windows xp on an eee

Okay, so you know by now how much I like those little netbooks, particularly the Asus brand. I have played with installing ubuntu, and it works very well for web browsing, email (only tested gmail, but it works), picking up wireless with aplomb. Sometimes, though, you just long for windows. I have games that only work on windows. Sure, I did find linux versions of the game, but it is like playing atari pong instead of a wii. And then there is the mp3 and wma issue. Yes, I like my music, but even more, I like audiobooks, which I can download from netlibrary and overdrive, populate my portable device (I prefer Creative players) and listen to just about anywhere and anytime. That does not come easily on linux, particularly if it is only windows media files. I haven't tried WINE, just heard horror stories of trying to run windows programs on linux.

So I got a second eee, windows xp home version, and it is nice, but at only (*only* because I just got rid of my 386 desktop that ran win95 by way of electronics recycling) 8 gigabytes, there just isn't a whole lot of space leftover from the O.S. Still, I managed to fit the Media Player 11 on it, and iTunes, and with an SD card, could actually fit a book. And it still surfed the web, but it was slow. The half-speed processor, and the half-gig of ram definitely showed up in long boot and shutdown times and long times to start big programs.

Bigger is better, right? So I got a Solid State Drive in the 16gig size. I finally got it to work with updated BIOS from ASUS' website. Now, how to install windows on the big one? Well, first I had to experiment with getting an install of XP pro on the smaller one.

First I looked into "microXP" which is a pirated, stripped down copy of the real thing. It supposedly has Browzar, a browser that will allow you to download Firefox (for free). First, it was hard obtaining a zip file of microxp without having to shell out some money to hosting sites or answer a bunch of 'offers', second, my copy of microxp only had a shortcut to Browzar, not the actual program, so I was stuck! Couldn't get a browser to get a browser. It did work otherwise, and had a much smaller

watch out for Ubuntu updates!

I saw updates were ready for my ubuntu eeepc, so I downloaded them as usual yesterday. When I got back from shopping, one piece had not updated properly, but I gave it no notice, and followed the recommendation for rebooting.

And then, my firefox wouldn't work. At All! I could click on it, it would give me the little clockface symbol (like the annoying microsoft hourglass it mimics, its appearance is often bad news). And nothing, no window, no nuthin. A reboot didn't help.

Since I couldn't search the web to find an answer, and I verified my connection to internet was working (in fact, I could get and send email, but still no web browsing), I decided to try the ubuntu software center.

I tried to unload firefox in order to reload a fresh copy. That didn' t work at all. I tried Synaptic Package Manager to reload firefox, and it gave me errors. Most of the errors were with xulrunner, and I tried to redownload it as well, and the errors persisted.

Finally, I had to remove firefox, all its subcomponents like ubufox and branding, and xulrunner.
Then I went to the terminal prompt to do the command line: sudo apt get install firefox-3.5. With it came the ubufox, branding and xulrunner.
And it worked! Firefox now works again, even retaining my bookmarks and search history.

I don't know what went wrong other than I got a non-working xulrunner for some reason, but a fresh copy fixed it, as long as I removed the bad copy first.

Sudo - the command that does it all. Its as powerful as a sumo doing judo. Sudo.