I've been engulfed in a whirlwind of Operating System (OS) storms of late that all began one night when I attempted to install a refurbished 2.5tb hard drive I had snagged for $100. Little did I suspect that Windows XP would throw a major hissy fit over the drive exceeding the arbitrary 2tb maximum decreed by Microsoft. Windows XP was impossible, there was a mathematical boundary based on sectors and MS-DOS and 32-bit, so said all the divines that I consulted.
I probed around the cyber underground and finally found what seemed like a suitable bootleg Windows 7, but it wouldn't handle the large drive either, nothin' doin'. The cracker clown had deleted the EFI boot driver, you see, which is required for Windows to recognize the drive properly. I assume that the EFI driver had been deleted so as not to interfere with the cracker's key-logging, virus and trojan horse programs, because Avast flagged three of the files in the bootleg as being Potentially Unwanted Programs, which is bad news, a headache I don't need. I probed a bit and found that some of the instructions were written in Russian, and that was all I needed to know quite frankly.
Long story short, I wound up returning to an old flame of mine, where OSes are concerned that is, an OS that I have flirted with in the past though our love was never consummated by an actual desktop install. No, we had only experimented together, fumbling under the sheets in a hotel room, this OS and me, and now she was a few years older and wiser, updated and better in every way, and to my surprise, this time we managed to pull it off and have a baby together.
Linux Mint, "Maya", is the lady I'm talking about, my latest excursion into the wild lands beyond the Windows continent. After a mind-boggling ordeal I have finally taught myself enough rudiments to get by in the not-quite-so-friendly-as-media-pundits-would-have-it Linux world. Pundits say Linux Mint is the friendliest flavor of Linux around, and they're probably right about that, but Linux itself is not quite so friendly as Windows XP, not quite as easy to get things done, and I found a number of glitches and hard-to-understand points even in 2012. I think part of the problem is that Linux developers preach to the chorus, the already converted, the sophisticated technorati who make up the Linux userbase, rather than designing with non-techie novices in mind, as Microsoft does.
The biggest problem with Linux as I see it is also considered among the biggest virtues by the Linux establishment so to speak. What I'm talking about is security, which seems to be spelled with a capital "S" and put in bold and underlined everywhere these days. I understand the necessity for some users. But I'm just a weed growing on the side of a rock in the Atlantic Ocean, and I'm not quite as concerned about Chinese spies hacking into my computer. Maybe I should be, I don't know, but so far I have not suffered undue consequences, at least that I'm aware of, from my supposedly "unsafe" habit of leaving my Windows XP computers without pervasive password protection. All right, throw rocks at me and call me a dinosaur, but that's the way I see it. I think it is ridiculous to have to type in a password every few minutes to get things done in the operating system. I counted one day when I was shifting files around and modifying configuration files, and I must have entered my password a dozen times. A password is required to do just about anything besides sneeze and cough. The usual retort from Linux fans is that this makes the OS secure from nefarious Internet hackers. Yes, but I love my Windows XP that lets me get things done in the blink of an eye without typing in the same password over and over. I think somebody needs to give thought to devising a method of security that does not involve constant password input. The truth is that nine out of ten users are going to write that password down on a piece of paper and tape it above their keyboard. How secure is that computer, again? I think the big danger is that it will become secure from the user, not that somebody will burglarize my house and slip a virus into the works, although that is a disturbing thought, and I guess I have rebutted my own argument here.
On a regular basis, Linux Mint 13 Mate 64-bit forgets the screen resolution, which means that it boots up at a resolution of 1600 x 1200, so that the letter "a" looks like a tiny dot on my 800x600 monitor. I have to rely upon memory to find the ATI Catalyst Configuration Manager in the menu, and it is not easy, because I cannot read the text. When I click on the Configuration Manager, the resolution resets itself without explanation. This problem seems to be intermittent without rhyme or reason, sometimes arising and sometimes not. Also on a daily basis, Linux Mint forgets the network permissions for shared folders, which means that I have to set the permissions manually, which requires entering my password from 10 to 20 times. I am now thinking that the price of Windows 7 would be cheap at $10,000, based upon my experience with Linux.
Second problem I had with Linux Mint is that the screensaver kicked in every time I tried to watch a video, and that was funny the first three times it happened, but after that I lost my appreciation of the humor. It took me about three hours to sort that problem out, and the solution isn't really perfect either, but I suspect my hardware configuration is to blame, of which more is to be said.
Third problem is the fault of AMD, I suppose. The ATI video driver for Linux seems to be defective or inadequate from what I have read in the forums. Too many users report that they have a better experience watching videos on Windows 7 than in Linux. I had to tweak and massage and dial down the settings in VLC Player for hours before I was able to play most video files right, and that doesn't count the number of hours I spent getting the sound to output to all of my speakers. There was a steep learning curve, but then again can I say that there wasn't one in Windows XP? I cannot. Windows XP can also be a bear to a beginner. Perhaps I've forgotten some of the banana peels Windows XP dropped on the floor for me to slip on back in the days when I was a Windows novice.
Despite these problems, for the moment I am enduring Linux Mint, because I have this faint hope that once you get past the initial learning curve, you're on easy street, and I've already paid my dues, which amounted to about forty hours glued to the computer experimenting and reading tutorials, many of them outdated, mistaken or partly true. It takes a lot of reading to learn a little bit about Linux, because most sources on the Internet just divulge a tiny secret here or there, almost never the whole enchilada, but one can't look a gift horse in the mouth, because they certainly aren't getting paid to teach me anything, nor have I yet paid for Linux Mint. To find an answer to a question, typically I have to read six or seven articles. Part of the reason is that the OS keeps changing, each new release bringing a tiny incremental improvement.
I think it would be logical for all the distros to merge and all the developers to join as a team to focus on a single distro, one Ring to Rule Them All and In the Darkness Bind Them, you see. In chess, I have learned that in order to win one must focus firepower upon a single point. Again and again this is the path to victory, and so it is in other areas. Focus is the key. When developers are scattered about in different houses reinventing the wheel or spinning their wheels, then of course the player with the focused firepower, that is to say Microsoft, carries the day. But this is obvious.
The payoff for me is that Linux is free, which really matters to me, not because I need to save a hundred bucks, but because it gives me the convenience and flexibility of being able to install an OS on any computer at any time for any reason. That matters when one supports a network of computers, as I do, and occasionally makes builds or upgrades for friends. I seldom keep a motherboard for over five years, but am always on the move where hardware is concerned. No longer do I have to fret about whether Windows is going to work or not, whether I have to buy another license or worry about viruses in a bootleg copy.
Also, Linux handles drives that are greater than 2tb without too much difficulty. I was only able to partition my drive with MBR, which only supports partitions < 2 tb, despite having a UEFI Bios that supports GPT and thus > 2 tb partitions. Linux only gave me the option of slicing my drive up into different partitions, each less than 2tb, rather than having one big partition, which is what I wanted, although I recognize the utility of having a small partition of 60gb or so for the /boot partition.
Linux can do many of the same things that Windows does, it just takes a little extra elbow grease sometimes, and I've got plenty of elbow grease at the moment. I do think it is true that Linux is more secure, although I've taken big chances by connecting to unauthenticated repositories in an attempt to fix some of the problems I encountered.
The Community in Linux appealed to me, and I'm afraid I became so enthusiastic at first that I was just gushing, sharing my little novice insights and observations, until I realized I was talking to myself. At any rate, enthusiasm has its uses, and it fueled my learning. Who cares what strangers think of my lightly-informed postings? I am but one of a crowd of Linux novices and am sure the Linux gurus will ignore igor. I'm a tiny little pipsqueak among the multitude.
For the record, if one is determined to learn the rudiments of Linux, and only if that is so, I do recommend Linux Mint 13 "Mate" 64-bit. Hopefully, you will not have a network, do not plan to watch any videos, do not play any sound files, and do not have a drive over 2tb, and do not have an ATI graphics processor, and if these things are so, you will have less difficulty with Linux Mint than I did. The reason I encountered some of my hassles was due to this odd desire to do something other than enter passwords and troubleshoot random problems all day. It's just a quirk of mine, I'm sure.
Right at the moment, I'm a little burned out after my self-imposed "boot camp," when I was spending just about every waking hour studying and experimenting. Why do we programmers do that to ourselves? It is some kind of sickness. Balance, that's what a body needs. I get tunnel vision sometimes, want to know everything, do everything, fix everything. Oh well, that's just me, I like to be fast, efficient, correct. But now I have everything sorted, I think. I'll probably regain my enthusiasm later.
I tried Open Elec 2.0, oh did I try! I really wanted it to work, because the developers had kindly produced a version specifically for my processor, an E-350 AMD APU. What more could one ask for? It was as though they had made it just for me.
Open Elec proved a waste of time. In the first place installing it absolutely requires a USB stick, and I did not fully realize that until too late. There is no way around that requirement, as far as I can tell, and that was a huge problem for me, because I only had 1 USB stick on hand, and when I attempted to make an install drive for Open Elec, my motherboard fried it, I mean it is junk now, and I threw it in the trash can. I don't know how or why that happened, but the USB stick was a cheap freebie from NewEgg, so there you go.
Next I tried making an install drive out of an actual hard drive, trying to fool Open Elec into thinking the hard drive was a USB drive, but that didn't work either, Open Elec was too smart and refused to cooperate with my nefarious plan. Bad igor! Trying to install OpenElec without a USB stick!
Burning a CD was out of the question, didn't work. Finally I resorted to attempting to make an install drive out of one of my MP3 players, which I recognized after some reflection, is actually nothing more than a glorified USB stick, with an earphone jack and a primitive interface. This was my last-ditch try, and I tried this twice, but it didn't work either, and I don't know why. When I tried to boot, it got a little ways and then halted with a numeric error, which I researched and could not find any information about.
So after five hours of researching and experimenting and hoping and a dead USB stick, I came up with exactly nothing in my attempt to try OpenElec. The developers have a nice web site though, and I can only wish I had their design skills. I like the cool blue, smooth fonts. They are just too cool for school. But I noticed that the comment features on the web site seem disabled. It is impossible to leave any discussion on the wiki and it is impossible to leave comments on the blog, and I think I have surmised the reason why and it is not ultimately a technical reason, although an error is reported. I don't think the developers want to hear from people like me that are having problems, because I think they know full well that their version 2.0 is actually more like 0.2 beta-ware, not quite ready for prime time yet. Enabling comments would likely bring on an avalanche of "how do I's" and "can you help..." and they're not getting paid for anything as far as I can see and have better things to do then spin their wheels assisting the clueless. I think their payday is going to come from preinstalled systems and from business clients. The most an end-user like me can do is help them test out their beta-ware and for that purpose, they are glad to share an .iso, if I have the know-how and the hardware to deal with it, because if I can pull off an install then it is likely I can supply them with valuable feedback rather than clueless novice feedback.
Windows 7 is the OS my brother swears by and with good reason I am sure. He doesn't know about Linux, but is open-minded about it, just as I am. He is dead-set against Windows XP, though. He has been campaigning for me to abandon Windows XP and accept the inevitable, and after a series of debates over the past two years, I plan to accept his proposed Christmas gift of Win 7 Professional 64-bit, because I need to know Windows 7 in order to remain proficient as a techie. I do realize that and I hate being perceived as a dinosaur, even if I am with my useless COBOL and BASIC and Batch knowledge. I'm an unemployed, unemployable dinosaur, a loser that chose the wrong programming languages and paid the price, and some people, like my Father, think I'm lazy because I don't have a computer job, and that point of view irritates me, because I'm anything but lazy. All computer programmers have jobs according to this point of view. I don't expect to persuade critics of the sobering facts in the marketplace. Unless they have been out there looking for computer jobs, they do not know what they are talking about, but are basing their opinions on the marketplace during the boom time, the Clinton years, before the Bush calamity. Some people refuse to update their opinions, but remain frozen in time, living in a different era.
Right now I feel that Linux will succumb to format c: in the near future. I doubt it will be of use to my friends or family due to the steep learning curve when attempting to do even the most mundane and ordinary computer task, such as access a file over a network. The thing is, it is possible to do everything in Windows via graphical user interface, one that is highly refined, consistent, relatively bug-free, and very well documented in numerous web sites including Microsoft's. With Linux, even with the elegant Linux Mint, it remains necessary to resort to the command-line interface in order to do much of anything in regards to OS tasks. I cannot imagine asking my non-techie friends to learn all of the things that I learned through dozens of hours of experimentation and research. So for the masses I believe Windows will remain the OS of choice, and now I have a better understanding of why this is so, although I do wish things were different and I do hope things are different some day.
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