when Ritsuko times out

This is like, what, the 15th time I’ve tried to make Linux my main desktop OS? The crappiest thing is that after installing Vista and using Vista to download and install XP, I find that aircrack-ng only works on Linux for my Intel 3945ABG wireless.

Anyway I had this really great thing going on, where the desktop compositor was working full blast, xv would play my video and the transparency would work on top of the video, and I had this faux brushed metal OS X theme that looked especially good when you could make the window decorations transparent, but not the contents. It looked very new and Leopard like.

Too bad there was this very hard to reproduce lockup that occured whenever I switched from X11 to the console, with syslog-ng not writing down anything that could be used to pinpoint the problem – and every now and then the kernel would say ‘lost sync with /dev/input/mice’ or something and my mouse pointer would go crazy.

Since I couldn’t find a single wireless to connect to, I installed my specially lightened version of Vista, but it still wouldn’t connect to the wireless network. So I had to go to my parents’ friends’ relatives (sigh) downstairs and use their cable connection. I downloaded a light 200MB version of XP that omitted the language files (thank lord, I didn’t want to outstay my welcome see) and downloaded the drivers while I was at it. I never thought downloading via IRC would be this convenient. I don’t even have to fiddle around with ports like in Bittorrent. And I don’t have to wait in long queues, like eMule. Fiddled around with MagicISO so it wouldn’t nag and tell me to buy the full version, burned the image onto the DVD+RW, thereby completely nuking my enormous X JAPAN and m-flo collection (hey, I was in a hurry, I didn’t remember!). Some of the stuff was quite rare, too. It’s not every day you see a FLAC rip of the Ballad Collection. Anyway, I said ‘that will be all for now, thanks guys’ and went upstairs and installed XP.

Whenever I install Windows, I feel like I’m coming home. Just like when you’ve been out there for half the day, with snow and rain and wind all blowing around you, and the goddamn 44 never comes and you stay at the bus stop waiting for an hour before finally braving the wind and cycling off into more snow and sleet. And when you finally get home – ah, that’s bliss.

Yup, it’s bliss. modo installs, and actually works. Good old Firefox. Good old fuzzy little foobar2000. Good old FileZilla client, with its great interface. Good old Photoshop CS3 and Acrobat 8. Good old Diskeeper 9. Good old Haali Media Splitter, good old ffdshow, good old Media Player Classic. Good old deviantart with its deep archive of msstyles for XP. Good old explorer, which can sort images by resolution, unlike everything under Linux except feh and konqueror.

It runs fast, I can tell you that. And unlike Linux, I don’t have to worry about any weird problems that might arise just because I’m using slightly esoteric hardware. You have to give the guys at Microsoft credit: their mouse driver, at least, is totally solid. Never messes up and goes ‘out of sync’. Never gives any weird, unpredictable problems, either, until you hit 3+ months uptime. At this rate, Linux will never catch up on the desktop. And this time, I bet my life on it.

So how come I suddenly have internet access and am typing this up for all of you to see right now? Well basically I got smart. I said: if there are this many wireless networks on this floor, maybe if I go downstairs there’ll be lots of other networks! And hey, there’s a Resident’s Lounge downstairs, and it looks pretty posh. And posh it is…. I’m sitting right here with a nice 802.11b connection right now and a bag of M&Ms, and it’s 3am, with my DVD-Rs all piled up around me. It’s comfy. And I get free internet, courtesy of some guy. Thanks!

0046. Yasunori Mitsuda – [Chrono Trigger CD1 #09] Wind Scene