061228 00:16 by iDRMRSR

While Melinda was doing the laundry, I applied myself to trying out Linux on the other two boxen I have gathering dust here.

One was my newer laptop. I FINALLY found a distro, Linux Mint 2.1 (Bea not Barbara) in which a couple of simple commands got my wifi card working with ONLY THE LIVE CD in the thing! I also found a hunk of software out there somewhere that restored the functionality of my touchpad, so I could scroll by dragging my finger around it as if it were a nipple.

I never "did it" (that is, installed Linux) on a laptop before. I washed real good afterward, and nobody will be the wiser because I just used the Live CD, so there's like no trace of what I did around.

Then I got this 550MHZ P-III box in a closet. It has a WHOPPING 20GB hard drive and a 3D video card with a whole 16M onboard!!! It even has a ZIP drive (100mb) AND a DVD read only drive! Perfect vintage, I supposed, to run Linux on.

061224 12:51 by iDRMRSR

I went to the butcher shop yesterday to buy a turkey. I could have paid $0.89 a pound for one, but instead the butcher told me about a new movement in the meat industry, the open source meat initiative. Under this new plan, you could just get a free turkey, or rather, a type of species very close to a real turkey, equal in nutrition and almost exactly the same in every other regard. Rather than raising them on the farm, small hobbyists all over the world raise their own turkey-like birds and exchange them for free with each other, hoping that one day all the inbreeding will produce a species much tastier than the usual mechafarm produced crap.

So I opted for the free turkey! The butcher gave me this carcass with all the dark meat but no white meat.

I asked, "What good is this?". The butcher said, well, most of the FLAVOR of the turkey is in the DARK MEAT. Due to a legal issue with the HunnySuckel corporation, he couldn't just give me a whole turkey. However, he said his brother was in the parking lot out back, and had the white meat in his trunk for all the free turkeys. He explained to me that it was up to me, if I wanted white meat, I could go out to the back and get it. He said a lot of the free turkey people simply content themselves with the dark meat. "The Free Turkey people are believers in CHOICE", he intoned.

061223 00:06 by iDRMRSR

So close. Golly this live CD boots up REAL FAST somehow with a KDE desktop. On the laptop I tried out, it even mounted the NTFS partitions, including the hidden ones Dell always sticks out there.

Sound, video OK, only problem was ACPI. If you didn't boot with the ACPI=off option, nada, but otherwise it came up almost as fast as a boot from the hard drive.

It's got NDISWRAPPER so I tried to bring up my wireless card. I needed to copy the Windoze drivers files, which were immediately available on the NTFS partitions, plug in the WEP key and ESSID and all that, and eventually I got it CONNECTED.

I set up the default gateway, did this IWCONFIG and that IFCONFIG and this DHCPCD and that ROUTE command for about four hours total and NEVER COULD GET IT ON THE INTERNET. I even ran the same commands, route, netstat, iptables, on my working wired Ubuntu and the laptop. Everything should work but NADA beep. Ubuntu and Slax looked the same, but only UBUNTU could talk to anything.

061222 00:32 by iDRMRSR

Obsessed with a six year old PC and trying to get MIDI and the 3D desktop thing working under UBUNTU.

And I just noticed the time, PAST MIDNIGHT.

Today's (22nd) my birthday. I'm at the Heinz Age (57). That's thrice 19!

Equation even sort of works out BY WEIGHT. If you pick three slightly anorexic 19 y/o's, that is. That's an interesting topology question...could 3 19 y/o's fit into my pants at the same time? I don't think so, which is a paradox because then, where's the rest of the weight.

And old as I am, I'm still SCREWING AROUND WITH THIS SHIT!

I'd rant more but I need to check my MySpace page one more time before I change into my evening truss for bed. May even try and squeeze out a little pee before I go to sleep, instead of after.

061128 00:09 by iDRMRSR

Yes, I've decided to try something which for me is UTTERLY PERVERSE.

I'm right now downloading UBUNTU 6.10 for installation on one of these spare PC's I have cluttering up the place. The Windows ME which formerly ran it is now no longer supported by Myqrocopht. I could just take the HD out and plop it into my XP box, but this seems such a waste.

Especially since the old machine is actually a nice 1GHZ plus Pentium.

I already know it won't accept XP, and I won't accept spending $100 for another licence...and I hate to throw the thing in the trash, so I'm doing the only other thing that seems sensible.

I am RAPING it with Linux.

Please note that this is an admission on my part that...I abhor Apple something terrible...I'm not that impressed with Vista by any means...and this will give my idle hand(s) something to do in my dotage. That is, keep up to date functionally without expense of any real money.

061129 01:22 by iDRMRSR

Had to give up on my webcam. It's just not going to fly under Linux. There's like only two people on the whole planet writing drivers for webcams and they haven't got round to my model just yet.

So then I decided maybe I could do something neatsy keen with MUSIC. So I downloaded this package called Hydrogen which alleges to produce nice drum and bass loops. I know a lot less about music than I do about Linux, let's face it, but when I played the DEMO that came with it, it sounded kind of like when you pull your straw through your Big Gulp lid. Not like drums at all. Squeaky.

Then I tried to play some MIDI file I had laying around, since Hydrogen is MIDI based. Ho HO! No player associated with type MIDI. So it did some kind of scan and told me I should install a package called AMAROK, which is kind of an iTunes for Linux.

I installed it. It's so freaking complicated it had to install a database server, too, which I let it do. Then I pointed it at my Windows partition which had all the music. 58% of the way cataloguing the music, it burped and I never heard from it again.

061130 00:13 by iDRMRSR

Ahhhh, ratz. I spent most of the day UBUNTU-ing.

I finally found something that put a charge in my shorts. There's a windowing system out there called Beryl which actually puts your graphic card to use. Looks like what I imagine Aero on Vista will look like. Semi transparent windows, which wiggle and bend as you move them around, transparent task bars, loads of colors and reflections and animations out the wazoo.

Unfortunately it's BETA code, so like when you maximize a window, it may just turn completely black inside...or scoot up above the top of the screen so you can't grab the title bar and yank it anywhere. However when it's working, it beats the SNOT out of Windows XP and makes OS X look like the ugly sister, from what I've seen of videos of OS X on YouTube.

It's got all the candy colored clown they call the Sandman, all right. Had to slap on quite a few tweaks for my Nvidia graphic card (which is five years old BTW).

061130 23:32 by iDRMRSR

Including what I could get of the Beryl Window system to work. Now normally it gives you a six-face cube for a desktop, which you can rotate, but I never got it to do anything consistent for me.

Still, I could browse the web, download from ALT.BINARIES.SLACK, play MP3 and MOV files, logon, logoff, and empty the trash successfully. Which is about all the average SubG ever needs to do besides pee and whank and drop stool, all of which are better done offline anyhow.

So what am I complaining about, the price was right, all FREE FREE FREE. And compared to Windows, which has been very good to me, Linux is worth EVERYTHING I PAID FOR IT. With Windows, at least I could POST my own binaries, play MIDI files, and use my webcam. Well, by the time my PRIME system here becomes the old shoe, in that glorious future perhaps UBUNTU will be sufficiently well developed to satisfy me completely, and I can slap a Linux on it before I turn it over to the glue factory.

061202 20:31 by iDRMRSR

OK guys, I tried all the various tweaks and all I got was SLOWER and SLOWER.

I did manage to get my cached reads up to 1019 MB/S whilst at the same time the buffered reads came in at an astonishing 3.48 MB/S (eg, floppy disk speeds) with some sprinkling of parms.

I even managed to get my system to TOTALLY FREEZE with one invocation which happily I forget now. Gosh, that's becoming a nauseating PATTERN with Linux. Remove one card in the house of cards and it comes SHATTERING DOWN.

The other funny thing is this. Whilst KDE is rilly attractive as an operating environment IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO SET THE SCREEN RESOLUTION AND SIZE! KDE simply picks something out of its blue-ish ASS and sets it there.

There IS no way to change this. I require 1280 by 768. GNOME lets me set its brownish ass this way, and all is good. From that point, all the fonts are set at 10 points, all is readable with these old eyes, etc etc etc.

061202 01:05 by iDRMRSR

I think when I leapt into the UBUNTU fray, I certainly didn't do enough (heh heh) WINDOW shopping before I mindlessly downloaded plain old UBUNTU.

I just installed KDE along with GNOME (which was standard with UBUNTU) and now I am MUCHO happier in most regards. KDE looks just like Windoze, well enough so that I don't feel completely lost. It also plays with BERYL much better. I can flip and rotate my six desktops to my heart's desire.

Which is pretty ironic because, I'm ONE sole person here. What in "Bob"s sweet name would I need SIX desktops for? However it's nice to know I could have them if I wanted. MIDI playing is quite a bit better, too, for some reason.

The only thing is, KDE is about 50% slower than GNOME. It's pretty obvious the eye and ear candy is stressing the pants off the 1.3 GHZ processor in my old box. I didn't bother to 100% configure everything in it to my liking. I can see that would be rather daunting. So many crappy options, so little time.