Talk about falling into a Worm Hole and disappearing forever… Have you ever tried to configure your Linux box to display your desktop on two monitors? I have. I’ve succeeded when I had the right graphics card, but the rest of the time I want to howl at the moon.
It’s that bad. I’m not one of those Idealistic Save The World Free as In Freedom Linux Fan Boys. I just want something that works with my two big monitors. In my work I use lots of operating systems: OS X, XP, Linux, Solaris, HP-UX, and (picture me barfing up in an alley) Vista. As long as I have Vim and grep, and lots of screen real estate, I’m a happy hacker.
It’s just that all of my Intel boxes have that crapulous Windows Vista on them. I tried to live with it for a while. My benchmarks (mostly Ruby scripts and PHP) run fine. Great multimedia software, and my printers all work. Nicest of all is that it’s trivial to use multiple monitors (and I’ve got a stack of them on my desk!).
You’re all set up, then it happens. You try to shutdown the machine, and it auto-reboots endlessly. You try to kill a runaway Firefox process and you can’t, not without rebooting. Hey, it feels like 1995 all over again. All you can think about is getting that cancer out of your hardware.
So I get fed up and pull out Gparted and carve out an Ext3 partition and spend three days installing Linux on my Thinkpad. I start with Ubuntu—it can’t see my windows partitions, so I download Fedora. Same deal. Then SuSE, and Debian. They all suck. One can’t see my wireless card. One can’t see the disk. When I’m about to give up, I try Mandriva and everything works…except there’s no way to display the desktop on two monitors. Of course, it does mirroring, but what a waste of expensive hardware.
I’ll be glad when operating systems are extinct, like dinosaurs. After the last three days I’m totally ready to move to a Pacific Island and read detective novels for 10 years or so. I’ll bring my Raymond Chandler collection… Anyone want to join me?
