Lisp instead.

• Do homework. Sleep. OK, actually all this took more than a day. But at least it’s all set up now.