… every time I’ve installed it on a machine, it’s been a let-down.
I have an “old” (4-5 years) laptop (Athlon XP 2500 with 3 gig s of RAM, using the nVidia 440 series display, if that makes any difference) that’s been running its original Windows XP install since I bought it. For the most part it sits next the monitor for my main desktop PC and is used these days to watch DVDs or streaming video from Netflix or Hulu, or for some light web surfing now & then – tasks that it has always been adequate to perform.
So for whatever reason I got it into my head that it would be a good idea to take this perfectly functional machine and wipe it to install Linux. Though my success with various Linux incarnations of this open-source OS in the past has been, shall we say, limited – there always seemed to be some piece of hardware for which I couldn’t find adequate support, or some piece of software I wanted to be able to run, but couldn’t – I figured it wouldn’t hurt to take the plunge, because I could always re-install XP if it didn’t work.
So I grabbed the latest Ubuntu 9.04 release and it installed flawlessly. Installed a utility called Synergy to allow me to share mouse & keyboard across multiple machines, and it worked flawlessly once I set all the machines involved to fixed IP addresses, because the Linux and Windows boxes didn’t seem to want to recognize each others’ presence any other way.
Next I downloaded the Boxee media center, which I remembered reading on LifeHacker had support for streaming Netflix movies… what I didn’t remember, though, was that it only had this support on non-Linux platforms, and in fact there’s currently no way to view netflix streams on Linux at all except possibly through some kind of Windows virtual machine setup – which kind of defeats the purpose. Boxee crashed out to the desktop most of the time anyway.
Next I tried to watch Hulu, and it worked fine, except that with headphones plugged in, sound was coming through both the speakers and the headphones. I had to Google for a solution to this (ticking a checkbox in the sound control panel to enable automatic headphone detection), and this is a minor quibble, but it seems like something that should be set by default.
Sound problem resolved, I clicked “view full screen” on the Hulu page – and bye-bye browser window. So Hulu only works if I keep it running in a small window.
“Surely they’ve gotten DVD playback right,” I thought.
Not quite.
In order to watch pretty much any commercial DVD, I had to track down a quasi-legal driver to decrypt the contents. This is, of course, not at all the fault of the open source community, but rather of the greed of the film industry, but it’s still a stumbling block in the acceptance of an alternative desktop OS.
Decryption installed, I popped in a commercial CD, and was able to watch it right up to the FBI warning – at which point the player locked up. Several other DVDs did better – I didn’t watch them all the way through, but at least I could get into the movie itself and navigate around.
So, as has happened every time I’ve installed Linux, it’s just not up to the task for which I’d hoped to use it. I suppose it would be ideal if I needed an Apache server, but, for the moment, I don’t.
For my next trick, I’m going to grab the Windows 7 RTM through my employer’s MSDN subscription and see how that works on the old laptop. Most likely I’ll end up back on XP.