About a week ago, I installed Windows XP Service Pack 3 [snore] on my laptop thinking that it might do something for it. I mean, SP3 is out in the Release Candidate stage of production. What could go wrong? Right?
After installing, it seemed to be a pretty even-keel boring ride with few changes that normal users would never see or notice. But that's where the placid waters ended and the maelstrom began.
After the first full shutdown/reboot sequence, I got the BSOD on a consistent basis. I knew it
wasn't my hard drive. That's new. The only real thing that changed was the damn service pack. I considered re-installing Windows for about two seconds and then thought about Linux.I have been trying to get a decent running installation of Gentoo Linux going for about the past two years. It's not the easiest broad to get along with, but it is lightweight and flexible.
Long story short: I spent a week in Gentoo CLI Hell and ended-up with a rather useless Operating System. Today I settled for a distribution of Linux that is built on Gentoo but is far easier to set-up called Sabayon. After-all, it is easier to uninstall crap than it is to install crap with Portage. An added plus was that everything, including my wireless card, worked right out of the box. IV'E NEVER HAD WIRELESS LINUX!!!
One of the reasons I wanted to go with Linux over XP was that XP was getting rather boring to look at and it was very limited. I've been wanting to make a Mac clone on a PC ever since I first saw OSX all those many years ago. The vigilance in people so dedicated to make that dream a reality in Linux has come a long way.
I spent all day today working with a program called Baghira [Panther in Hindi. I thought it was clever too]. I finally got my laptop's desktop looking similar to the desktop on my G3.
The only difference is that the G3 royally pisses me off every time I use it and the laptop actually has a bit more horsepower to run all of the *bling*. Yes, I even managed to get a fully-functional Dock with the parabolic zooming and the works [ksmoothdock]. That's the sweetest part about it.I even went so far as to rig-up some shell scripts to change the title bar in Konqueror to "Finder". It got the Finder icon too. I know the picture doesn't look 100% like OSX; but you're just jealous that your Finder doesn't have tabbed browsing :-P.
I almost forgot how fun Linux was until this little experience. Hopefully someone reading this (at least the first few parts) will not screw-around with a Gentoo installation and instead get Sabayon. If you would like to try Sabayon with no risk, just download a CD image from their website and boot from it. It won't touch your data unless you ask it to. No risk!
