Monday 27 April 2009

Good computer day, bad computer day

I use a PC quite a lot, it runs Windows XP as most do, and being in France and having to type emails etc in French, I have a French keyboard. For reasons I won't bore you with, I decided to put a password on my system. Typed it in, retyped it, all is well until I come to reboot when the machine doesn't recognise my password, and I can't get in.

Two hours of stress later, I discover that at some point in the process, it assumes you have an English keyboard, so the characters I was entering were not what is written on the keys. So I get an English keyboard to crib, enter the permuted password, and off we go. I have changed the password so that it is now the same for English keyboards as French ones. But this is sloppy programming. Fire the miscreant for wasting my time!

On the other hand, I installed the Open Source operating system Ubuntu on my little netbook the other day, and it has performed astonishingle well, especially considering that it is free. I installed the operating system, then Skype, Wine and Spotify without a problem. It really is nice to find some software where you just have to follow the instructions and it does what it should.

Spotify is a (legal) internet-based music player, so now I have the netbook plugged into my stereo on a semi-permanent basis. It looks cool and sounds good, too.

1 comment:

Dave said...

From what I've seen of it, Ubuntu is very good and goes a long way to dispelling the myth that Linux is only for geeks (though the geeks may be somewhat upset at losing some of their OS-snobbery).

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