Linux Schminux

I am sad to report, that our home's hp (ptui!) desktop computer is back to running Windows. Sigh.

As much as I liked the idea of Linux, and would love to join the Penguin Colony, it just wasn't practical. Madeline went to watch Grey's Anatomy on the net, and don't you know, abc's streaming episode player doesn't support Linux. Neither does nbc's or CW's. I did try to get by running the Window's version of Firefox under wine, but the performance just wasn't there, and the video was unwatchably choppy.

To be perfectly honest, I was disappointed in Ubuntu's stability. I had to reboot a bunch of times when the Gnome UI quit responding. Juice Master, or whatever the default mp3 encoding app is, wasn't all that swift either, getting track times way wrong on VBR encoded tunes. And though I appreciated being able to copy songs from my iPod back to the computer, manually keeping my iPod synched wasn't how I want to spend my time.

So here I am, with Windows again. Sigh. Maybe I'll peel off a partition of my hard drive to reinstall Ubuntu as a kind of playground. We'll see.

I still need a reliable, and automatic backup strategy.

Quick Computer Update

As you'll recall from last week's tale of woe, after resurrecting my sucky hp hardware, and installing Windows (from an old CD I had from a previous computer, because hp doesn't see fit to provide its customers with media), I had no network. Browsing Google News, as I often do, I stumbled on the announcement of the Gutsy Gibbon release of Ubuntu Linux. I am proud to say, that our home computer is back up and running - Windows free! Ubuntu is pretty slick. There are a few rough edges, and some things that will take some getting used to, but most things remain the same. We've always used Open Office for word processing and such, Thunderbird for e-mail, and the Firefox browser, so 80% of what we do doesn't change at all. With a little poking around I got RhythmBox supporting mp3 files, and it does a nice job managing our music and updating our iPods (though when I rip a CD, the track times are WAY off). Now, if I can find a good, reliable backup strategy, and figure out what to do about anti-virus software (no, I do NOT believe that since I'm running Linux I don't have to worry about malware), we'll be good to go.

Hewlett-Packard stinks, Seagate isn't much better

Last week the hard drive in our home computer crashed. Big time head crash with screeching noises and everything. So I called hp support - my computer is 13 months into a 12 month warranty, so hp isn't interested.

OK, the drive is a Seagate. If I had bought the drive and installed it myself, it would have come with a 5 year warranty, so I figured I'm in OK shape. I call Seagate, and nope, the drive came with the computer, Seagate won't support it, and they tell me I have to talk to hp.

To make a long story short (and believe me, I could weave a novel-length tale out of what I've gone through the past week), I'm screwed.

So I went to Best Buy and bought a new 320GB Western Digital drive. I installed it, booted their installation disk, and guess what? Thanks to hp's amazing hardware, the install tools won't see my mouse (did I mention I had the same problem with the Seagate diagnostic tools?), and without a mouse I can't partition the drive into one large partition. I figured how to work my way around that problem, installed Windows, and it no longer sees my NIC, so no network.

Between the troubles my mom had with her Compaq (AKA hp) laptop, this mess, and the offshore support staff - I'm through with hp. Will never buy an hp product again (and I was on the cusp of getting one of their network storage devices, whew, dodged that bullet).

AND YOU SHOULD NEVER EVER BUY FROM HEWLETT-PACKARD EITHER.

So there.

For other's opinions, you can google hp sucks