Windows Pains
My laptop died last night. I was running XP Pro on it, because I need some of the audio recording software (Sony’s Sound Forge), and haven’t found a good replacement on unix.
Well, I can’t find my OEM CD, and I only run legit, these days.
Anyway, Cart before the horse and all that.
Back to the begining.
I’ve been swapping hard drives in and out on my Toshiba Tecra M2. one HDD with XP, another HDD with various distributions. (I almost always run back to OpenBSD, but I am an incourageable tinker.)
Well, I was surfing, finding Solaris Docs, because that’s my latest project. (Sun is giving away free licenses for Solaris 10 for the time being) Windows was updating in the background, and as I hit enter to search for why I’m having such a hard time with Xorg on this machine, the ‘Restart Now’ box popped-up. Oops.
Windows rebooted, telling me it couldn’t find the ‘chkcfg’ and would reboot, then went to a bluescreen with a hex-code ’0xc00000a3′ (I’ll post the correct error later, I think that was the right one).
On reboot, it did the same.
Checking forums using another box told me to boot into safe mode, which wasn’t an option presented in the F8 menu.
I used a non-legit copy of XP Pro to boot and attempted to repair the boot and disk. No joy.
Eventually (2am) I said screw-it, and went to crash.
4am, I woke and booted a live-cd. linux confirmed what I’d overlooked with windows. my 3 partitions were now one.
My gigs of (legit) music, and the itunes catalog of it were no more.
I had a choice to make. OpenBSD, FreeBSD, Debian, Slackware, Pardus, Gentoo, Ubuntu Studio, or Solaris 10.
I slept on it.
Woke again. Saw my lady off to work (I go in later), and sat down to get to work.
– Slackware 12 won by a narrow margin.
– Solaris was out due to issues with Xorg (Kept forcing me into 32 bit mode, when the GeForce 5200 Go supports up to 24 bit).
– FreeBSD was out because I prefer OpenBSD’s mindset (Paranoia is good.).
– Debian was out because of no particular reason . . . Normally, it’s my preferred Linux Distro, but Slackware 11 impressed me.
– Ubuntu Studio was passed-over, simply because I’m having issues burning DVD’s right now. I have been wanting to try it, as it’s geared towards what I need, audio recording. I will most likely try just installing the recording packages.
– Gentoo I passed-on because while it’s a great base, and very well documented . . . I just didn’t want the hassle.
– Pardus worked great as a live-cd, and I love the python-centric development they’ve done. Unfortunately, I could get no packages to install. All attempts failed with ‘This is not a Zip file.’
That left the decision between OpenBSD or Slackware.
What decided it for me were:
+++ Slack recognised my IPW2200 (iwi) wireless, and after copying the firmware to /var/lib it worked, easily.
+++ Slack’s framebuffer gave me a full screen with a nice small font in console, without having to start X and run an Xterm.
— OpenBSD’s chrooted Apache has been kicking my butt, trying to get both python and php to work with it.
— OpenBSD’s framebuffer puts a 800×600 useable window in the center of my 1024×768 screen.
That wouldn’t be that bad, except that the default font is also a bit large to be usefull, day-to-day.
Nit-picky? Yep. Am I satisfied? Nope. I still prefer OpenBSD. I like having Apache, PostGreSQL, a few OpenSSH shells going and have under 30 processes running.
I just have a few things to figure-out, and hopefully the blowfish will be on my laptop again.