[skip rant]

So I was too late to help Rage Against The Machine prevent another drippy X-Factor Christmas No. 1. But when a friend at work said they’d never heard Killing in The Name Of, I had to download it and somone had told me it was cheap on Amazon.

But what a hassle! Amazon insisted I install software to get the download. While it was good that they offer a linux version (4, actually!) of their downloader, incuding one for ubuntu, there’s no 64bit version. I was really annoyed to have to install amazon’s software on my computer to get what I had paid for, especially as it is proprietary, closed-source, meaning that nobody except amazon has looked at the code to see whether it can be trusted. Amazon will have made sure the code does what they want, but they have little interest (or experience, I would expect) in checking it doesn’t have any adverse affects on anything else I might want to be doing on my computer. I really don’t see the need for it, and I’m going to be looking for another place to buy mp3 downloads.

But, back in the office, I thought just this once, and found helpful instructions on installing on a 64bit system, so I thought I’d share.

But amazon hadn’t finished messing me around, and even after downloading their software, overcoming my conscience, getting it installed, and configuring my browser (!) my one mp3 download was nowhere to be found. I sent a volley of messages out using amazon’s unhelpful help or feedback pages, most ignored and a few answered by robots along the lines of “oh, I see you are stupid, if you click amazon and click spend money, then we consider our service complete.”, eventually I got connected by good old phone with a human. Although a human clearly bound by a tight script and clearly without the official authority to issue apologies, they were able to “increment my download” and finally, about 3 hours after I thought this’ll be 5 minutes’ fun, I had the song.

Anyway, here’s that link again: blog.hyperandy.com/2009/11/25/installing-amazon-mp3-in-ubuntu-karmic-9-10-64bit/

My old laptop finally died after 7 hard years of service! The laptop is dead. Long live the laptop… [updated 28 Dec 2009]

The good

Xubuntu installed really quickly, absolutely no bugs or crashes. In half an hour my system was liberated and cleansed of that corporate virus called M$ Vista, the 500Gb hard drive was formatted with the new ext4 fs, and lightening-fast, beautiful, simple-yet-flexible xubuntu was up and running (I was once a KDE enthusiast but we went our different ways when they set the path for KDE4/Dolphin).

The Radeon graphics card was immediatly supported (with the open source driver) and although I’ve not done anything to really test its capabilities, it seems fab.

Whether it’s the processor speed or the 4Gb of RAM I don’t know, but intensive tasks are a breeze. I love RawTherapee for processing RAW digital camera images (photos I’ve done with this), and the results of changes are immediate (on my last computer I would have to wait about a second to see the effect of a change).

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