The Vineyards

My recent acquisition of a DVD burner was matched by a severe disappointment at the media I got along with it. I know small planes fly around every day after lunch leaving smoke trails that say "Use only Ridata and Taiyo Yuden media!", but I would have an easier time finding a kangaroo down the street than a pack of Taiyo Yuden priced at less than the burner itself. Looking at a store's shelf, awed by the lack of options, I picked a spindle of fifty Kodak discs, assuming the many years of trusting their camera films could be extended by their discs. No such thing; actually produced by some Umedisc company in Taiwan, the "Kodak" discs are among the worst in any review site Google can lead me to. Regardless of reviews, in a pack of fifty, twenty discs were not even recognized by the burner as recordable. That says enough to me.

What discs I managed to burn were filled with things I can easily get back but were cluttering my hard disks too much. With the newly recovered space, I could reorganize my files and ended up with an entire primary partition completely empty in the secondary hard disk, a partition from which I can boot by changing the priority order in BIOS setup. So I acquired a trial version of Windows Vista Ultimate to see what would happen; I installed it and used it for about two weeks, and loved it.

Then I changed BIOS setup back to use XP again, because many older programs would not run on Vista (nothing I desperately needed, to be honest) and I felt bad using a default, slow driver for my already low-end video card, because nVidia's official driver was "experimental" and remained so until I went back to XP. I heard dreadful tales about those drivers and I had my own terrible experiences with bad video drivers in XP already, I was not willing to put something like that on my brand new OS installation. I had already learned my lesson, too, when I blindly tried to install Alcohol 120% on it and it took me three days to make it boot again. Only then did I go to Alcoholsoft's site and saw the big warning, "older versions do not work with Windows Vista", and many forum posts complaining that Alcohol had made their new system unbootable, and silly people feeling so high and mighty responding "But didn't you see the warning in the site?", because in today's world of high speed internet connection no one keeps a CD, DVD, or even a separate partition or folder filled with useful programs they always install on a new OS installation, or to take to a friend's house when they call saying "My computer broke, can you fix it?" and removing all the adware and spyware would take longer than reformat/reinstall and all they would lose is the "last month's trip to the beach" folder in My Documents\My Pictures which is all already on their fotolog or MySpace or orkut album or Flickr anyway. No, no such thing! At this day and age, with high speed internet connections, it is no trouble at all to check the sites for each program we use whenever we need to reinstall them for whatever reason - even if said programs amass to about fifteen or twenty.

But I admit it was stupid of me to think an old Alcohol 120% would work with Vista. In my defense, Mac users keep saying Microsoft's biggest problem is how each version of Windows keeps backward compatibility and how Mac OS is so much superior for not doing it; I believed them. But this is unimportant, it was fixed, the new version worked, I loved Vista (even though it gave my system a 3.7 score because of my puny video-card). But I went back because it was too early.

With the space there again, with nothing better to put on it, I decided, of course, to try some Linux. "This time I will make it work". This idea was brought by a random stumbling upon the announcement of a new version of Sabayon Linux on digg.com, which I very rarely read. There were many complaints around the internet about how Sabayon takes as much space as Vista because it installs thousands of hardware drivers in case the user ever needs them, but I had space to spare, no worries. What really attracted me was a bit of information saying the x64 version comes preconfigured with many functional 64-bit applications and everything that does not have a x64 compatible version is set to 32-bit by design - in essence, Firefox would have Flash and Wine would work without the need to work all sorts of magic. I tried it.

The mouse cursor was there during installation, both in graphical and text modes, but it did not move. Installation ended, the system booted, the cursor was there, but it did not move. I have a very standard PS/2 mouse, it is recognized by everything under the sun - but not Sabayon Linux's 10GB of drivers. "No matter", I thought, "I read their support is quite good, there is a link to their IRC channel right on the main menu, I will just ask around or check their forums." But no, that was impossible, because in the 10GB of drivers there was also nothing able to make my onboard network card work. No internet and no mouse, it reminded me of my first week on Windows 3.1, except Windows 3.1 was fully usable without a mouse. I kept trying for about a week, then gave up and wiped the partition out.

"Fine, then, I will do what everyone who refuses to use Vista does and install Ubuntu, I can deal with some magic to make Flash and Wine work." Downloaded the latest stable version, 6.10, got it on a CD, booted, set it to install, nothing. A corrupt screen, black and white, with a barely recognizable Ubuntu logo and a flashing bar that seemed to go back and forth but was too garbled to be sure. Then nothing.

It would not work with the defaults, so I poked around for install options. I got the corrupted screen to look smaller on a higher resolution but nothing else I tried had any result. Turning the garbled screen off gave me some information about what was going on. "dma_timer_expiry" a number of times. Back to XP, Google, hundreds of conflicting forum posts with no actual solution. Back to BIOS setup, I disabled the SATA controller and hard disk, leaving only the IDE drive where Ubuntu was to be installed. Same garbled screen, but behind it there were less dma_timer_expiry errors - just one, actually, but enough to prevent installation completely. I kept trying for a few more days with no results. I wiped the partition again.

I think a forum poster got it right with the most elucidative comment, "lol nforce". My puny motherboard is based on the nForce4 chipset. It works with Vista.