Zhanga: October 17, 2005

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Monday, October 17, 2005 (1 comment)

Oops. I would have updated earlier, but I installed Linux and completely b0rked my Windows installation. So I had to reinstall both.

I installed Fedora Core (Linux) on my laptop a few weeks ago, and I've gotten everything on it to work as well as or better than its previous Windows equivalent (music player, office suite, etc.) except for suspend, but that's the crappy ATI driver's fault and they're supposedly working on it. So I decided to give Linux a try on my desktop (no ATI), too. (And you should too.)

Well, Mandriva Linux is supposed to be the easiest distro to use, and the new version (2006) came out less than a week ago, so I decided to give it a try. BAM! It fried the contents of my hard drive in such a way that neither it nor Windows would boot, and recovery tools had no effect. Retarded. I saved most of my data, though.

So I reformatted my drives, repartitioned, etc. so that it would work. Installed XP, then Mandriva again. Everything worked ok. Mandriva wasn't hard to figure out initially, but it was a little more annoying than Fedora. For example, it kept asking for the dumb root password and wouldn't cache it, so the initial configuration was a pain because I had to type that password 50 times every 10 minutes.

But at least things worked pretty well... that is, until I decided to install the Nvidia (how do you capitalize that?) drivers for my Geforce. I didn't actually get to the installation part, which I'm sure would have been a huge pain because it involves recompiling the kernel. So... what caused me to not install those drivers?

On the Nvidia home page, there is a Flash animation. Firefox (and every other browser I know of) doesn't ship with a Flash plugin, so you have to download it. Well, Firefox happens to have this nifty plugin finder thing that installs plugins for you with 3-4 easy clicks on the "Next" button. Works fine for Flash on XP, and works just as well in Fedora. Actually, the only thing I've noticed that it doesn't work perfectly for is Java, in which case it links you to the Java download page. It takes about 10 seconds to install Flash from the first click to completion. I tried this on Mandriva, and it failed the first two times. The third time, it said that the Flash 7 player was available... but it's for paid subscription members only.

Back to Flash. Let's think about this for a second. The Flash player is FREE. It's free for every operating system that it runs on, including Linux. But Mandriva doesn't let me install it without paying? Even Microsoft, the most greedy entity on the planet, lets me install Flash player without paying. I guess Mandriva is setting new standards in greediness.

In order to get Flash to work, I'd probably have to take the free Fedora RPM and hack it into shape so that it'll work on Mandriva. Either that or somehow (illegally) obtain the source code and compile it. Do I really want to go through all this trouble for something that takes 10 seconds on Fedora, and even on Windows? No.

Two hours and a reformat later, Fedora was running. And it didn't destroy Windows. As a side note, the Nvidia drivers for Mandriva are available in an RPM that doesn't involve recompiling anything. Of course, this is available only if you pay. Not so on Fedora. All I've gotta do on Fedora to install those drivers is type one command and push "y" once.

Another reason Mandriva sucks: I tried running the update program, but it failed the first few times because its default update sources point to servers that have updates for the 2005 version. I had to manually type in addresses for updates to Mandriva 2006. Firefox, incidentally, was one of the updates. Interestingly, Mandriva 2006 (released to the public Oct 13) comes with Firefox 1.0.6. I ran the update and it just gave me a slightly newer Firefox 1.0.6. Firefox 1.0.7 was released by Mozilla on Sept 21. Why does Mandriva not have it? The Fedora software repository has had it forever already.

Conclusion: Don't use Mandriva. If you're going to get Mandriva, just use Windows instead because they're both about as gay. And I think it's easier to pirate software for Windows than for Mandriva...

</tech rant>

Ok, now to the normal stuff. I only wrote that because making me pay for free software is ridiculous and it seriously pissed me off.

After that hard-earned bank deposit of last Thursday, I wanted to make sure my efforts weren't futile, so I checked online after business hours on Friday. Checks deposited after 2 PM are supposed to be credited by the next business day, so Friday night should have been enough time. Well, it wasn't there, so I called because it was a large sum of money. The lady (she didn't sound Indian, so either she's about to lose her job or she's moved to India so that she can get a job) told me that they server is down and that updates are being processed. She said it'll be done updating in 5 hours, at about 7 AM.

Do banks really only update their sites once every 24 hours? You figure that 60 years after the ENIAC, they should have data systems sophisticated enough to handle real-time data. Well, I'm probably digging deeper than my shovel's capable of. In any case, as soon as I hung up, I pushed refresh and noticed that my account balance had increased by the amount of my deposit.

Dan just muttered something to me as he walked out of the dorm. I have NO IDEA what came out of his mouth, except that I heard "... qaeccmu four hours matnouiakideoths." at the end.

In other news, I got my project proposal for stat back. I noticed that everyone else's papers had red all over them, with comments and stuff. Mine only had two sentences, and the second one was, "Let's talk more about your procedure."

What a great sign! Well, at least it's only worth 5%. I'll just ace everything else in the class... right? Right.

I might write more when I get back. I'm going to talk with the professor now. He's a nice guy, so at least I'll come out alive, even if I have to start over on this project. (This is in stark contrast with some teachers I know. Yes, that's you, O Lard Devil.)

Zhanga: October 17, 2005

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