On the plus side, I have a reasonable hope that I’ll be able to send in the old motherboard (which I’ve determined was the point of failure) and have it replaced under warrantee. It’ll only cost $60, plus shipping both ways. Now, this “paying to have a defective product fixed under warrantee” bit pisses me off–but even though the expected cost after shipping is around $100, it’s still less than half the cost of just buying a new one.

On the minus side, I was playing with sound options on the Linux box because there was no software mixer. This meant that while I could play music (via XMMS), and I could watch videos (with MPlayer), if I wanted sound in my videos I had to shut down XMMS, spin around three times, and chant voodoo incantations in order to get it to release its lock on the sound card. When the video was done, I had to do the exact same process in perfect reverse to be able to play music again. Do you have any idea how hard it is to chant voodoo incantations backwards?

Given that this is a stupid state for things to be in, I was trying to work out some way to arrange for various sound-producing programs to acquire feeds into a mixer, instead of locking down the sound card. Unfortunately, my tweaks somehow meant that I could no longer log into my account. Don’t ask me how that happened (I was only playing around with a text configuration file in my home directory called something like .alsarc) because I don’t know. Normally, this would be no big deal: I’d log in as root, delete or move the configuration file I had modified, and then log in as myself again.

Only, you can’t log in as root on Ubuntu. Even if you’ve set a password, the security manager just doesn’t let you log in.

So I get to install a whole new operating system again. I think I’m going back to FreeBSD; at least I have manuals for that. Not everything is lost; I booted a Knoppix CD I happened to have lying around (they’re handy for emergencies) and managed to copy the contents of my home directory to the external hard drive, from which location I expect to be able to get to them later. Still, my computers have apparantly decided that this is the week to piss me off.

(I realize that I could just delete the offending file from within Knoppix and continue using Ubuntu, but I’ve become rather disenchanted with that distro after using it exclusively for the last few days. Its major downside is that, though many things Just Work, the way in which they work tends to suck.)

The only language I’ve ever used in which the graphical element has been fairly unobtrusive and simple was PHP. I suspect that it’s because PHP was built from the ground up to take the input and output functionality of HTML and run with it, as it merges very well with HTML code and fits the general style, and has no other obvious input or output methods. This was a good choice, because HTML itself was designed to be a interface design specification language of a high degree of power and flexibility, yet simple enough to be hand-coded without significant trouble.

The reason I’m mentioning all of this is that I’ve started to look into the how and why of creating a graphical desktop application for Linux. I would be doing this for Windows, but I no longer use that operating system. This is all leading into the creation of the graphical SCP client eventually. Right now, I’ve created a rather useless hello world program which, nonetheless, runs on the KDE desktop. However, I was following a tutorial rather closely. Next on the menu: creating a program of my own design and specification (a simple digital clock which I can resize with the font size adjusting accordingly, perhaps with alarm and/or analogue mode).

Why do I program and learn during summer vacation, when I could be mindlessly bent on relaxation? I’ve relapsed into a seminocturnal sleeping schedule, and there are only so many novels I can read…

Since it was a video problem, and my 3d accelerator is the most relatively ancient piece of hardware on my machine, I figured I could solve the problem by upgrading the video card I am using. I acquired a cheap secondhand Geforce 2. I put the system together. I booted, and everything was fine. Until just after Windows had finished booting, I had logged on with my username and whatnot, and I was waiting for the various miscellania to finish loading to I could adjust the video settings back up from 8 color and 320×240 resolution… the screen goes black with a blinking cursor in the upper left hand corner.

I reboot a few times, the same thing happens each time. I try disconnecting the patch-through cable from the DVD hardware decoder. None of this works. I talk to some people around the house, turn it over to one of them in exchange for letting them use my copy of the game.

They futz around with my system for hours. Put in a different cheap secondhand Geforce 2 in case it’s a hardware problem. Install Windows XP in case it’s a driver issue. Nothing helps.

So now, the game still doesn’t run, I’m back with my old video card, and my computer is in a million pieces strung together with the internal wires. It looks like what you see in war movies, where the injured soldiers are holding their abdomen in–except that in my computer’s case, it has no arms, so everything is just spilled everywhere. The only thing that’s really changed is that now I have a new operating system. And it’s one that I don’t actually like.

Someday, some time in the future, I will get a new computer. When this happens, i will pay the premium for all-new components, with knowledgable technicians to put it all together. Because I don’t really want to deal with hardware; I just like playing with software.

The funny thing is that I was always sort of assuming that it was simple laziness keeping me on my platform. However, the more I look into it, the more it seems that Windows, as much as people complain about it, isn’t the pure evil that everyone gripes about.

Start reading posts from this thread on Slashdot. If you don’t know already, Slashdot is a place where people who like computers tend to get their news. It’s a place where Linux, MacOS, and various other operating systems are enthusiastically supported. But there are a whole lot of people who post here and say that it’s more than the games keeping them using windows.

The biggest thing, of course, is the games. I’m going to generalize a little here, though, and say that games are just the most obvious example of the real category people are thinking of here: high-end applications. Whether you’re looking to run Dreamweaver MX or Unreal Tournament 2003, these products are developed, designed, and tested for Microsoft Windows. Linux and Mac releases, when they exist at all, come out months or years after the windows release; they are buggier and less well supported… basically, in most cases they’re a port, not an actual development effort. If I were to move to another operating system, I would have to find replacements, or just do without. And I get the distinct impression that without significant effort, it would end up being the latter.

But it’s not just the big, flashy software that I would need to go without. The everyday normal stuff would also need to change. Things that are running in the background right now, because they’re useful: trillian, winamp, eudora… I don’t believe that any of these have linux versions at all. Are there replacements? Of course. Would it be a pain to find and obtain replacements for all of these? A major one.

And then there’s the matter of the system shell itself. Don’t get me wrong, I loved dos and was amazed when Windows 95 came out and you no longer booted to a command prompt. I don’t mind tinkering around with a textual interface, writing scripts and mucking about with regular expressions. But we don’t live in a text-only world anymore; you have to use GUIS. It shouldn’t be a problem, as a well designed one is snappy and easy to use. But the only linux GUIs that I’ve seen, frankly, can’t hold a candle to Windows. Even the slashdot folk agree; they’re simply not as clean or as intuitive. Macs have a better case going for them, but though they’ve got talented designers and programmers, I personally disagree with many of the design decisions that they made. I’ll get into that in another post… It resolves to the fact that in terms of interface, I simply prefer Windows 2000. It’s certainly not the best design I can think of, but it’s the best one I’ve seen actually implemented.

I would love if linux (or any available OS for that matter) was stable, well-designed, and widely supported. I’ve just yet to see any that meet those qualifications. As far as I can tell, Windows 2000 is actually the best approximation out there. Which is kind of surprising,..

I dunno. Read this. It’s a good article. And it’s a goad to anyone who knows how to program at all…