Fuck Linux

We have a "media center" computer that connects to our TV. It cost about 350 bucks, and we jacked the tv-out of the nvidia card to the tv. Wonderful.

We first installed MCE, which worked ok, but we thought we could get more flexibility out of a linux installation with MythTV or some other suitable suite. Fine and dandy--Jessica and I have built and administered many computers, and we both can program in at least 2 languages. "Take the plunge", we said.

We were slightly gunshy. Awhile back we installed Debian on one of the laptops we had sitting around, as an experiment and to make the machine run quickly on a modern OS (it was old and shitty). We were something less than successful. However, upon doing some research recently, I found that debian is one of the hardest distros to set up. Jessica decided that Fedora core would be very simple. Fine.

After downloading the cd images, we were greeted with the Fedora core greeting, and were whisked away to partition drives. We did, choosing xfs file system as it's very nice for handling large files. After choosing a bunch of packages, I diligently fed the computer discs until it came to the end of the process.

Problem 1: Anaconda (the installer) hangs while trying to install the boot loader on an xfs partition. Upon googling it I found the error on bugzilla. This is a known bug that's existed for a long time. Nobody has fixed it.

ok, so reformat with ext3 filesystem. Now the installer finishes fine. I set up an account and boot into KDE. First step of course is to load the video drivers. Pop over to nvidia's site, download the file (with a very fucking long filename) to the desktop. Open a console and sh the file. No good; it can't install while X is running. Fuck. Restart computer choosing command line only. Same error. Wtf?

After some googling we found that the proper command to issue is init3, which reboots the computer only partially. Now we could proceed with the install. Reboot into KDE and it seems good.

At this point I will stop the story and just list the problems that we ran into subsequently:

- No sound. We got the sound working, but upon reboot it was broken again. And the same process as before does not restore it. Note that the sound worked during the initial installation (it played a "test sound"). But now nothing.

- TV-out image is far to the right. This was not a problem in MCE. It can not be fixed.

- Adjusting the screen size is ridiculous. If you're not su-ing to modify a .conf file, you're fiddling with a program that is nonrescalable so that when you change to a lower resolution you cannot set it back because the "ok" button is irretrievably off the screen.

- Opening a network folder takes minutes just to give a listing of files. The network printer could not be found at all by KDE's print manager, regardless of the fact that SAMBA found it just fine.

-X refuses to run at all if you try to run a newer kernel.

We're giving up. Linux is more definitely not ready for the average person. And I don't think we're average.