Archive for August 17th, 2008

System Rebuild


It was a technically frustrating day yesterday.  I recently purchased the newest release of Neverwinter Nights 2 (a role playing game) in the hopes of doing something not work related in the evenings for a change.  Alas it wasn’t meant to be and I instead spent about 6 hours last night rebuilding the machine after a series of interventions that ultimately rendered XP unusable and Ubuntu wiped from the face of the map.

First off it turned out that the $70 game (Neverwinter Nights 2) didn’t support my graphics card, which is too old now apparently.  To add insult to injury, after having installed the software I found that windows explorer kept crashing - rendering XP dead in the water.  Looking at this as an opportunity for the phoenix to rise from the ashes I figured I might as well restore the system and build it from the ground up, because there was a whole lot of legacy stuff from my endless tinkerings there that was undoubtedly clogging things up.

However despite the restore process indicating that only the C:/ drive would be affected by the restore process, I ultimately found that it had completely overwritten the Linux directory and everything in it.

Fortunately for me the one partition that wasn’t overwritten during this debacle is the one partition that had all my data on it.  So the only real thing lost was time.

In the wake of this I’ve decided to explore a different tact to my systems than I have been the last year or so.  Despite my attempts to move to a pure open source/FOSS model founded upon an open distribution (Ubuntu), I’ve found there are some aspects of proprietary computing I just can’t shed yet.  This is not due to personal preference, but rather to a lack of available substitutes.  For example programs like SecondLife just don’t work well on the Linux platform yet.

The result has been a bipolar model in which I’m constantly having to switch between two machines, never quite sure of which my official platform is.

To break from this habit I thought I might compromise and bring as many FOSS programs into the fold as possible.  This goes for my MacBook (which recently died as well), and my Windows XP Media machine.

I can’t ignore the fact this ultimately amounts to giving a prisioner time outside under guard - despite the Free software (free as in freedom and free as in beer), if it’s been implemented in a closed system it’s never truly free.  Yet my circumstances are such that I don’t see any clear alternatives at the moment.

So in the case of my PC I’ve opted to use the following software environment:

This constitutes by far the majority of my computer usage, with the proprietary exceptions being Skype, SecondLife, and Newsgator RSS readers (which centrally sync my various machines).  My attitude currently is proprietary will only come into play if there is no reasonable FOSS alternative.

There will most likely be some additions and changes as time goes by (I’ll try and keep this updated), but this gives you a pretty good idea of the opportunities that exist,

Sunday, August 17th, 2008

open source No Comments