Comparing Penjuins, Apples and Windows doesn't work.

So today I was reading a NY Times story posted on Digg about Ubuntu, an interesting article but containing some of the usual FUD about Linux. While commenting about this on Digg I found myself in a familiar argument, an argument that I have seen often but that does not hold water in my opinion. It goes a little something like this...

I won't use Linux because I had hardware issues the last time I tried and I never have any on my Mac.

You see the issue I have with this is that you cannot compare your experience with you Mac to your experience of installing some favor of Linux on some randomly configured PC. The people that put forward this argument always fail to admit that their Mac is a closed system that does not allow them to install any old piece of hardware. If they were to be fair they should compare the experiences of the Hackentosh community to that of Linux, they would then at least be in the same ball park.

The second aspect of their argument that I have an issue with is this, neither Apple or Windows have really been in the position that Linux is. Linux as an OS needs people to adopt it now so that hardware vendors will improve their support, something that has started happening thanks to Dell and AMD.

In reality if you want to compare Apples to Linux you should be comparing a Dell or System76 PC with a Mac.

Crunch Bang Linux Desktop

Crunch Bang Linux Desktop
Originally uploaded by kiwiboyus

Here's a screen shot of my current #! Crunch Bang Linux desktop. I love how clean looking Openbox is with just Conky and Gwibber running.

Love this design.

I just stumbled across this blog while looking for a good Kiwi icon to use as my avatar, I maybe a Pakeha but I really like this design. It's the islander in me, just like my need to live near the ocean, it's a Kiwi thing. Oh and I found my icon.

Love love love The Dark Knight

I saw it twice at the movies, one of the few worth $9+. We bought the DVD and sat on it for 2 weeks, waiting for the Xmas/New Year break to watch it again... and it was SO worth the break. Christopher Nolan captured what I have always loved about the Batman with this movie, he's a true hero in every sense of the word without seeking any of the glory. In a way he is like Sam from LOTR (an Xmas tradition of ours is to watch all 3 extended LOTR movies), he is an under dog true to the cause regardless of any recognition. The Dark Knight is just one of those movies I will never get sick of watching, even though I know whats going to happen next.

I can't wait until the next one.

The Wind makes a great PS1

For the last few weeks I have been experimenting with emulators on my MSI Wind. The first was Project64 which plays Nintendo 64 games and works well. Then this week we finally got rid of our spare old monster of a TV, I had been using it to play my PS1 and PS2 instead of having yet another box in our TV cabinet. This gave me a new challenge of hooking up my Playstations to my PC monitor or finding another way to play my games. After messing around with a TV that didn't want to play ball I decided to look for an emulator to run my games. I found the mother load of emulators at www.emulator-zone.com, ePSXe had the top rating and I now know why. You have to do a little searching for a PS1 Bios (in the usual places), but once located and after the setting wizard I was playing MediEvil on my over clocked Wind.

Happy days!

Now all I need to do is make ISOs out of all my PS1 games. Sadly emulating PS2 is a different animal so I'll just have to drag it downstairs when I want to play.

Ubuntu 8.10 and Suspend

I have been running the beta of Ubuntu 8.10 - Intrepid Ibex for almost 2 weeks now on my Wind and have been really happy with it. Last night around 7:30 PM I put my Wind into suspend and forgot about it (normally I shut it down over night). This morning to my surprise, 12 hours later, I hit the power button and my Wind booted right to the login screen for Intrepid. I entered my password and expected to see a warning message about my battery being low but to my surprise I still had 3.5 hours battery life remaining.

Simply awesome!

Watch them Bios updates.

So when I read that MSI had released a new Bios for the Wind I was pretty excited. On top of allocating more RAM to the integrated video the fabled Turbo feature was back. So I flashed my Bios and all looked good until I noticed my wireless connection had become super flaky. I had replaced the stock wifi card with a dell 1490 because it works with Windows, Linux and OS X, so I thought maybe that was the issue. There is an extra stand off on the mother board that a lot of people said should be removed because it causes issues, so I finally got up the courage to take the pliers to it and no improvement. Finally tonight I decided to roll the Bios back to 1.06 and I'm back to a nice speedy Internet experience.

So the leason learned here is don't be so quick to install the newest thing.

By the way I love my wife, she bought me both my Ibanez guitar and MSI Wind. She's the bestest!