Courne Supremacy

…Is called Jaunty Jackelope by the Ubuntu people. I think what they really meant to call it was Jenky Jenkalope because it’s a pile.

I thought Ubuntu 8.04 was slow, but 9.04 so far as actually made my laptop even slower. Opening firefox is still slow but now openOffice 3.0 works in crawl mode even when all I want to do is scroll down using the scrollbar. Is that too much to ask for? Plus Jenky Jenkalope has already crashes twice in the past 30 minutes. Apparently trying to change folders will do that trick. Trying to do anything basic causes massive CPU usage.

Now, I’m not entirely sure if this is Jenkelope’s fault. I am running Ubuntu on a laptop that was originally running a Sony butchered version of Windows XP Home, and I know that this laptop doesn’t like to run much else. I was initially surprised with Ubuntu because without much hassle, muss or fuss I was able to just install it and it ran and detected everything on this machine. Well, everything except the ATI card, because Linux as shit for ATI support. I saw the new ATI drivers. I wasted a day trying to install it only to end up with Ubuntu greeting me with its safe mode, graphics-failed-to-initialize mode. It’s a total bitch to try and fix the graphics it it goes belly-up too.

I really wanted to love Ubuntu because it claimed to usher in some new age of computing that would free me from the Microsoft ball and chain, but so far I’m not impressed. Linux is the kind of computing platform that’s supported by good intentions and alturism. It makes people feel good because its the people’s OS. Made by people, for people, which is where the African word Ubuntu comes from. A million code monkeys sitting at a million computers tapping out and compiling the greatest set of computing tools that you could ask for, but I feel that none of the software is up to snuff. Why does openOffice Writer feel so slow when I go to move the scrollbar? Does my 1.7 Ghz laptop computer, which in its heyday was a grand machine capable of running HL2 without a hitch, not have the processing power to handle a scrollbar? I want to believe that GIMP and Inkscape might oneday replace Photoshop and Illustrator/Flash, but I doubt it. The verb “Photoshop(ped)” has now entered mainstream venacular; I don’t think you’ll hear someone saying that an image got “GIMPped” any time soon. This isn’t to say that I don’t believe in open source software. openOffice on Windows is very good. Blender is an excellent 3D modeling and otherwise complete Maya replacement solution.

As for me, I think I’m going to switch back to using Windows on this laptop. My experiment into using Ubuntu didn’t totally fail; it’s just not a good experience for me. I want to use my OS and not tinker with every little thing under the hood to make it run like a normal windows machine might. I do also have a new experiment which I hope to be trying soon: a Macintosh. I’ve decided to make the plunge into the world of OS X. I’m hoping that a company that custom builds their machines to work with their OS and software will transcend simple good intentions and give me a good user experience.

Tags: computers, ubuntu

So I got all the parts from newegg.

I’m trying to find the words to sum up how this PC experience building process went.

Oh right.

Dead on Arrival.

Thanks Newegg.

It’s quality, with a K.

Tags: computers, htpc, media center

So I want a Network Attached Storage device, or a NAS for short. I want all the cool stuff NASes like Synology’s DS207+ can do — Bittorrent, FTP, web server, and iTunes server, and the myraid of other things that a NAS is capable of. 

I want to stream Xvid, Dvix, and MKVs onto my TV so I can sit on my new couch and watch them. 

I thought maybe I could get a NAS and hook it to my 360 and do it. Great, but let me tell you it’s a bitch to hook anything up to a 360. Even if I did get it to work, which I have on occassion, not all Mp3s will be found, and not all videos will play. I tried my brother’s PS3. Different console, same story.

Another thing about a NAS like the Synology or QNAP. They’re expensive. 300 dollars expensive. That’s just for a glorified harddrive enclosure running Linux under the hood. Sure there’s memory and a processor that runs at 500 Mhz. You have to remote in via telnet to fiddle with the settings. So now you’ve got a box in your house that you have to remote connect into instead of being able to just directly access like a computer. A NAS is a good idea, but that’s kinda silly when I think about it. Oh, and then the harddrives. You want 2 TB? That’s another 300 bucks. Granted a 500 GB will run you a lot less, but that’s still on top of the NAS box itself. So for maybe 450 bucks you have a great NAS to backup your stuff. 

Or, you could have a media center PC.

And, what I really wanted after all this thinking is a media center PC. I believe I should be able to do all of those things I mentioned above that a NAS could do and then some. If I wanted to browse the web on my TV I can do that. Setting up MAME would be sweet too. It’s like I could play games in my living room. How novel is that? 

So that’s what I did, I killed a couple of birds with one stone with the help of this blog post at Coding Horror. He basically built a very cheap, small, media center PC. I pretty much just bought the parts he proposed — although I did a bit of research and reading on my own before deciding to go with them. I won’t lie. He did all the legwork and I’m borrowing his brilliance. I have no problem with that. It saves me the weeks of agonizing over which part is which or wondering if the parts are good enough. I know someone’s got these parts and built the computer, so it’s got to be good enough. The nice thing is that the parts I got off newegg are actually cheaper than what he purchased them at. So I save a little bit more. The breakdown: 

I didn’t bother with a Hauppauge Tuner card or the remote at this stage — maybe that doesn’t make this a true blue media center PC or HTPC or whatever it’s called, but I don’t give a rats ass because I can, if I build it, sit on my ass and watch stuff on it. I figure a basic mouse and keyboard will do me just fine. I did get an HDMI cable to connect to my TV so in the end I was around $375 and then after shipping and handling and taxes $438. Not a bad deal. 

This will be the second computer I’ve built. Let’s hope I don’t brick it. 

If I don’t manage that, then I plan to install Ubuntu on it.

As they say on TV, to be continued…

Tags: computers, htpc, media center