2002.06.01 ~16 'dows woes Local gamehenger Chunky Kibbles ranted about Windows XP. Reminded me of my wrastling with it's incestuous parent, W98. So here's the gig. I play Tribes 2 under our favorite penguin's choice of OS. For one reason and another, the T2 builtin VoIP are (a) incompatible between T2.Linux and T2.Windows, (b) just plain sucks in general. The T2 tribe/clan I'm in uses an out-of-game VoIP called "Roger Wilco", by Resounding Technology(?), now a wholly-owned subsidiary of GameSpy Industry (GSI), another company I have some serious beef against. To put a long story short, RW is available only for Windows. Well, there's the "server" end of RW (to relay packets) available for Linux, but that's about it. No actual codec'ing under the penguin. Cue WINE. It failed miserably. Cue my hand-me-down laptop computer from my sister. This laptop suffered a very dead screen when someone accidently stepped on its closed form while unattended, cracking the LCD screen. No one fessed up. In the time since, she has (a) gotten a desktop worthy of... Counter... counter-something FPS, (b) stopped being a nomad requiring a portable. This machine I have dubbed Polyphemos, after the cyclops who's (single) eye was poked out by Odysseus in Oddyssey -- the screen does sort of look like someone took a pole straight at it, albeit way off to the left side. It's a Pentium II-based Celeron/400, with a meaty 64MB RAM, and 4GB HDD, imbued with the curse known as Windows 98SE, and a Phoenix BIOS that is hopelessly glued to the hip of FAT FS for Save-To-Disk. It has since been sprinkled with the holy water known as Debian GNU/Linux, but it still suffers from split personality, primarily because of the Save-To-Disk. On the darker side of its personality, there was a mass of cruft collected over two years of use by my sister. I wanted to reclaim much of the space so that (a) lots of 'dows crap will be rid, (b) I can set up a Q3 server. This, as far as I can recall, is the first time I voluntarily elected to boot into Windows since 1997 (all other boots since being involutary, forced, or otherwise accidental). I decided to start on diskspace recovery. Calling upon skills lost and buried since 1997, I managed to get to "Add/Remove Programs" and started picking on anything starting with "Microsoft". Click remove. "Are you sure you want to remove" type dialog box. Yes. "Windows now requires a reboot for the uninstallation to be complete" type dialog box. No, I have more cruft to remove. Go on selecting a few more, with the same cycle of Yes and No. Can't think of anything else, so close the control panel thingy and reboot. The programs didn't disappear. They stayed there, in the dialog box and all the menus, mocking at my vain attempts at removing them. The sadistic humor dawned on me. The only way I was going to remove all this cruft was by individually relecting them for removal... and rebooting after each and every selection. After rebooting probably more times in two hours than everyone on lkml does during an entire x.{odd-number}.y development cycle, combined, I came to the issue of lookOut Express. For security reasons, I wanted this gone gone gone. But, lo and behold, it failed to list itself in the Add/Remove doohickey. I could probably attack the binary directly, but, knowing the predecessor Windows 95, that would leave all sorts of cruft behind, perhaps even more cruft than before deletion. So, at three in the morning local time, I visited the only place where I knew others dabbled in the dark side of the force, #linpeople. The instructions I received weren't hope-inspiring, but it was something: grab MSIE6 to install IE6 and OE6 so they appear in the Add/Remove, then remove. I should note at this point that networking has not yet worked under Windows. Under my sister's usage, it interfaced to a USB-to-Ethernet dongle (borrowed from a friend, and returned since). Under Linux, the machine uses a Linksys PCM100 PCMCIA card (which works great). Apparently Windows doesn't know how to use this. I started the download of the 30MB zip file at a *cough*whopping 22KB/s (of 150 cap) to my main desktop. In the interim, I fiddled with other stuff. After a significant portion of this zip file came through, I realized how Windows could be made to recognize and use the Ethernet card. This was shortly after, out of desperation, I reopened the box the Ethernet card came in. Sitting in there was a floppy disk. In some ways, I probably spent too much time in GNU land. I had LONG forgotten that in Windows, device drivers are packed with the hardware, rather than the operating system. Plop in floppy, and hope for the best. It crashed once upon attempting to install the driver. I should probably specify that the installer crashed, not Windows as a whole. That happened a short while later. Try again, says driver got installed... and needs reboot. Reboot. OK, so it continues with whatever the hell Windows does for driver installation. Then came more sadistic jokes. BEFORE the shell even started, IT REBOOTED AGAIN. No prompt! No shell! Poof, reboot! WTF?! Navigate GRUB menu for the nth time... Install Mozilla 1.0rc3. Reboot again... Eventually the IE6 zip finishes. Now to get it get from desktop to this laptop. Network Neighborhood? Claims I didn't enter a password for networking. Try a different tact -- pull over HTTP (using Mozilla and Apache). That worked. But there's nothing that understands ZIP. I have no idea why my sister never bothered with that WinZip thingy. Visit cygwin.com. More installations. Least I get bash now. And reboot wasn't required. Nice change of pace for once. Unpack ZIP, run. Dunno why I have to agree to a license agreement when I want to wind up removing OE. IE6 and OE6 install. The GRUB menu is starting to get annoyingly familiar and frequent. Post-reboot rest-of-installation of IE6 and OE6. Really, seeing GRUB again so quickly can gnaw on your bones. Then I proceed to select IE6 *and* OE6 for removal. *sigh* Maybe I should patch GRUB for animation or something. Removing IE6 and OE6 only managed to restore the previous OE and IE, MSIE5 and MSOE5. These don't appear for removal. So I look for OE's base directory, looking for uninst-something.exe. There isn't any. On a mad (both senses of the word) impulse, I exported the registry via regedit and sicced grep upon it for anything mentioning "outlook" and "uninst". This actually turned up something useful, the command line to remove MSOE5. The invocation was such: "SETUP50.EXE /APP:OE /UNINSTALL /PROMPT". Query if I want to remove. Of course yes. And of course, we meet our dear friend GRUB yet again. OE was the last thing that needed to be purged. IE is of course an inseparable and integrated (... humor me) component of the operating system, so I leave it be. Defrag time. I forgot what I did during the wait. Maybe I ranted on IRC, maybe I tried stupid rocket-jumping tricks in Quake 3, maybe I read Slashdot comments back-to-back, maybe I measured glacier movements, maybe I fell asleep. Eventually the defragmenting finished. Then it was time to install Roger Wilco. Never knew a sunrise could feel so strange. Installing RW went fairly straightforward, as Windows programs go. At least GRUB could remain sleeping. Some minor wiring to set it up as satisfactorily as possible. Microphone to laptop's soundcard, laptop's soundout to desktop's line in, old PS/2 mouse plugged into laptop and used as the "transmit" button (with my foot). Then I find out I won't be able to actually test this setup since the next tribe practice is in two weeks time, as next week is filled completely with matches. Sigh. TODO: rant about RW with emphasis on porting TODO: rant about GSI