Archive for the 'Computers' Category

Didn’t take long

Published
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Meta
on August 5, 2008
in Computers
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Unfortunately, while FreeBSD rocked for the most part, I found I couldn’t live without the few simple things I mentioned previously. As I am temporarily living in a small apartment far away from home, and therefore not about to sign up for cable service, I really need NetFlix Movie Viewer to work. And the YouTube experience left a lot to be desired. The final straw, though, was that despite the advances with Wine, I couldn’t get Quicken H&B to run, nor the scanning functions of my printer/scanner. Those were show-stoppers.

So, I did a factory restore and I’m back on Vista and everything works again.

The world kinda’ sucks.

75% MS Free… again

Published
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Meta
on June 28, 2008
in Computers
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I know you won’t find this terribly interesting, but since I have little else to talk about… I’ll tell you anyway.

I installed the latest stable, 64-bit AMD release of FreeBSD 7… about 6 times now. Luckily, as I’m building the system from scratch and already have all my important stuff backed-up, it’s a very quick process (about 15 minutes).

It’s been awhile since I’ve run this OS, so I’ve spent considerable effort trying out the latest versions of the various desktop environments and window managers out there. Last time I used it, Gnome with Enlightenment was the ‘hot ticket’. But in keeping up (and possibly surpassing) the eye candy of Vista and Leopard, there is Compiz Fusion.

Unfortunately, there isn’t yet a driver for my video card that supports it. For the time-being, I’m running a vanilla KDE 3, but I’m tempted to try to install KDE 4.

So far, the major ‘con’ of the migration has been version conflicts with dependency components when installing things like Firefox. But by the 3rd re-install I learned not to mix using ‘packages’ and ‘ports’. While the ‘packages’ install much quicker, they are pre-built binaries made to be generic. Installing from ‘ports’, on the other hand, means I get freshly compiled apps on my machine based on my specific config. The result is that by sticking with ‘ports’, though it takes much longer to install, everything runs MUCH smoother and faster.

The other drawbacks are:

  • Netflix requires Microsoft’s DRM in order to watch movies online… and the only workaround is to run a full-blown, fully legal/licensed version of Windows in a virtual machine. So I guess I’ll be watching my movies on my laptop
  • Flash support in Firefox on FreeBSD is limited. I installed gnash so I could watch YouTube videos. While it works, it leaves a lot to be desired. I’ll probably experiment with some other options.

Beyond that, I’m pretty happy with it so far.

PS. I’m only 75% free, because I still run Vista on the laptop, though I use OpenOffice instead of MS Office.

Once again, I’m fed up

Published
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Meta
on June 24, 2008
in Computers
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About 6 or 8 months ago I bought a new HP Pavilion desktop. It came pre-installed with Windows Vista. While I liked the interface at first, I really wanted dual monitor support so that I could watch my Scottrade account on one screen and work on the other. Well, Vista didn’t allow for that easily because it couldn’t load two video drivers at the same time… so I “upgraded” back to Windows XP.

I was soooo friggin’ amazed at the performance improvement XP has over Vista. I mean, sure Vista has some nice bells and whistles… but I found I didn’t use most of them. I was sorta’ excited to finally get to use Windows Media Center… but I find myself using WinAmp most of the time instead. Media Center wasn’t as user-friendly as I had hoped.

But, about a month ago I found my XP install a bit cludgy due to all the program installs, uninstalls and reinstalls… but I left my master XP discs at home. My only hope was to install Vista from the ‘recovery sector’ on my desktop. So I rebuilt the thing from scratch.

Long story short, it’s only been a month now, and I’m ready to go back to FreeBSD! I am so frustrated with the slowness and frequent “Would you like to report this error to Microsoft?” prompts whenever Firefox or some other application quits working. As this is actually my primary work computer, I feel lucky that I haven’t yet lost anything important. Good thing I’m a DR guy.