Windows puts me down again

Time and again M$ has let me down. Now the latest case is here. I use Fedora12 with Gnome Shell on my ACER 5738. One week ago I installed Vista Ultimate(to play GTA). For five minutes it worked like a charm. I installed the vga  driver and it was perfect. But as soon as I installed the HD audio driver, sound stopped coming from the speakers. Yes, it was coming before I installed the driver, but the  mic was not working. So I had to live without a mic. My problems did’nt end here. I then installed firefox 3(I didnt have 3.5 but I needed something to download it, and IE sucks). I installed the web developer toolbar on FF and restarted it, and boom, Windows says- “Firefox has stopped working”, and gives me options to either close it, or find a solution online. After digging through he matter, I found that the culprit was DEP. Short for Data Execution Prevention, DEP marks memory spaces as readable, writable and executable, and disallows suspicious executable stacks to run. Then I tried to run FF portable from my flash drive, again without success. Since then I’ve installed Chrome, Safari, K-meleon, Chromium, Opera, Flock, Avant and Maxthon. And I’m not surprised that only Avant and Maxthon work, apart from IE, given that that they run on the IE engine. SO, I’m stuck with IE(a browser that all sensible web developers hate). Apart from a sluggish rendering engine, it is a big security compromise. But for the time being, this is it. But the problem does’nt end here. Following is the list of programs that were blocked by DEP in the last week(apart from the 38 crashes… hahaha):

• DirectX_aug2009 setup
• Macromedia Flash Pro 8
• Firefox 3
• Firefox portable 2.2
• Firefox Portable 3.6
• MPC home cinema
• Google Chrome
• Chromium
• Opera
• Flock
• Safari
• K-Meleon

Well this is a fact that that I hate Windows, but I’m no Linux fanboy out there. Of course there are a lot of great features in Windows that I like, bt they are not enough for me. Now you know why I’m writing this on FF 3.6 running happily on Fedora 12(with very tight SELinux policies).

Linux ROCKS….

Hello world!

This is my first post. Written at 0851 hrs IST on Sun, 21 Feb 2010, on my ACER 5738 laptop running Fedora 12 with Gnome shell, with Firefox as the browser. This is a geeky, virus free, stable, state of the art system. Well why am i writing this. After the past months of emotional drama, pressure of first 3 semesters of my engineering course, and the inability to work on my website(coming soon), I had to do something new to revamp my life. And here it is, I’m writing a BLOG. I never thought I will write one, sounded kinda boring to me, huh. But now I think it must be interesting. Let’s see what the oracle has to tell(not the company dude).

Well this is my first ever blog, so I’m not kinda sure what to write, but as nature recounts, some of the possibilities are:

• Javascript
• Linux
• Computing
• Music
• Current education system
• Poetry

Well this is it for now, but I’m sure I would find a lot more things to write on. Let’s see what fate* has in it.

*fate is a joke….. and the joke is in your hands.