Any of you who are also in Crimson Eternity may have seen my looooong series of postings about getting Linux running on my second computer. MAN, it’s hard.
There was an article today, either in Digg or Slashdot, but I can’t find it in either now, about how Linux is not meant to replace Windows…
Okay. That would have been a good link. But to summarize: When Windows and the program I paid money for refused to play DVDs any longer, I decided to abandon Windows rather than pay MORE money to buy that same crappy program over again. I had some WinDVD software which came with the DVD player for my main computer (this one), but that only seemed to show anything in 16 colors.
Screw that. I’m off to the land of the free.
NOTHING but trouble. Linux means nothing; there are a hundred distros; one is right for you, but which one? I tried a dozen. Easily.
I liked Ubuntu for the longest time, but then it got cranky, developed quirks, had weird errors, and then the computer BLEW UP.
Well.
So I rebuilt the computer and tried Gentoo, a source-based distro. Source-based means every single program was compiled ON my machine FOR my machine, ending with a Linux perfectly made to run perfectly.
That’s what they claim, anyway.
Well, actually, it came so close – closer than Ubuntu in some ways (and in others, no. I still have a hard drive Gentoo won’t see.)
Okay, okay – I am getting to the point.
What sparked this all, was watching DVDs. My DVDs, I buy them all, I have a legal right to watch them. No matter what anyone claims about encryption. They are MY DVDs, and I WILL watch them HOW I want to watch them. And I want to watch them on my Linux computer.
But the DVD player would only play disks partway through.
There are so many things that could be wrong. DVD driver. Sound driver. Video driver. Decryption library. Read library. Player back-end. Player front-end.
Yeah. In Linux, everything comes in little pieces.
The decryption library, by the way, may be illegal in the US. But. I can watch my DVDs. They weren’t pirated. So I installed that library with clear conscience.
But it worked, but didn’t work WELL.
So tonight I got new sources – not the ones Gentoo wants you to have; I went to the developers, compiled them from the source, installed them and and and and and…
And they worked. They WORKED.
Hehehehe…. I just watched the Battlestar Galactica miniseries, all the way through to the credits.
It’s the little things….
* later note: turns out I was not using my new kernel. I (from work, natch) recompiled my kernel to change the way it loaded modules, and noticed that the boot loader was loading a kernel from Jan 1. For some reason. I pointed it to the new kernel and it now sees my SATA drive. I hope everything ELSE still works when I get home….
