Tag: Ubuntu

A burning hatred for Microsoft Windows

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So I get home, open my ‘new’ Dell E6420 and I get dunned about Windows updates. I postpone for four hours. But then the machine decides to reboot into the updates some 20 minutes later.  But phase 1 of 3 took, in my opinion too long. So I shut the machine down via holding down the power button.

It booted and went right to phase 3 of 3. Even that was fucking klunky. I had to shut down again, the third try was the charm.

When I finally get to logon I get the reminder there are 24 updates available. This time of course it showed me what they were. Bunch of security updates.

But Linux and in particular Ubuntu – when it has updates you have to approve in essence. And it tells you PRECISELY what’s being installed. And in fact updates to software is pretty frequent on Linux. Windows is every few weeks. But not all updates require rebooting.

It’d be pretty easy for me to make the switch. I have an SSD with Ubuntu 14.04 on it. I should just snap it in and say fuck Windows forever.

Observations on Ubuntu regarding Unity and Nautilus

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Unity is the the user interface of Gnome. Nautilus is the file manager.

Unity is fairly slick but suffers a few issues – the main of which is when you’re  doing certain thing I note little lags. Nothing major and not enough to deter me.

Now Nautilus – works well enough but if you’re doing copying over the net – don’t expect to use Nautlius for anything else.

I installed mc on the command line – probably use that for big file copying over the net. And in fact I’m pretty handy with mv, cp etc. at the command line. So perhaps I’ll use that a my default.

Or just ditch it all – install Kubuntu and be done with it, because I do find KDE vastly superior to Gnome.

Goodbye Windows XP

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So I’ve made the decision to finally cut away from Windows in general. Not a big fan of Windows 8 to be sure. 

I’ve decided I’m going to put the latest 64 bit incarnation of Ubuntu onto a Dell Studio 1535 a friend gave me. Then I’m going to install Oracle’s VirtualBox on it, and stuff a bit image of my XP box onto that. And of course I’ll disable the networking on the virtual machine. 

In essence it give me my XP box as a sandbox that has no danger of being hacked. Got to love that aspect of virtual machines. 

And more to the point – I think the most attacked entity still using XP will be state governments all over the country. 

Fixing ancient laptops

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I’ve had this laptop for a long time. I’ve done preventative maintenance on it and repairs where necessary.

One of the things that drove my nuts about it was the screen hinges. The things were just worn down, the screen would flop any which way.

Searched the web and found a new set of hinges for $10. It took the removal of 12 screws to do this, the ones on the screen surround, and the screws holding the hinges to the rear of the display cover and those that secure the screen to the chassis of the machine.

And as I’ve said – I understand the limitation of XP and 32 bit architecture. But it still does what I need it to do without any major issues. And I was of the firm impression that Vista was a piece of crap, Windows 7 was acceptable but unnecessary to upgrade to that as it was a bit bloated, and Windows 8 looks like it was designed by a crack addled ADHD sufferer. And that’s me being nice about it. In my opinion XP was the pinnacle for Microsoft. And it’s been down hill every since.

What Microsoft doesn’t realize is this:

1) An operating system has a very LONG life span. And just shoveling new OS’s out there that in essence were half baked pissed a lot of people off.

2) The cycle for I.T. infrastructure isn’t two years, it’s more like 4-7 years.

It is entirely likely that my next computer will not run Windows. Or at least not as the default operating system. Instead I’ll probably get use Debian Linux and VirtualBox on it. VirtualBox is a virtualization package that lets you run another OS image underneath the main OS. So I’ll just clone my current XP box into an image and use that when I need to get access to MS Office, etc.

And I will kiss goodbye forever Microsoft’s craptastic operating systems. Yes I said it, I’ve dealt with Windows for over 20 years now and all I can say is that it’s been one pain in the ass after another. From print drivers that no longer work with the latest versions of Windows, to bad file system structure, etc.

Linux at the very least is flexible as hell. The ext4 file system can have drives up to one exbibyte (EiB). That’s that EiB is 1 exbibyte = 260 bytes = 1152921504606846976bytes = 1,024 pebibytes. A pebibyte is is 250 bytes. And right now we’re only seeing terabytes and gigabytes. So there won’t be any problem with big files in the ext4 file system.

Plus ext partitions have journaling capabilities, error correction, etc. Compare that to the Windows File System.

I can just use Macrium Reflect to create the boot image of this machine – and BAM! Virtualized in style.

So I’ll be leaving Microsoft for greener fields. And in fact once I image this machine I’ll probably put Ubuntu or Debian on it. It’s still usable.