I spent most of this weekend reinstalling the OS on the box where this blog lives—repartitioned the drive, got rid of the XP Pro install, and switched from an old install of Fedora Core 2 to Ubuntu. As a result, I’ve got more drive space, and a much more stable system. All things considered, it wasn’t even that painful a process.

Of course, this meant the blog had to be reinstalled as well. I’ve moved to a newer version of the software, and a somewhat more interesting (yet still satisfyingly minimalist) skin. As of this writing, I have only just gotten everything back up and running, and have not really had time to work out all the bugs and get it exactly the way I want it.

Please stay tuned for further improvements…

I don’t think I’ve mentioned it here before, but I’ve been listening online to KCMP out of Minneapolis/St. Paul quite a bit lately. It’s part of Minnesota Public Radio, but the programming is free-form music, and they play a pretty wide range of stuff.

The only downside is that they offer only two streams, a 32kbps Windows Media stream and an aacPlus stream. Like an idiot, I was listening to the crummy-quality Windows one until I figured out that Winamp plays aacPlus.

Anyway, I’d recommend checking it out— 89.3 The Current.

For some time now i’ve been meaning to reinstall the OS on my laptop. For reasons I won’t go into here, it originally came with Windows 2000 on it; then last summer, I installed XP. Due to lack of planning and forethought on my part, I had to do it as an upgrade rather than a clean install from scratch, and I’ve never been completely satisfied with it. Mostly it works fine, but there have been ongoing small nuisances such as odd wireless problems and video resolution glitches. On top of that, there was just a lot of old crap lying around the system, left over from 2k, and that sort of thing annoys me on a deep philosophical.

So, I reformatted the hard drive and reinstalled XP on Saturday. No problem there—I’ve installed XP more times than I can count at this point, and frankly, aside from having to run the endless patches and updates to get it current, it’s a pretty damn easy process.

Being a glutton for punishment, however, I thought to myself, “While I’m at it, why not partition the drive and install Linux as well?”

Long story short, I spent pretty much the entire rest of the weekend installing Linux on my laptop. This is probably my sixth or seventh go-round with Linux, and while it’s gotten relatively easier each time (partly due to the ongoing development of the OS, partly due to my increasing familiarity with it), every time I’ve installed it on a computer, there has been some maddening problem that threatens to be a show-stopper. The first time, back in the days of Red Hat 6, it was just getting the damn thing to find the modem. Then on Red Hat 8, there was the epic struggle with the nVidia drivers. Fedora Core 2 went much more smoothly, and has been running on my workstation at home for at least 6 months.

For the laptop, I decided to give Ubuntu a shot, as I had been hearing lots of good things about it. If you’re not familiar, it’s a desktop-oriented offshoot of the Debian distribution, and so far, I have to say that I like it a lot. With one notable exception, the install is a breeze. I started with 4.10 (“Warty”), which is the current stable release, and for reasons I may go into later, updated to 5.04 (“Hoary”), a beta of the next major release due sometime in late spring. Hardware detection was nearly flawless, and their implentation of Debian’s apt-get system for updates is great. All in all, it took me about two hours to get everything up and running on the test box I initially tried it on here at work.

The problems I have so far only eluded to arose when I tried to get the wireless connection on my laptop working. To put it simply, wireless just flat-out didn’t work under Warty, due to IRQ conflicts that turned out to be a known bug in the version of the Linux kernel that came with the distribution. The upgrade to Hoary has gotten the wireless working, but it’s still pretty sketchy, and this is where I come right back around to Linux’s amateur-hour feel when compared to Windows and Mac OSX. While the wireless technically “works” (in that I can, in fact, connect to an access point and transmit data), switching back and forth between the wired and wireless connections is dicey at best, and there is no out-of-the-box equivalent of the GUI wireless configuration utilities offered by Microsoft, Apple, or countless hardware manufacturers. I have found a couple of homegrown Python apps that claim to offer similar functionality, but I have yet to get either one successfully installed, much less working satisfactorily.

There’s an interesting series of articles featured on Popmatters today about the music industry, copyright law, and digital rights management. They’re worth a read if for no other reason than that they’re well thought-out and reasonable, as opposed to the hysterical hand-waving and apocalyptic predictions that usually characterize both sides of this discussion.

I found Sam Mamudi’s piece about the background of copyright protection to be the most thought-provoking. While he does not fall into the easy category of “recording industry shill/stooge,” he does point out that what the industry is looking for in its pursuit of digital right management would probably not be considered all that onerous had consumers not enjoyed several years’ worth of free-for-all. As much as I hate to admit it, I largely agree with this view. Even with all the crack-downs that have taken place on the downloading of music from the Internet, it is still difficult bringing myself to pay fifteen bucks for an album I know I can probably get for free.

As a side-note, if you’re not familiar with Popmatters, you should probably check it out. Update daily, it’s a good mix of media, social, and political commentary and criticism. Their album reviews cover a wide range of music, both popular and obscure, and they’re informative and helpful (as opposed to the Pitchforkmedia “We know more than you could ever hope to, and we’re not going to miss an opportunity to point it out” style of music criticism).