Blog From The Bench

For the past five or six years, I've been immersed in the Unix world. By trade I'm a FreeBSD system administrator. The server running this site runs FreeBSD as well. I kick ass at FreeBSD. But, I've never been able to break myself free to use it as a workstation. I tried last night, and for a glorious 12 hours my Dell Inspiron laptop was running Fedora Core (I figured of all the Linux/Unix variants suitable for workstation use, the free one from Redhat would be the best). Then I went to run up2date to update all the installed packages. Things went great until I pressed NO instead of YES on one of dozens of popups asking me if I wanted to accept an RPM that wasn't GPG signed (and it didn't appear that any of the packages were signed, so why ask in the first place, or not provide a "yes to all" button? I understand the desire for security that signing provides, but for god's sake, some of us have lives). Instead of failing gracefully, the entire update process aborted. Maybe the RPMs were saved somewhere and I wouldn't have to spend an hour downloading them again, but I was too pissed off to try again. In the meantime, I was trying to get the builtin Dell wireless support working. I downloaded ndiswrapper, but couldn't make heads or tails of what I needed to do with it - the difference between FreeBSD bootup configuration and Linux bootup configuration is like Shakespeare jumping in a time machine and falling out next to a Valley Girl. One is cultured and refined (BSD), the other is, like, whatever (Linux). I got so fed up with it that I'm just going to abort the little experiment and reinstall Windows. Which, of course, can never just be easy - XP's hardware test thingy just hung when it saw the EXT2 filesystems, forcing me to download a bootdisk with an fdisk clone on it to blow away the Linux partitions (or the master boot record, or, like, whatever). Yes, I know I should've been more patient, and maybe I'll try again someday, but for now I just want my beloved laptop working. So, I'm back to being Bill Gates's bitch.

I'll tell you what, though - while I had it running, I had KDE (that's my window manager, desktop thingy, graphical environment, whatever it's called, of choice) looking absolutely beautiful. Forget Apple; if Microsoft wants to get more experienced users excited about Windows again, give them the customization options that KDE gives you. You can tune your experience to be however you want it to be.