Adventures in Operating Systems

This is a follow-up to my post last week:

There were a few things that happened in succession to send me into an OS tailspin pretty quickly.

The first was I had just spent a great deal of time installing, and configuring Windows Server 2008 on my desktop to be a “Workstation OS”, and I started experiencing stability problems, and the second was I got a great deal on 8GB of RAM for my desktop, so with that alone, meant I was “locked into” an x86_64 OS, and I had to re-evaluate what I wanted out of an OS.

In that last post, I listed some problems I started having with Server 2008, and I was able to find the culprit - it turned out not to be Server 2008’s “fought”, but somehow either it “really” started being a problem at that time, or Server 2008 was just more attune to the problem somehow.

One problem I listed was horrible I/O performance when creating a VDI file in VirtualBox. Somehow (perhaps by default) SMART reporting in my BIOS was disabled, and upon running hdtune on that drive (an old 80GB SATA that was from about 3 machines ago) was failing SMART miserably, and I’m actually surprised it was still running. I think it was causing overall system instability because it was also holding a system pagefile. I know it was also contributing to the VirtualBox startup problems as well, because I had the program itself installed to that drive.

That whole incident did teach me a lesson because I had “hacked” the install of 2008 so much I didn’t even know where to start troubleshooting - could I possibly back out of every tweak and/or hack I had done to convert a Server OS into a Workstation one at a time to find the problem? That would be a pain, and I just lucked up on finding the problem.

I did have a couple of more issues with Server 2008 as my desktop OS. First, it’s nearly impossible to find free or affordable anti-virus for a Windows Server OS. The only solution I could find for free was WinClam (a windows port of the open-source ClamAV). Although ClamAV is a great project, it simply doesn’t offer real-time active protection which is essential (to me anyway) on a Desktop OS. Another problem I was constantly running into was Application compatibility. I was constantly seeing the message “Cannot be installed on a Server OS” or something along the lines of “This application requires Windows XP and/or Windows Vista”. One such application was Windows Live writer - I was astonished that I was running an Windows OS and I couldn’t install a Microsoft product! I did find some hacks that involved manually extracting the .MSI files, and some other stuff, but I’m simply not going to go through all of that to install an application on Windows.

With that, I have permanently scratched the idea of running Windows Server 2008 on my desktop - it will be banished to Virtual Machines forever! Now, I was faced with a decision - what to load?

Windows Server 2008 also shared another problem with my system with Windows Vista; my graphics card was unstable in games with either OS (using the Vista x64 drivers). I could play CS:Source for anywhere from 5 to 15 minutes and it would start to crash. So, that rules out Vista.

Next choice (if I was going to stay with a Windows OS) was Windows XP x64 Edition. I’ve had mixed results with this OS. It actually had gotten better than when I first purchased it RTM back in 2005. I think a lot of the improvement (with driver support) had come from the fact that Windows Vista x64 was more widely used than XP x64 ever was, and had forced many hardware manufacturers to finally write x64 drivers.

One major problem with XP x64 Edition was shared with Server 2008. For those who don’t know, Windows XP x64 Edition is not based on the Windows XP Pro code base, but rather on Windows Server 2003. Windows XP x64 (like Server 2003) reports itself as NT 5.2 whereas the standard Windows XP Pro (x86-32) reports itself as NT 5.1 resulting in it’s own set of application compatibility. These issues were not as severe as some things I ran into with Server 2008, I’m assuming since application developers knew of its existence and the fact it would be running on Desktop machines. Windows XP x64 also failed the Windows Live Writer test. Microsoft Application can’t install on Windows OS = FAIL!

I knew at this point I would be going back to Linux. My opinion is also that Windows x64 (any variant) isn’t nearly as “good” at x86_64 as Linux (and Unix) as a whole. Running any x86_64 variant of Windows, I have many “*32″ applications littering my task manager - not much out there is written for Windows x64, and I found myself obsessed with finding x64 native stuff, but there isn’t a lot out there. Linux on the other hand, in a x86_64 distro is almost completely 32-bit code free, with the exception of Flash running inside of ‘nspluginwrapper’. Not to mention, by this point I have confirmed that I simply am not meant to run Windows at home. I’m a *NIX guy, and I just have to admit it. I’m more comfortable in a *NIX OS on my home machine - it thinks the way I do For example, I have 3 hard drives in my PC (now that the 4th is confirmed dead - and removed), and I don’t want C:, D:, and E: drives - I want one file system - DANG IT!

Now, I had to decide what to load. Initially - I avoided just loading back up Ubuntu - I wanted to take a week and explore what was out there already, and what was coming down the pipe (by loading and testing some Beta and RC class stuff).

Next post: what I tested, and what I picked.