I upgraded the wikibox today. I replaced the old PIII 800 machine with an Athlon XP running in the 1650 area. I decided to do this instead of using the Athlon machine as a render client, since it really doesn’t have the horsepower to do so. I want to eventually replace the Hard Drive in the wikibox with something faster to increase responsiveness.

The upgrade was easy and not easy. Unlike Windows and their fascist “copy protection asshat HAL kernel sh*t”, you can change the hardware on an Ubuntu box rather easily without tripping some kind of Gestapo alarm or basically causing the whole operating system to puke blue chunks. I just yanked the hard drive from the old machine and popped it into the new one and it just booted up and ran. I did have a couple of problems, however.

May I take this opportunity to say that the X Windowing system sucks. It’s settings are hardcoded into a fuc**ng text file and if you change the video hardware, oops sorry, you don’t get a GUI. It does not have any kind of automatic fallback mode, so if you change your video hardware and you don’t have any experience with the command line, you are basically screwed. Secondly, I think GNU/Linux really needs to create an X Windows compatible API that is BUILT INTO THE FUC**NG KERNEL, just like EVERY OTHER MODERN OPERATING SYSTEM. Maybe then graphics on Linux would not be slow, buggy and generally crufty crap.

Back to the story: I had to do some guessing and hacking and a couple “sudo -reconfigure dpkg-xserver-xorg” commands to get the video running. Then, to my surprise, the network card did not work. Running a “lspci” command showed that the OS knew the card was there, and some other command starting in “mod” (that I found on a forum somewheres) told me the driver was installed, but eth0 was just not up and could not be brought up with “ifup eth0″.

After about 2 hours of forum hunting and getting nowhere, I finally stumbled across a bit of nice detective work. Apparently, Ubuntu’s network software, also, sucks. If your network card changes, it will not automatically reconfigure your configuration files and just make it work. Oh no. You have to hand code “/etc/iftab” to match your new card’s MAC address. THEN and ONLY THEN wil eth0 come up. What if you aren’t intimately familiar with linux and/or you aren’t a hardware geek and don’t know how to get the MAC address of your network card? Again, you would be completely screwed.

What a pain in the ass! Well, at least I didn’t have to reinstall the Operating System. On XP, it’s nothing more than a minor irritation: a quick repair install and phone reactivation and you are up and running. Vista, however, is a totally different story. You CANNOT repair install it. You have to completely replace the OS, reinstall all your software and drivers from scratch, and put all your data back.

I guess what I am saying is, VISTA BLOWS.