Off and on and perhaps off again

When I bought this baby, it was pretty state of the art. It's still well fast and cool, and still has the most storage capacity I've seen in any laptop, even the new ones. 500gigs. Yeah, it's a doozy. Anyway, it had Vista pre-installed on it, and I honestly wouldn't spent 5 minutes of my life in that OS, so i promptly installed WinXP on there. Now, that was a year ago, and change. Not long after, I installed Ubuntu 8.04, Hardy Heron, on there as well.

In my geek-infused hurry to get Ubuntu installed, I apparently downloaded and installed the 64bit version. Now, this wasn't a problem as such, because I do have a 64 bit processor, and afterall, the OS was minded for a comp like mine. But what I did have problems with, was getting java to work. I just couldn't fucking do it. Off and on over the next 15 months, I tried and tried and tried. So many fora and webpages with solutions. None of them worked for me. It was agonizing.

Now, as such, Java isn't really THAT important to me. I don't use it for a whole lot. Sure, quite a bit of odd pages here and there use it, but I haven't had much use for it besides the one thing I do actually use it for; online gaming. A year back or so, I rekindled my old romance with an online gaming site, because my mom was also getting hooked on it. It has quite a number of games, and all kinds of hoolapaloo in there, and while you don't really gain anything technically, by playing, it's fun and a good place to waste some time. You can play the usual games, multiplayer, backgammon, bingo, card games, snakes and ladders, ludo and a pictionary of sorts. It's faily amusing. But the whole site relies very heavily on Java, meaning as long as I was in Ubuntu, I wasn't able to play. 

I got along fine, but whenever I did want to play, or my mom asked me if I wanted to have a game of whatever, I'd have to change back into windows, and it annoyed me. I didn't really use windows for much else than Java and the occasional game of Civ 4 with a colleague at work. I'd rather stay in Ubuntu for most of the time. So I figured, I'd install the 32 bit version. But by then, I had customized my desktop heavily, and installed all kinds of small nifty programs, as well as sorted pictures and music and video and what have we, and I just couldn't be arsed doing all that over again. So I just sort of let it slip, trying the odd fix for java. No luck.

Then on April 23rd, 9.04 was released. Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope. I was happy. It had the newest kernel, and more cool features. At first I upgraded directly through the OS, seeing as it's all free there's no problem doing that. As such things went spiffy, but I thought it did falter on a few points, mainly on video, where the system would sometimes hang. So I figured, why not go for a complete reboot of the computer installations. I downloaded 9.04 stand alone, and went about reinstalling everything. That included windows.

Installed windows, and formatted both drives in the process. I had, of course, saved everything worth saving beforehand. So, 2x250gb of free space. 50 gigs dedicated for Windows. Since I won't use it all that much, 50 will be enough. A few games, the odd graphics program, and that's pretty much it. I'll have access to my unix files from that partition anyway, so if I need a specific file, getting it won't be a problem.

Installation went fairly smooth. However, getting graphics card to work proved difficult, which I didn't get, since I had no problems at all the year before. I tried many things, including drivers from the Acer website and the ATI website. Both claimed the device didn't match the drivers. I scrambled about, trying to find out exactly what graphics card was in my comp. Radeon Mobility HD 2600, as far as I could see. But ATI.com didn't have a driver specifically for that card. In fact, it seemed they were not aware of it's existence, according to the drop down menus for drivers. Damnation! Oh fuck it. Onwards!

I popped in the 9.04 LiveCD. What a wonderful concept, the liveCD is. You basically pop in the disc, let the comp boot off of it, and you're in a working desktop, looking and functioning exactly as it would, had it been a complete install. Unix people will be familiar with it. I also describe this behavior with Puppy. But alas, the liveCD didn't want to boot here. I clicked the item in the menu that popped up when I booted from the disc, but nothing happened. I had to Ctrl-alt-del it and try again. Tried many times. No luck. ARGH, best describes my thoughts at this time. I had an install of WinXP that worked like a charm, and 9.04 that worked mostly like a charm. I delete them, and install the exact same things, only this time nothing works. What the fuck was going on.

So. The next day, I tried another burn of WinXP. I figured it might have burned wrong or something. Or just not be a proper version, what do I know. The new one installed with no problems either, and while the ATI official drivers didn't work, the ones from Acer did. So that's alright. Things seemed to be ok then. So I popped in the 9.04 liveCD. No luck. Sigh. Thankfully, the guys at Ubuntu (or most distros for that matter) have a solution for this particular problem: the alternate CD image. A text only installer. I downloaded it, burned it, popped it in and booted. Yay. Things got moving. Ubuntu desktop goodness, here I come!

Installation went smoothly. I was in. I was good. Things were almost back to normal. I started moving files and stuff back to the appropriate folders. Then I noticed none of the effects I was used to, were active. Hmm, thinks I. Time to have a gander at the screen compositing program. I mess around in menues for a while. No luck. My loader dock didn't want to work either. And other stuff. Oh now what! Always something, isn't there. Forum searching time again.

Takes me a while, but I finally sort of pinpoint the problem: graphics card. ATI have dropped support for quite a number of cards recently, and Jaunty has suffered because of it. There is some half-assed patch out that might help, but people are reporting problems left and right. I am angry. Why why why. I was so happy. Now I'm sad again.

So it's decision time. I'm at the crossroads now, where I chose. Technically, almost everything works in Jaunty. I can listen to vids, look at music, read and write, surf the web... flash works AND Java (yay), I can use bluetooth and my SD card. I can do almost whatever I want, apart from the two reasons that make out like 50% of why I love ubuntu: the eyecandy. It's not essential for functionality. But it's damn nice to look at, and fun to play around with. I'm guessing somebody someday will fix this ati problem properly, and I'm figuring I should just leave it as it is for now, and wait for that day. My other option is reinstalling 8.04, where things worked like a charm, and then upgrade. I mean, when I upgraded to 9.04 from 8.04 (via 8.10), everything that had worked before, kept working. Only new problem was that video was a little unstable. But then I'm scared I'll lose Java.

Oh well, I'll give it a bit of time. This is why I love messing with unix though. It's frustrating and difficult sometimes, but when things work, you feel SO much better about yourself. It gives me a real sense of accomplishment. And it never stops to amaze me how many people are out there, doing lord knows how much for free, just because they can and think it's fun. That's what the world should be like, for me. Open source and sharing. Hippie and new-age, sure.. But it fucking works... most of the time!