Wednesday 20 February 2008

Reasons why I cannot erase Windows from my PCs

Even though I love Linux, there are still certain things that still prevent me from switching completely:

Midi

I've tried to get Midi working in Linux countless times. I've recently installed the Midiman firmware loader to no avail. Theres no fanfare when I plug it in. inputting lsusb in a terminal shows it's there, but I cannot seem to get the thing working in any of the programs. jackd runs, but nothing much happens.

TV-Out / Multihead

I have an old Compaq AP550 that sits connected to a portable TV through its Nvidia MX400 and single phono-type video lead, without a monitor. When Windows boots it automatically displays on the TV. Unfortunately on Linux, even with the proper drivers, once X is started it does not appear. It's an absolute pain to experiment in hacking xorg.conf. Things should be much easier than this! Also, on my main desktop, i cannot get multi-head working without stretching my desktop accross two monitors - I want two seperate desktops at 1280x1024!


Apart from this, I do use Linux 90% of the time. There is another problem I have too which stops my aging Toshiba Tecra 8000 laptop from being totally Linux, but I'll save that for another time.

Update (17/05/10)
Both these problems have now been circumvented. Ubuntu has had good dual head support with Nvidia drivers for a while now. The old Compaq has been retired and replaced with several times, due to hardware failure. The current machine is a HP D530 with an ATI card with HDMI-out, into the rear of a flat-screen TV. It works just like a monitor. I'm also slowly starting use a dual CPU Powermac G4 for music creation, so hopefully Windows will be used even less.

Update 2 (20th January 2016)
I have been single boot Linux for a long time on my main machine, but i relented some months back and got a second PC with Windows 10 purely for gaming, mostly GTA V.

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