by Ethan Johnson
January 22, 2007

Here is a post-crash status report:

• Kubuntu is back. I tried to stray from the reservation, but things didn't work out very well. OpenSUSE installed correctly, but was painfully boring. I think there's a reason why people brand that flavor of Linux as being "corporate." Plus, key packages that I can't live without were not readily available for OpenSUSE. I could learn how to compile from source, but I'm married. Oh, and YaST was incredibly annoying. I kept thinking of all of the tasks I would have performed already if I had "just" re-loaded Kubuntu. I tried Gentoo as an alternative option and never made it past step 5 of the "simplified" installation process. Word to Gentoo: There's being challenging in a fun, interesting way, and then there's being snotty about a broken process. As I surfed around looking for how to get past step 5, I learned about all of the "yeah buts" concerning Gentoo. Stuff that wasn't an issue with Kubuntu. Since I hadn't done anything yet, really, I paved over OpenSUSE and gave Kubuntu a new lease on life.
• Hard drives are getting ridiculously cheap. I was going to buy a 160GB PATA hard drive for about $70, but the sale price expired when I made the decision. However, I got a 320GB SATA drive for about $90. Good grief. I'm noticing that internal drives are cheap, whereas external will kill you (financially). If they are tagged as "backup" drives then expect to spend something in the way of a car payment. I ran out of "mad money", but I plan to buy a second 300+ GB drive when I am able. For now I will use DVDs for backup.
• After all of this hassle, my sound card still "crackles" like a firelog, which was why I tried to fix my sound drivers in the first place, which led to the crash. Apparently this is caused by a) Audigy support in Linux being akin to a bag of flaming poop, and b) latency settings for my PCI slots. Ummm, I checked my BIOS and there is no place for me to manually adjust PCI latency. I took someone's random advice and disabled all unused ports, like my parallel port and both serials. Still crackling like a firelog. For anyone who cares, the crackling sound is associated solely with the "front" slider on my mile-long KMix window (when Audigy is selected). Everything extraneous is disabled or muted. Question: Why do I need literally 8 sliders to be raised to get sound out of my Audigy card in Linux? And here is a question I can't seem to get a satisfactory answer to: What is the best (read: supported) sound card to get for Linux/Ubuntu? (The ALSA sound card matrix isn't very informative in that regard.)
• Kubuntu runs worlds faster the second time around. Not sure if it's the fresh install, the new drive, or what. Not complaining, just an observation.
• I still can't mount my bad drive. I may have to spend actual money on data recovery, one way or the other. Which means it'll be a while until that happens. I'll put the old drive on ice in the meantime.
• Fluxbox is altogether super cool and super annoying. Again, just an observation.

Rebuilding efforts continue apace, but in short I think the crash will yield some benefits. After upgrade after upgrade of (K)Ubuntu, my system was getting clogged up with layers of pancake makeup. Now that I have to do it over, I'm not loading every cool-looking package just because I can. Which helps, I'm sure. I also had a bunch of packages loaded to evaluate, and a goodly number of them were slated for removal anyway. The crash sped up that process considerably.

In spite of all of this hard drive drama, I'm still pretty enamored with Linux in general. When it's good, it's very good. And free! I'll love it even more when my sound card issues get ironed out. Thanks to everyone who provided feedback/sympathy/suggestions in the wake of the crash. <EM>