Today was another day of partly not being able to find anything that really struck my fancy to write about, and partly being too busy to look for things to write about or have time to write them. Fortunately, this week really hasn't felt too terribly long, which is great. I've been tired and just not wanting to do anything. I'm also broke at the moment, so I can't really do anything anyway.
I've got this TV in my bedroom that I use to just watch shows while in bed, or I'd hook up my laptop and use it for a DVD player. I have this old desktop sitting right next to it, though, so I finally decided to just hook it up and essentially use it for my media player. It isn't that great of a system so I had originally intended on throwing a barebones Linux on there since all I needed it to do was play DVDs and stream media from my other desktop. I didn't think that this would be too difficult since all these people are touting how great Linux is and that it is now super easy to use. I threw Ubuntu on there, and got it fired up. There was just one problem, though. Ubuntu didn't like my wireless card. Now, I'll admit, this was a cheap card, so I wasn't too surprised that it wouldn't recognize it. However, this was not a problem of not being recognized, the system would not even boot with it in there. I tried all sorts of stuff, but nothing would cause this machine to boot if I had the card in there. Now, first, this card works perfect under Windows. Second, the manufacturer makes Linux drivers for this card so obviously this card doesn't just kill Linux. Third, I'm not a computer moron, I can figure most things out when it comes to fixing machines. I finally said screw it, and put Windows back on there. Now I've got exactly what I need working perfectly. The stupid thing even boots faster than when I had Linux on there.
Now don't get me wrong here. I don't want you to think I'm just bashing on Linux. I know lots of people that use it, and I've used it in the past. I have nothing against it at all. I just thought it was an interesting experience that I'm trying to use and older machine, with some inexpensive parts to make my little media player. I would think that this is a perfect time for when I should install this OS instead of Windows. Go figure. Oh, and in case you're curious, the distro I was using is Ubuntu. It ran great and worked well for everything aside from this one problem. When I took the card out of the machine it worked well.
On a somewhat related note, the thing I use to stream my media is
Orb. This thing is awesome. It is also free. What you do is install it on your system with all of your media on it, and then you can go to a web interface from any computer or device that has access to the internet, and you can access all of your content. I've also got a TV tuner in my machine, so I can stream that too. So from anywhere, I can get to my music, my movies, my pictures, and even my TV. The compression works pretty well, and I rarely have any sort of problem with lag or stuttering. Also, I can watch things fullscreen and still have them look decent. I definitely recommend that you check it out if you have a need to get your media elsewhere. Oh, you can also share things. Not like being able to let other people download them, but you can create a link for a specific thing and send that to someone. This lets them access a web page with a Flash player so they don't even need another program to watch or listen. This works rather well, and I've used it a number of times to show people stuff.
Labels: Linux, media, Orb, tired
