I've been playing with my new Feisty quite a lot lately. After finally coaxing Samba into working, I wanted another challenge. Here I must say, I had to admit defeat. And guess what? I can now get to make some complaints about Linux.

The 2 things I wanted to do is:
1) Installed a new screensaver obtained from kde-look.org
2) Make my NetGear WG111T USB WIFI adaptor work on Linux.

For both of these, I was unable to succeed. Now, one by one.

1) Screensaver crisis:
I know the screensavers that come with KDE are extremely cool when compared to those shipped with Windows. But while browsing KDE-look, I found a screensaver which I really wanted. I immediately downloaded the Tar source and thought I could compile it and get it to work. Guess what? I was wrong. Now, ranting time starts.

Who the hell wants to compile a screensaver? We just want to paste a file in a folder and get that thing to work! No sir, we don't want to compile things just to get a new screensaver. The thing is: You have to compile! WTF!

Ok, I can tolerate this bit. The instructions were quite simple. Extract the Tar.gz contents somewere, go to that directory in Konsole. Then:

./configure
make
make install

Those were the 3 things to do. Quite simple it seems! NOPE! It's not! In comes Dependency Hell!

While configuring, I was missing a number of libraries and had to download loads of packages. I also had to use prefixes to point to the correct directory. From here, it seems simple, but trust me it isn't. You are going to hate it! It's waaaayyyy too complicated! The length of the commands and the number of error messages produced creates genuine fear and cold sweat... 100's lines of errors! :S WTFFFF!

After lots and lots of efforts, Googling and package downloading, I could get past the ./configure step. Now, when I tried make. Again loads of errors concerning unreferenced things in openGL. I didn't quite get what the errors were about, but I want to proceed. I was tired enough with getting configure to work. Forget me now! There is no way I'm going through another dependency hell to allow make to work. And that just for a darned screensaver!

Sorry people, but here, Windows rulz. Just download a Setup, install and your screensaver is in your Control Panel. But Linux? Download source, compile screensaver, get packages, solve dependency issues and whatnot?? Sorryyy! Never again! Very very non user-friendly!

2) WiFi USB Adaptor

I abandoned the screensaver, deleting the source and extracted files to remove the temptation to try again. Now I wanted to get my adaptor to work. I Googled around and heard there was no workable driver. You had to use the Windows driver with NDisWrapper and get it to work on Linux.

Considering the amount of work needed to get that to work, I haven't even tried. But I heard that it works pretty well, if you can accept that every time you want your connection, you need to use Konsole...

Anyways, here it's not really the fault of Linux but that of NetGear that refuses to provide a driver for Linux users. I prefer to wait for a better solution to make the adaptor work. Till that, I prefer to use Windows to connect wirelessly. Hope somebody develops a good driver. I really like using Linux, but I'm still a noob. Don't count on me to go write drivers or to use NDisWrapper or whatever. I just want to leech of some packages and get things to work. The NDisWrapper and driver writing will be when I become a novice. Perhaps in a few years! :P