On Friday 27 Aug 2004 18:06, Steven T. Hatton wrote:

I wanted to try my hand at writing some Qt code on Windoze, just for the sake of seeing how well it ports. I've owned a license of every major OS release Microsoft ever put out since DOS 6.22 and WFW 3.11. I've tried to stay current so I am aware of what the other side is up to, and so I can interoperate with the dominant desktop OS.

Well, I installed Chi-Rho (XP) a while back under the mistaken assumption they had actually implemented a decent filesystem that could mount in the way partitions can mount in Linux. Come to find out, they don't really live up to the claim. I could not simply stick a partition under my installed programs to get more space on the system partition.

That meant I kept hitting a wall when I tried to do any kind of update to the OS, etc. Well, when I booted into Windoze I discovered they had Sp2 for XP available, and I figured I should install it for security reasons if nothing else. I finally gave up on trying shuffle files around in order to enough space on the system partition to do anything. There may be a way to get the OS moved to a larger partition, but it certainly isn't by design. Right there is enough reason to loath the whole product. As much as I hated to uproot all my existing installation, I decided to slick the system partition, and another larger one, and merge the two with a new install.

So I fished out my XP CD and blew away the OS with the intention of reinstalling it. Things went reasonably well considering the inherent limitations imposed by the product. But after about an hour of waiting for the thing to finish installing the basic OS, I realize there might be a problem. I pulled out the CD from the drive and found it has a nasty scratch.

Mind you, this is a CD with more holography than a B rated science fiction flick, with a 25 character activation key, and a default install that gives Microsoft a user account on _MY_ computer. Microsoft doesn't want people burning off copies of this thing. I always build my own systems, so I installed the OEM version myself. The reasonable thing for me to do is call Microsoft and ask them to send me another disk. Right? Ri....ght!

First they lied to me and told me that can't give me another copy of the disk because the OEM manufacturer adds their own software to the CDs. Uh..., I am the manufacturer. The CD I have is just plain vanilla XP. It would cost MS less than a freakin' dollar to replace the thing. But noooooo! I have to go back to the place I bought the CD from and they are supposed to replace it. So now I'm out all the work I put into configuring the OS in the first place. All the time I put into working around the broken file system, all the time I spent trying to get the install to work, and I have to take the time to go out to the store where I bought the bloody CD because Microsoft is too cheap to replace the thing!

If this were SuSE, I would just download the OS and be done with it! Microsoft wouldn't dream of making the files I need available to me on-line, even though they require I have an activation code, and that I register the software in such a way that it is electronically bound to the hardware.

So after 18 hours of pounding on the stupid OS, and finally reverting to W2K, I finally started to look into using Qt with VC++. That lasted for about 3 minutes, I realize MS simply does not give me as nice a development environment as Linux. So I rebooted, ran Grub to get my MBR back in oder, and started writhing code. :-) -- Regards, Steven

yep well nuff said i guess sounds like the help desk strikes again .. Leave it ..:-). -- Linux user No: 256242 Machine No: 139931 G6NJR Pete also MSA registered "Quinton 11" A Linux Only area Happy bug hunting M$ clan PGN