With my new PC built it was time for the troublesome task of picking which OS, I have a prehistoric version of XP (SP1) I could use officially but that wouldn’t use all 4gb of RAM and still leaves problems like the hassle of securing it and spending 4hours doing every update, or I could go the pirate route and grab Vista (ain’t no way I’ll pay for that crap – I’ve already had to fix 2 laptops and a PC that were supposedly secure thanks to a combo of Vista and various anti-virus and firewalls but which were still laiden with adware. I don’t have time to deal with that crap and won’t pay for it if it’s still that weak).
Luckily I like to do things the cheap way, but even better, the FREE way. So instead of using M$, I put Ubuntu onto the system. It has to be said that it seemed to take longer to format and partition the 1TB drive than it did to actually install Ubuntu. Always one for a gamble, I went for the latest 8.10 in 64 bit variety… and it worked with only issue being that during installation I had to keep re-sizing windows as using a HDMI lead gave me resolution that meant the next and back buttons were off the bottom of the screen. So far so good, but then NO SOUND!
I checked with sound through the headphones and main output jacks, fine but it wasn’t having it and still had no sound through HDMI. After a bit of tinkering I did the absolute noob move of trying someone else’s fix which might have worked on 32bit but all it did was freeze my box on the next boot. I tried reinstalling 32bit and tinkered some more, found out how to fix it but didn’t like the solution. Basically you have to set the HDMI output as output 1 not 3. Nothing wrong with that but half the time I want sound coming out of my surround system hooked up to the jacks on the back, it’s only when I’m watching stuff on youtube or system beeps I don’t really feel the need to be using 5.1… Fair enough I’ll give Microsoft this one but I haven’t had a single poop up and still haven’t got round to firewalling or antivirusing my machine yet and it was on overnight with nothing happening. Try that on a new vista box and see how many ads you have on screen!
So I went back to Ubuntu 64 and so far I have not found anything that doesn’t work on 64 that works on 32. I’d heard stories that it was ready for use and now I’m inclined to agree. The only bad thing is that the mounting of drives is F**ked up now. I could use the old fstab no problem but it took me a while to realise that now that wasn’t enough, I had to change the owner of my extra partition. CHOWN username.username /mountpoint for anyone who mounts a drive, and can’t write to it. There’s enough guides to getting DVD playback out there that that took 2 minutes to get going, MP3 playback is much faster to get going as well so the Linux community is doing it’s bestto get round the legal problems that stop it from being able to offer those features out of the box to speak. Sun haven’t updated Virtualbox for Ubunutu 8.10 so my virtual windows pc (for when I want to watch 4ondemand or some other service that refuses to run outside of M$) so for now my old PC is going to have to remain in a fair bit of use.