The smell of newly purchased stuff... So, there I was, Hauppauge WinTV board in hand, Mandrake 10 installed and ready to rock! Little did I expect that it would come to this. But first things first. Let's begin with my background. I know computers, and quite frankly I know them pretty well. After 5 years at university, most of the time staring either into my 21" Miro or into my too small chassis containing my old PIII 450MHz with various twists, and also as a network admin at my dorm with some 140 computers, I've come to know them pretty well. Most of the time at Uni my computer was running Windows 2000 and was happy with that, although I always loved to boot into my FreeBSD partition and feel the delight of total control as I tweaked and twisted my inits and rc:s. When I quit Uni and my trusty PIII died with a sigh I decided enough was enough. At Uni I used to reinstall Windows every 6 months or so, since I couldn't keep from bloating it and I didn't really feel like walking through the registers deleting old services all the time. Now I got rid of my Windows partition and installed FreeBSD to use as my only OS that, for now, ran on a borrowed PII 350 MHz. At first, I missed some of the nice things Windows had to offer, but soon enough I had forgotten all about it.
Time passed, I got myself a job, an apartment in a new town and a new P4 3GHz with 1GB speedy memory and 200GB hard drive, yummy! I didn't think much of it, but did a fresh install of FreeBSD again. Some more time passed and although I thought FreeBSD is superb in almost every way, I've always been a music junkie, and some of the features ALSA could offer in the new 2.6 Linux kernel seduced me. I tried various Linux distros, including Mandrake 10, Slackware 10, Fedora Core 2, Debian Sarge and Gentoo. They were all nice and nifty, and I had just about decided to stay with Debian (since it has almost as good application base and tools with apt* as FreeBSD's ports) when destiny took another shot at me. My job forced me to relocate to a new town, a new apartment and a new... no, wait! No Internet connection available! Not yet anyways. This, and the fact that Swedish Television announced that they are sending an entire night, twelve hours straight, devoted to rock and heavy metal this very Friday night got my wheels spinning.
Seeing an old friend
I don't own a TV, much less a VCR. What to do? I'd really like to see this show. I went to the store and purchased a (reeaally) cheap Hauppauge WinTV board, and figured that I'd just plug it in and record the whole thing. I knew of tvtime and xawtv, and that xawtv could capture video, although I had never used it. Enter current time, and enter problems. I have no Internet connection, so I cannot download any packages to install the applications or libraries needed. Also, in my current move-chaos, I have left all my CDs and DVDs with packages and distributions in my other apartment, in another town. I found a Knoppix CD, which detected my board, and I was able to watch xawtv, but only in black and white, and it did not record. After ploughing through all my bags and boxes full of my belongings, the only thing I found that was of any help was my Windows 2000 Professional installation CD. After scratching my head to the bone I decided to give it a try. I mean, I work with Windows XP everyday at work, and I know that installation can be as simple as click-click-double-click. After all, I do have the installation CD that came with the WinTV card. Insert CD and fire up!
Now, I seem to recall Windows installations as a breeze compared to that of Linux or *BSD (yes, WinXP is more so than W2k) but I guess things change. Compared to SuSE, Fedora Core and especially Mandrake, Windows (both W2k and WinXP) is a walk on broken glass to install. I haven't tried it, but I guess Xandros and Linspire are just as easy as the three cousins mentioned. If you take the time to read the instructions when it comes to partitioning and bootloading on a Slackware or Debian installation, then it's not harder to install than any Windows flavor. Okay, Gentoo is a league of its own, but no one lacking severe experience in OS:es should ever try that at home.
Installation is finished, let's reboot into our fresh system. Hey! What's this?! I'm being greeted with a screen resolution from hell, and a 16-color display, some welcome! In Linux, I was at anytime invited into a nice 1024x768 or even a 1280x1024 display with millions of nice colors to view. Okay, let's just change that in the nice Display Properties Settings Menu. Nope, no go! I have to install new drivers and reboot first. What drivers? The ones I can download from my none-existing Internet connection? Sure, I may have gotten a CD with all that with the display card when I bought the computer, but that is 250 kilometers from here, and no time to fetch it. Linux may not offer me accelerated hardware support with the built-in drivers (with some exceptions, I believe), but then again, Windows offers me nothing at all. Yes, again, WinXP has much better support for this, I admit, but if I recall correctly not even that was of any high quality.
Okay, I try to install the WinTV board anyway, it might give me something. Well, no, not really. The sound works fine, but there is nothing but a black square where the image should be. I guess it needs more colors to display correctly.
Score so far?
At this point, I'd say Linux and Windows are even. The exception is the unlikely winner Knoppix, who can show me b/w TV, with a 2.4.x kernel, running from CD, impressive I must add. Well, I have Windows installed and a messy apartment waiting to be cleaned up. Let's explore my old OS and see if there is any nostalgia to be discovered. But alas, to my surprise, there is nothing to be discovered. We have... let's see... er... Notepad and WordPad, nice for writing stuff like this, and then there is... uhm... Paint and Mediaplayer. Let's face it, Windows comes with nothing! Not even if you consider that WinXP has a newer version of most of this, and some more tasty stuff, like Moviemaker. Sure, there is Internet Explorer and Outlook Express, so if I had an Internet connection I could browse the web and fetch some mails and viruses, since there is not even a proper firewall installed. Where's the stuff I need to get my work done? Where is my Office suite? Where is my application for creating awesome graphics for my website? Where is my compiler? Where is my Instant Messenger? No, I don't want that one, I want one that supports multiple IM protocols! Okay, so I don't have a connection, but nevertheless, I'll have one soon (I hope, I'll be sending this from work).
- "Win Vs Linux, Page 1/2"
- "Win Vs Linux, Page 1/2"
