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2nd scarification, 6 days later »

Windows XP –> Kubuntu –> Windows XP

Before I headed to sleep last night I had prepared to do an install of Kubuntu on my system, and deleting Windows XP once I had everything set up and working. When I woke up today (or tonight rather, as it was 1:30am) I put in the Kubuntu DVD I had burned the other day before and proceeded to boot from it. A minute or two later I was booted into Kubuntu because of the live CD, and started on the installation part seeing as everything seemed to be in working order. 30 minutes later everything was installed and I restarted the machine and booted into Kubuntu again, this time “for real” so to speak. I knew I had a few hours ahead of me setting everything up, but what awaited me was pure agony.

The first issue I ran into was getting dual monitors working. And people wonder why Linux isn’t more popular… Having to manually edit the X.Org config file to get dual monitors working is not something you should have to do, but there I was. Random googling solved the issue, after maybe 30 minutes or so of work my second monitor came to life. Next up, installing Opera, my favorite browser of choice. Uh oh, what’s that dpkg? Did you say “package architecture (i386) does not match system (amd64)”? Really? Oh great. Yea, granted perhaps I should have taken the step to do some proper investigation before I downloaded Kubuntu, but seeing as I have a AMD 64-bit CPU, I found it obvious to download the amd64 labeled iso. But unlike Windows, running 32-bit applications on a 64-bit kernel is not possible. Well, not without 5 hours of work in config files and/or installing stuff with debootstrap-chroot-whatever-the-fuck.

Well Firefox was installed in the mean time, maybe there was some hope about finding a Opera solution later on I thought. So next up, partitioning my NTFS drives and moving stuff around so they’re all formatted as ext3. Guess what? KDE’s partition manager sucks ass and is the most unintuitive application ever. I did an apt-cache search for another partition manager, but alas, all that was available was a command line thing. Not something I was in the mood to work with, I don’t want to see a line that countains any of the words mount, dev/sdx or fstab ever again. Please get away from me. I just want to move my files from my NTFS drive over to my ext3 partition and then format the NTFS drive to ext3 when I’m done moving stuff over. Why make this simple task so incredibly hard?

Later I discovered that the joy of getting the dual monitor setup working was to be short lived. It does not work very well. You know what operating system handles dual monitors perfectly? Windows XP. It’s pretty much flawless. Watching a video in VLC on the secondary monitor and going into full screen mode should do just that right? No Sir. It goes on the main monitor, and in the wrong resolution at that. KDE’s task bar is of course on top of the video all the time, not to mention the titlebar of the video window as well. Full screen? More like 90% screen.

And you know what’s really quite intolerable? Having to manually edit the X.Org config file to get extra mouse buttons working. Then KDE started behaving even more weird, maybe because of TwinView, I don’t know. Popups from programs, including errors, would show down right on the second monitor, way out of the screen’s viewing area, making them both impossible to read and close. Applications kept starting up hugging the upper right border of my main monitor and I started getting pissed off. I rebooted and got back into Windows XP again, and I felt so insanely relieved.

I really want to migrate completely to linux and use it every day. I want to get rid of Windows. But it’s just not possible. Sure, all these bugs and annoying behaviours I ran into could probably have been solved with several hours of google searches and asking annoying questions in help channels on IRC. I don’t want to do that. I want an operating system where all my mouse buttons work, among other things.

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 24th, 2007 at 15:27 and is filed under Computers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

4 Responses to “Windows XP –> Kubuntu –> Windows XP”

epp at February 25th, 200721:51 quote

why do you want to migrate completely?

skint0r at February 26th, 200712:19 quote

Geek factor x10

epp at February 26th, 200718:43 quote

bah ;| linux max overrated

Fihlvein at February 27th, 200710:01 quote

Okay, things didnt go as well as in the happy stories, but basically to me it sound that it fell in two issues: (I’m not going to cry around here, just state the facts)

1. Display settings: yes, there is always a high change to get a headache when configuring dual monitors. You have to blame Nvidia and Ati for not making configuring settings any easier. They both do have a graphical user interface to control settings (did you try it skint?), but they are far from perfect, or like what you have seen in Windows world.

For configuring XORG there is for example “dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg” which is a wizard like dialog. That should satisfy basic needs, like mouse setup. But then again it’s also quite low-level editor. I’m suprised though that your extra mouse buttons didn’t work? Or did they work but you couldn’t remap the button actions? Did you try search for other Linux users experience with your mouse model? I’m sure someone knows a solution.

Anyway, the thing is with configuring display settings that unfortunately if you want something special, you need to know what you’re doing, and it will take some time. I’m eagerly waiting for ATI to finish it’s awesome Catalyst Control Center Linux version. That should be revolutionazing, if it’s at all as good as Windows one.

2. You chose 64bit version, but we talked about this already. 64bit scene just is still in the beginning.

I remember when I started using KDE I was also cursing when I didn’t find any working partition manager. Then somebody told be that use GParted, which actually is a Gnome software, but it’s used eg. on Kubuntu install. But since it’s so powerful and Gnome/KDE software can be used together, solution to that is as easy as “apt-get install gparted”. Of course text based fdisk is quite easy too when you get the hang of it.

Things can get mega annoying sometimes indeed, like I finally managed to fix my sound not being available in certain applications yesterday, but now that I know what my problem was, it’s logical and I learned something again and will not do the same mistake again.

Maybe get back sometime in the future when usability has yet improved more. I’m just the kind of “explorer” guy who likes to follow the progress and evolution so much that I couldn’t come back to Windows, even if I tried. It felt like all the “evolution” stopped right there when I was in the Windows world again, so I had to come back.

My only issues at the moment with Linux are that laptop doesn’t power down properly (ACPI support being under development) and sounds are lagging when running programs under Wine.

It’s a pain to have difficult issues but it’s such a victory delightment when you actually find out what’s wrong and fix it. =)

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