::A Geek in Korea::

I’ve been running Linux full time for a few weeks now. I appreciate the ease at which upgrading and getting a new system up to speed. When I upgraded from Edgy Eft (6.10) to Feisty Fawn (7.04), I was literally done upgrading in 5 clicks. That’s awesome.

I had been happily running Feisty Fawn with absolutely no problems since the release, but ran into a snag today.  I had been watching a video on Google, but when I went to play an .avi file on my machine locally, I got no sound. Not only that, but my media players all choked when playing anything. Crash, force quit. They weren’t running due to some error with ALSA, which controls the sound in Linux (as to my understanding).

Since I have NO ability to troubleshoot Linux, I searched the web for the error. I tried some of the fixes offered, but no luck. My sound was shot. Conflict? Crashed Daemon? Who knows. I decided to simply download the Feisty Fawn installation CD and give it a fresh go. That’d probably fix whatever conflict it was and give me sound again. Or so I hoped at least.

The file finished downloading in a few minutes (I love my connection), and I burned the CD while I moved some files over to my Windows Partition to back them up. I wasn’t losing anything but some Gnome customization much so the reinstall was more of an annoyance than anything else. I set up the reinstall, then went to take a shower and get ready for work.

The install went smoothly, and I was back up to speed running what I usually do in under 3 hours. That’s fairly impressive. I even installed Innotek Virtual Box without a hitch, which lets me run Windows XP inside of Linux. That’s UBER-Geek territory right there. An OS inside another OS.

I’m doing this so I don’t have to bother trying to get Korean websites to play friendly with Linux. I simply let my wife run Internet Explorer in the virtual Windows XP. She gets Korean support, a Korean browser, and I have nothing to worry about. Even if she gets a virus or something, I can simply wipe the installation back to it was before the virtual OS was ever used. It’s not a “real” install. It’s contained in a file that is easy to revert and control. It’s basically the perfect for what we need, and runs really fast. You can’t break it, and it works as advertised. It’s Windows XP in a box.

The only thing it can’t do at the moment, is give me full USB support. I just can’t get my USB devices working with it, though people claim this is possible. Some digging will be needed to get it working properly. If I can get the USB to work like I need, I’ll be completely rid of any reason to reboot into Windows XP proper. I’ll just install the applications I need in the virtual OS and work with them from there. That’d be pretty damn cool. I can’t believe that it’s so simple to get the Windows XP to run inside of Linux.

Other than the fresh reinstall, I’m very impressed with Feisty Fawn. I played around with Beryl and found it superior to Compiz.  Compiz crashed my windows system, Beryl was cool, but not all that useful for how I work with my computer at the moment. Now that they’ll re-merge, I’ll keep my eye on them.

I’ll stick with good old 2-D Gnome for a while till they get some more features. I’d have been ALL over these a few years ago, but “shiny” OSes don’t really excite me that much any more. Just give me something useful to write and surf with. I’m not that picky.

Anyway, I’m still trying my luck at Linux despite the snag, and I’ll keep at it and hope I don’t run into another similar problem. I’m getting more comfortable with everything, and there are so many unique and useful features I’ve learned to use in Linux that’d it’d be a pain to go back to vanilla Windows after all of this.