Happy Camper

I posted a few weeks ago about my laptop that I brought on Ebay.au and how great it was, well it was until stupid me didn't get all my ad aware, spybot and antivirus stuff running straight away and when I did (read a week or so) my OS was hosed. Now all of those Linux folk out there are going to tell me how great GNU\Linux is and it is when it works.

I looked at a heap of different Linux builds and tried quite a few of them as well but they all suck in some way or another for what I want.

Tried Knoppix, worked great everything worked out of the box except sound :( and when I finally tracked down the information I needed to make noise it worked when it wanted. I would get the sound working after using alsaconf and then after a few minutes using X\KDE it would crash the sound server and nothing I did short of a reboot worked to get it back.

Now call me lazy maybe but I was persistent, I tried tinkering with config files and the such to no avail.

Now don't get me wrong, I am still using some Linux stuff and in server environment's it is great, but then I don't need to have sound working and flashy desktops, Linux in the server\big iron arena for sure, but after spending 2 days playing with Linux in one of its many variants made me want to pull my hair out, on the desktop not yet.

So after a few days of piss farting around with Nix I reinstalled 2k, took me about 10 hours to go from a completely hosed box to one that is setup how I want it including time to look for new software on sourceforge, everything worked out of the box first go, wireless, sound, graphics everything except some shortcut keys but Ill get to that soon and they didnt work in nix.

And after all that I am glad I got hosed as now my laptop is better protected then it was, and I am going to image the HDD soon to make future installs easy. I found a lot of great software over at sourceforge and it is written to work not to be bloated, now I have more functionality then my previous install and it runs faster and I am a happy camper again.....

On a side note reading about Vista TM I am actually interested, it is the Second M$ OS that really makes me want to go and buy it, the first was windows 95 on floppy :) so I will have to wait and see how it turns out at the release and I might be going shopping soon.