The painful loss of the Soup

The chunky soup is no longer on sale. Why God, Why!!!?!?!?!?! Why must you give me a wonderful sale on chunky soup when I couldn’t afford to take full advantage of it, just to take it away when I could….WHY!?!?!?!!!!!!!!

Also, Linux sucks. Thats right, I’m a computer geek, and I said it. Do you know how long Rob and I collectively have been trying to get TV capturing to work so we can make a freevo box. For those of you who aren’t familiar with this thing it is like TiVo. It lets you record and pause live TV with commercial skipping. Sort of like a vcr, only I can play computer movies (mpeg files) or show pictures or anything like that, if the stupid thing would work. Do you know how much work it takes to do anything in linux.
First, you have to install the base distribution cd, then you have to download all these components like the newest php and perl modules, then you have to compile all this crap from source, and then install it. Which, installing in linux is a mysterious process, it is like sometimes you run an installer, which also must be compiled, and sometimes you just copy some files from one place to another and it works, and others you have to copy some files into the source code and recompile everything. I think to make this video card thing work completely right I have recompile my kernel (which is the main deal that makes linux work) and recompile XFree86 and then copy some stuff to the right places, compile that, and do something else. But the main webpage for the drivers tells me I have to just unzip some stuff, which is bogus.

Finally, here is the kicker, after doing all this crap which can take upwards of a day just waiting for the computer to complete this stuff, anything that came with the shiney new distribution (I’ve tried Debian, Slackware, Mandrake, and SuSE) that was specific to that distro, like mandrakes rpmdrake which helps ease some of this pain for other software, is gone. And very hard to get it back, especially to see the nice front end gui that helps me know what I’m doing with this crap. This all just goes to say that I don’t think Linux is going mainstream any time really soon. Not until they can make stuff work across distros, and can make it so that your hardware works without any recompiling anything. Also, no one should bitch about windows being bloatware when I have to keep downloading, or have to have on hand all the source code for everything, because that wastes an ass ton of space.

Maybe later when I’m not thinking about how annoying Linux (and BSD if you are reading this Pete, because it ate my tree so I can’t update the port tree anymore) I’ll write about how my classes went today, because I had some interesting ideas after attending my last class.

So I’m signing off for now.