I tried Linux again over the weekend, downloading the newest Fedora Core 3 distribution and giving it a whirl. It took a bit of tinkering, but I actually set up Java, Flash, and Azureus from the command line, and was really getting used to the whole paradigm, before I learned that even after I added some code to my kernel that allowed me to access my NTFS drives (my audio collection, my video collection, my applications, and my documents/photos), I couldn’t write to them, meaning that I couldn’t ever save anything while running Linux.
So, I tried the release candidate of Windows XP x64, except despite the integration guide on Collosumus.net, I couldn’t manage to get it to recognize the SATA drive it was to be installed on. Long story short, I’m back on a fresh install of XP 32-bit, which is nice, but a little bit of a come-down, in all honesty.
The real bugger about all this is that Linux does its best to get along with Windows, but Windows won’t give Linux the time of day. Microsoft doesn’t want to allow its customers to dual-boot or experiment with alternative products. Also, its development cycle is so slow that XP is ancient technology as opposed to Fedora Core 3.
Speaking of Linux, I saw this at Slashdot and just had to laugh: it’s the original Usenet announcement about Linux from its creator, Linus Torvalds.
Do you pine for the nice days of minix-1.1, when men were men and wrote their own device drivers? Are you without a nice project and just dying to cut your teeth on a OS you can try to modify for your needs? Are you finding it frustrating when everything works on minix? No more all- nighters to get a nifty program working? Then this post might be just for you :-)
As I mentioned a month(?) ago, I’m working on a free version of a minix-lookalike for AT-386 computers. It has finally reached the stage where it’s even usable (though may not be depending on what you want), and I am willing to put out the sources for wider distribution. It is just version 0.02 (+1 (very small) patch already), but I’ve successfully run bash/gcc/gnu-make/gnu-sed/compress etc under it. {Free minix-like kernel sources for 386-AT}