Ian’s Blog

I had to install Windows XP on my spare partition for school just a little bit ago.

Booting the installer took like five minutes to load random drivers from dozens of vendors most of which I had never heard of before and certainly didn’t have hardware from.

The installation is tedious; After the poky bootup, it took about 45 minutes to get as far as the product key box (Speaking of product keys, what is this crap? Is this an OS or a lockbox?). But that’s not all, kids! The product key box is placed completely arbitrarily in the middle of the installation process! After you enter your product key you have 20 whole minutes of quality-time with the Windows installer.

To compare, booting Ubuntu from a LiveCD takes about a minute. Installing took about 15 minutes the last time I did it.

And let’s not forget the complete lack of any ability to waste time while it’s installing. You get a mostly-functional desktop OS environment complete with simple games to waste time while Ubuntu installs. Windows? You get to look at their completely useless descriptions of what’s going on (Can anybody tell me what the difference is between finishing the installation and finalizing it? Why does the Windows installer arbitrarily spend 10 minutes seemingly doing nothing while “finalizing” the installation, only to move on to “finishing” the installation for another umpteen minutes?)

The best part is, the out of box experience of Windows I’ve heard trumpeted from every Windows fanboi turns out to be… well, less than accurate. I rebooted into my finished installation and the sound didn’t work. The resolution was completely wrong (To be fair, I think I have this problem with Linux, too). The ethernet card didn’t work.

Oh, and it didn’t come with any useful software. I got Notepad and Spider Solitaire. In comparison, Ubuntu doesn’t get the resolution right on first-boot either, but at least it gets sound just fine and it can even connect to this newfangled Interblags thing without needing me to hold its hand. And it comes with an office suite, a good image editor, a multiprotocol IM client, a bittorrent client and VNC software.

So, just because irony tastes so good, to get Windows working I had to boot into Ubuntu, navigate to the motherboard manufacturer’s website and download 70 megabytes worth of drivers.

I reboot into Windows, confident it has basic support for other filesystems. After all, Linux can access FAT filesystems and to a lesser degree it can work with NTFS just fine, plus a bunch of other ones (XFS, JFS, ReiserFS, etc), so why shouldn’t Windows be able to access an Ext3 filesystem? It’s not like there’s no documentation.

But, apparently, it would be too easy to just be interoperable. Windows supports NTFS and FAT. And that’s it. So I dug out a USB key and transferred the files over USB key.

One reboot later and my screen can now be set to the correct resolution and I can get on the Internet. Still no signs of sound, though. By the way, why do drivers install third-party tools to manage your hardware? Shouldn’t the built-in control panels provide sufficient control?

But I still need ext3 support because the files I’m working on are on an ext3 partition and are too large to move to any external media I have on hand. So I looked around, and actually managed to find a third-party ext3 driver, which allowed me to access my files.

20 minutes after Windows was installed, it was beginning to be useful. Now I just needed the software.

I poked around the Internet, found it and installed it. Then it locked up. No problem, I’ll just kill the runaway process, I thought. But on Windows, to “Kill” a process apparently means to politely ask it if it might like to leave soon, please? because killing any process invariably became an ordeal of asking it to kill the thing several times before anything happens, if Windows doesn’t lock up, too.

Oh yeah, the terminal sucks, too. There is no “ls” command, only “dir”, which confused the hell out of me for a while. The argument syntax is strange, too: if you want to pass a flag, you have to use /f as opposed to -f. While it’s not functionally a problem, it looks ugly and is rather close to the directory delimiter, \.

Forget tab-completion. I tried to tab-complete an incorrect path on a mostly-finished command, and the completion just destroyed everything to the right of the path. You also can’t arbitrarily resize a terminal window. There’s a strictly-defined set of terminal resolutions the window can accomodate. Beyond those particular resolutions you are simply out of luck.

All I can say is: Fuck this operating system.