Walking the Edge of Reality

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Walking the Edge of Reality

A look behind the curtain to my world...

Crossing Over
Sunday, August 17, 2008 12:22 PM

So I spent the greater part of my afternoon yesterday looking for a Windows XP CD, in the hopes that I can get this Vaio up and running. I found half a dozen Vista CDs but no XP, and I didn't want to go through a Vista install for fear of the typical "driver hell" that accompanies any Microsoft Windows install (especially when Sony Vaio machines are notorious for having hard to find drivers).

So instead of finding a Windows XP CD, I did find something else: an Ububtu Linux CD.

"This can't be worse than what I have now... can it?"

I haven't used Ubuntu in a long time, and when I did it was for server systems - mail servers, specifically - and not as a daily use operating system. On my old laptop I also had an install of it as a VMWare image, but I don't remember the last time I used it.

First off, I could run the OS from the CD without actually installing it, which allowed me to get online for a brief bit. It creates a virtual hard drive of your current memory, but since this machine doesn't have much memory to begin with (512K) it wasn't very practical. Also, things like LogMeIn required the JRE, which doesn't come natively installed.

So I bit the bullet, did a full "drive wipe" of this machine, and installed it.

"Driver hell"? What's that? This OS is quite impressive in that regard: without me having to jump through hoops, it auto-detected and got working the wireless network adapter, allowing me to connect via TMobile wireless instantly. Also it seems to know everything about this machine, including details on the battery life. I can't imagine a Windows install being this easy; I can picture myself now looking deep in a drawer for the Sony CDs because Windows couldn't identify the CD-ROM, for example.

Now obviously this isn't a practical long term solution for me, especially considering there is no Visual Studio and my websites won't run on this OS (no, I'm not going to try the .NET options on this thing; that feels... unnatural). But it does serve nicely as a "disaster recovery" environment in case all else fails (which it has, for all practical sense).

And, besides, it's a pretty interface...

Posted by David "Nighthawk" Flor on Sunday, August 17, 2008 12:22 PM

3 comments [ View Comments ]

Posted by redct on Sunday, August 17, 2008 1:25 PM

The JRE is pretty easy to install: Applications => Add/Remove => search for "java". You'll also have to change "Show:" to all available applications, if it's not already there.

Posted by redct on Sunday, August 17, 2008 1:43 PM

Since you can't edit your previous comments;
http://robrohan.com/2006/10/05/howto-setup-c-for-web-development-on-ubuntu/

I know you say it's unnatural, but I say it isn't if it works :D

And they even have a .NET IDE: http://www.monodevelop.com/Main_Page

Posted by Tabby on Sunday, August 17, 2008 4:51 PM

similar thing happened to me, sort of, i was trying to create a partition so i could dual boot vista/ubuntu, accidentally overwrote entire drive. whoops.

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