Back Again. . .

I've been kind of busy of late - hence the lack of blogging.

In fact I've written a couple of pieces (that I'm going to have to finish and post) but, well, sometimes life just gets in the way, and recently life has been getting in the way in quite a large way.

So, two funerals later (seriously) and I'm back.

To get the ball rolling again, here are some of the things that I would have been blogging about under normal circumstances.

Hackintosh Havoc

I've had a play with a home-made hackintosh. What do I mean by that? Well, basically it is MacOS X running on a standard Intel PC. Was it worth the effort? Probably not. To cut a long blog short you would be better buying a second hand Mac than the amount of effort you will need to go to in order to get it working properly (and in case you are wondering - it never really worked properly, although it was damn close).

In case any Apple lawyers are reading, the hard disk used was humanely destroyed after the experiment. No copies of OSX Tiger were harmed in attemping this.

Ubuntu Blues

I've recently aquired a Dell OptiPlex 270 (Pentium 4, 2.8ghz folks!) which I'm going to be using as a replacement for my venerable 1.8Gghz Athlon XP 2200. The strange thing about this PC is that although it supports Hyper Threading (sort of a cheap alternative to Dual Core) this isn't enabled by default. Strange but true. Once it has been enabled the PC performs rather well with Windows XP.

Of course, I also installed Ubuntu alongside it. Unfortunately the "newest" version of Ubuntu I had to hand was an 8.04 install. Not to be deterred by this I installed it (reducing the XP partition down to 20 gig) then upgraded it to 8.10 and then again to 9.04.

One problem with the OptiPlex 270 is that it needs a low profile AGP graphics card - and the only one I was able to rustle up at short notice was an ancient 16 meg ATI Rage Pro 128. Not the best card by a long straw - but better than the onboard 8 meg(!) Intel one.

Luckily I was able to borrow a 128 meg Geforce FX 5200 PCI card - which worked well in Windows (after a little bit of fiddling to disable the onboard card). It also worked well in Ubuntu - up to the point where I rebooted and checkdisk started - but claimed that it couldn't repair the file system. After a couple of hours of running FSCK on Ubuntu's root partition (and watching hundreds of errors appear on screen) I gave up, downloaded the Ubuntu 9.04 install CD and reinstalled from scratch (this time as EXT4).

As the PCI graphics card was still too slow I bought a cheap-and-cheerful low profile AGP card (another Geforce 5200) which now runs like a charm. Ubuntu accepted the new card without problems (booted up and hey! It works!) - Windows however took about an hour to get everything running correctly (which included uninstalling and re-installing the drivers, swearing and playing around with different configuration options to get the card recognised correctly, and then to get the resolution so that it would change from 640x480 up to 1280x1024).

Ubuntu 9.04 boots extremely quickly (just like Windows XP), and is ready to work as soon as the desktop is displayed (unlike XP which is unusuable for the first minute or two).

SCO is Gonna Go

It has been recommended by the U.S. Trustee that SCO is moved out of Chapter 11 Bancruptcy into full Chapter 7. This basically means that it has been agreed that there is no future for SCO as a company, and so its assets are to be sold and the proceeds given to the creditors.

Could this be the end of the extremely long running SCO vs The World saga?

Seeing as SCO, as usual, are planning to oppose this decision (gosh, really?).

So what did Darl McBride have to say? “We are reviewing the motion that was filed in Delaware today with counsel and will have a detailed response for the court in due course. We plan to oppose the motion and present our own suggested course of action to the court."

Time will tell if this lawsuit still has legs.