The joys of linux

[linamishima]

So, two weeks ago, before a big interview, my windows install gave up the ghost. It would reach the logon screen then just hang indefinitely. Testing my hard drive on Chloe's identical (aside from ram) laptop, and the install still suffered this fault. A week and four reinstalls, a new hard drive, and a return to my original ram later, and windows still wasn't a happy bunny. It refused to detect my on-board sound, failed to allow my expressport x-fi card to be detected after the installer had found it, and after installing the intel chipset drivers, it declared that I wasn't allowed to have any working USB ports.

So last weekend, I took a long-awaited step, one which the new hard drive was supposed to enable anyhow, just in not such an extreme form, after which:

• My on-board audio works 100% normally
• My laptop is quieter and generally feels a little happier
• All the USB ports work
• There are no errors logged about the hardware at all
• The new ram actually passes memtest, so might actually be fine
• The on-board audio headphones output seems to have less noise on it somehow
• ...but I've not used my x-fi card, since there are apparently driver issues*
How did I manage this? By installing Debian. Nothing like the deep end for learning something!

It's an interesting ride. The default version of pidgin available to me doesn't speak MSN, so I'm offline from IMs for now, and I spent an entire evening struggling to get media playback working. I've still got to figure out how to get flash working safely under a 64bit OS and browser, and how to get more recent versions of programs.

And of course, get my damn website up! All that's on my domain at the moment is this handy PDF version of the current Debian reference.

* Although, there were under windows, too - there's a hardware fault on the card's chipset by design. Well done, Creative Labs...