Not Ready for Prime Time.
Aug. 25th, 2009 06:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
swestrupBy that I mostly refer to me. You see, I have a number of pending invitation to go and do things with folks, and I've had to decline or postpone all of them, because I'm still not nearly 100%. Most of my cold symptoms are gone now except for a somewhat stuffy nose (which is hard to distinguish from my normal case of chronic rhinitis), but I have no energy. Doing the simplest things leaves me exhausted for ages afterward. So, I'm taking it real easy for the next few days, even though I'd love to be out and about and doing things.
The other thing I usually refer to by that title is Linux, but this time around I'm gonna have to opine that its about come even with Windows XP, which is a shame as XP is broken is SO many ways, so the bar isn't very high. My experiences with the two, now that I've spent a long time going back and forth is:
a) Windows 'just works' 99.9% of the time. You plug your hardware together, install windows, download and install the drivers, and you're DONE. Until, that is, everything breaks for no reason whatsoever and you find yourself reinstalling stuff that's already installed. Had to go through that again today when my XP box – which is doing nothing but being a TV – stopped listening to the remote. Its done that before. The only thing that works is completely uninstalling the software for my Remote Wonder II, and reinstalling it. Then everything is fine … for a few more months. Highly aggravating, but livable.
b) Linux, on the other hand, is rock steady. Generally speaking, you set things up, and they just continue to work. The problem is its often near-to impossible to set things up. Take X configuration as a great example. You used to have to write an xorg.conf file to describe your hardware setup, in terms you were unlikely to have the faintest idea how to describe. What's worse, if you read the manual there are sections that say "We don't know what this does. Maybe nobody does." Helpful. So, they've recently moved to autodetecting everything since the 'autodetect' code has been 'working' and 'stable' for ages. Huh. I HAVE NEVER HAD ANY LINUX DISTRO SUCCESSFULLY DETECT AND SET UP MY VIDEO FOR ME. Right now, I'd love to boot my TV machine into ubuntu (as the various bits of Linux TV software I looked at seem to favor it), and use it instead of windows. Only, I've never gotten it to recognize my remote. I haven't been able to figure out how to get it to recognize my keyboard (its a Microsoft International Canadian keyboard and Ubuntu has never heard of it and seems to have no map file for it) and it (to my amazement) correctly reads and interprets the EDID info from my monitor and then auto-chooses settings that are obviously out of spec. Oh, and even the mouse, a SIMPLE SERIAL MOUSE!, is not correctly handled out of the box. I have not found any way of getting Ubuntu to boot and recognize the mouse. So, in theory Linux would be far more stable, but I'm going to have to wait until I have a few hundred hours to spare in configuration attempts before I even get a distro that's working well enough to bother with.
And all I really want is a box able to play arbitrary video files on my monitor, and controlled by a remote.
The other thing I usually refer to by that title is Linux, but this time around I'm gonna have to opine that its about come even with Windows XP, which is a shame as XP is broken is SO many ways, so the bar isn't very high. My experiences with the two, now that I've spent a long time going back and forth is:
a) Windows 'just works' 99.9% of the time. You plug your hardware together, install windows, download and install the drivers, and you're DONE. Until, that is, everything breaks for no reason whatsoever and you find yourself reinstalling stuff that's already installed. Had to go through that again today when my XP box – which is doing nothing but being a TV – stopped listening to the remote. Its done that before. The only thing that works is completely uninstalling the software for my Remote Wonder II, and reinstalling it. Then everything is fine … for a few more months. Highly aggravating, but livable.
b) Linux, on the other hand, is rock steady. Generally speaking, you set things up, and they just continue to work. The problem is its often near-to impossible to set things up. Take X configuration as a great example. You used to have to write an xorg.conf file to describe your hardware setup, in terms you were unlikely to have the faintest idea how to describe. What's worse, if you read the manual there are sections that say "We don't know what this does. Maybe nobody does." Helpful. So, they've recently moved to autodetecting everything since the 'autodetect' code has been 'working' and 'stable' for ages. Huh. I HAVE NEVER HAD ANY LINUX DISTRO SUCCESSFULLY DETECT AND SET UP MY VIDEO FOR ME. Right now, I'd love to boot my TV machine into ubuntu (as the various bits of Linux TV software I looked at seem to favor it), and use it instead of windows. Only, I've never gotten it to recognize my remote. I haven't been able to figure out how to get it to recognize my keyboard (its a Microsoft International Canadian keyboard and Ubuntu has never heard of it and seems to have no map file for it) and it (to my amazement) correctly reads and interprets the EDID info from my monitor and then auto-chooses settings that are obviously out of spec. Oh, and even the mouse, a SIMPLE SERIAL MOUSE!, is not correctly handled out of the box. I have not found any way of getting Ubuntu to boot and recognize the mouse. So, in theory Linux would be far more stable, but I'm going to have to wait until I have a few hundred hours to spare in configuration attempts before I even get a distro that's working well enough to bother with.
And all I really want is a box able to play arbitrary video files on my monitor, and controlled by a remote.
