{"id":115,"date":"2005-08-23T15:37:00","date_gmt":"2005-08-23T22:37:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.elbeno.com\/blog\/?p=115"},"modified":"2007-07-29T13:14:47","modified_gmt":"2007-07-29T20:14:47","slug":"computer-niggles","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.elbeno.com\/blog\/?p=115","title":{"rendered":"Computer niggles"},"content":{"rendered":"


\n… of my efforts to run a dual boot Gentoo<\/a>\/WinXP<\/a> system.<\/lj-cut><\/p>\n

The other day I ran across 10 days as a Linux user<\/a>, the account of a Windows user’s self-imposed Linux odyssey. And it makes fairly interesting reading. As you know I’ve been a Linux user for hmm, over 10 years now (Slackware<\/a>, Redhat<\/a>, Mandrake<\/a>, Debian<\/a>, Gentoo<\/a> at various times), but I’ve never quite managed to give up Windows. I recently upgraded my machine to an Athlon64 and I’m still in the process of smoothing it out.<\/p>\n

There are problems on both sides. More on the Linux side at the moment, but the problem with Windows is that should I meet any problems there, they are much less soluble. Here’s the state of things at the moment:<\/p>\n

My partitions are approx 40GB NTFS, 40GB ext3, 220GB FAT32. And miscellaneous gubbins for a Linux boot partition and swap partition. I use Grub<\/a> as my bootloader, which works fine. Windows sees the NTFS and FAT32 partitions; Linux sees them all (but the NTFS is read-only). I set it up this way so that I could have a nice big data partition visible to both where I could store mp3s, code, etc.<\/p>\n

So here’s my feature checklist, what currently works, and what doesn’t.<\/p>\n

– Graphics drivers: Fine on both, thanks to nVidia<\/a>. I have decent resolutions and hardware acceleration in Windows and in X.
\n– Sound drivers: Windows fine. Linux had some teething problems with mixing. I have it configured OK for most apps now, but I still get no sound out of KDE<\/a>.
\n– Video playback: Windows fine. Linux untested. Playing back protected content under Linux is tricky.
\n– Web browsing: Firefox<\/a> on both. No flash plugin on Linux because I run a native 64-bit system and the flash plugin isn’t available for 64-bit mozilla<\/a>. I tried installing 32-bit Firefox binaries with the plugin, but I got sound issues. I only need flash for Homestar<\/a> anyway. Java does work since I use the Blackdown native 64-bit Java VM.
\n– iPod: Windows fine. Linux a bit flaky on automounting with coldplug, but I can reboot the iPod to fix that if needed. So I can access the iPod as a normal drive under Linux. The real problem is that I haven’t got gtkPod<\/a> working yet – it hangs all the time. Not sure why.
\n– Games: the only game I play on PC is World of Warcraft<\/a>, and since I keep a dual boot, I haven’t bothered to try to get it working under Linux.
\n– Development: This is where the shared drive comes into its own. I have installed Eclipse<\/a> on both sides (again, on Linux using the 64-bit Java VM) and use it pretty much interchangeably to compile the same source code. I also have Cygwin<\/a> (to support Eclipse CDT) and MSVC<\/a> on the Windows side; consider the 32-bit Windows vs native 64-bit Linux too and I have a fantastic level of portable code potential. The one problem I am running into is actually on Windows: I’m still trying to get OpenGL hardware acceleration running.
\n– Email: I use Thunderbird<\/a> on the Linux side. I suppose I could set it up to use the shared drive, again, but I haven’t yet. So I have nothing on the Windows side.
\n– Webcam: Basically works under Windows, although it continually claims to find the new hardware. I don’t know why it can’t just treat it like a pluggable device and not complain. Under Linux, I load the pwc module but I haven’t got the pwcx yet. And there is some config yet to be sorted – camstream<\/a> just displays grey, although it detects everything correctly.
\n– IM: Usually Gaim<\/a> on both sides. Identical. But no alternative on Linux – I can’t videocon with the family like I do in MSN. Is gaim-vv<\/a> getting anywhere?
\n– Printing: More difficult to set up on Windows than Linux. Since I use a networked print server, it works basically the same way on both systems. But as always Windows likes to hide the details.
\n– Office software: I simply don’t use it on either platform, so far. When I want to, I’ll grab OpenOffice.org<\/a> on both.<\/p>\n

Overall: I’ll be keeping both for a while. Windows because it has a few apps that I can’t replace (World of Warcraft, MSN videocon, flash plugin). Linux because it is cleaner (I know what is running), safer (I don’t need<\/em> to run AntiVir<\/a>, Spybot S&D<\/a>, or Ad-Aware<\/a>), and nicer in my daily usage (web browsing and coding). I have Grub set to boot Gentoo by default.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

… of my efforts to run a dual boot Gentoo\/WinXP system. The other day I ran across 10 days as a Linux user, the account of a Windows user’s self-imposed Linux odyssey. And it makes fairly interesting reading. As you know I’ve been a Linux user for hmm, over 10…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-115","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-linux","category-windows"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elbeno.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elbeno.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elbeno.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elbeno.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elbeno.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=115"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.elbeno.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elbeno.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=115"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elbeno.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=115"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elbeno.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=115"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}