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November 29, 2005
Messing about in boats
I've always loved the idea of Venice. Its origins are not auspicious. Fishing villagers from the mainland escaping marauding barbarians by moving to a foetid, mosquito ridden lagoon far off shore. It seems to have worked for them. When they ran out of land, they created it by driving hundreds of thousands of logs deep into the mire, capping them with flagstones and buildings.
And they wound up with views like this. (click for a bigger version)
It is, in my eyes, the most wonderous city in the world for many reasons.
Scrawled illegibly by Meathe at 12:06 PM
November 23, 2005
But I liked the Mac...
Recently, my office has decided to move away from a mixed Macintosh/PC environment to a solely PC based environment. Whilst I welcome this from an administrative perspective, it means that my trusty Apple PowerBook is about to retire.
I like my Macintosh. Its not because I'm a "trend whore". Its not because Spotlight searches are infinitely better than the useless Windows find utility (I use Copernic Desktop search on Windows). Its not that I dislike Windows (despite what the flame warriors say, it is possible to like both systems concomitantly). Its because lurking under the desktop is a tweaked BSD Unix environment that lets me get into the shell and do the things I can only do there. It is also the system I use to develop for the mud. The Xcode IDE suits my purposes and has quite a few handy additions for performance testing and debugging.
As part of an appeasement package, I've been given a hand-me-down laptop (which is actually a very neat machine, a Toshiba R100, weighing in under 2lbs). Its not fast and it was until recently a strictly Windows machine.
I thought it was time to give Linux/Unix another run on the desktop, so for the past two weeks, I've sunk many, many hours into downloading, installing, tweaking and otherwise hair tearing with various distributions.
There are some catches. The unit doesn't have an internal CD drive, so the distribution must be bootable from a USB CD or some other medium. It has a weird graphics chip that linux loves to hate. It also crashes with some linux kernel configurations. Many distributions will start to boot from the CD, but have aggressive boot times and demand the install CD be ready before the USB autodetections complete - which simply means they don't work, or workarounds must be developed.
I am not a Linux guru. I have administered a unix system or two in the past (good old System V), so I can find my way about the shell readily enough. I haven't looked too far into compiling a kernel. It seems an interesting project, but I don't feel a burning need to do it. I just want this thing to work with a KDE and Kdevelop.
SUSE, the Novell branded system (eventually) won. I downloaded the Open Source (free) version. The installation (5cds) was fast, graphical and simply worked. Post installation was painless, it correctly detected and configured my network cards (wired and wireless), the video chip, sound and suspend options. Definitely my best experience with a linux install on this machine. Its also quite sprightly, seeming much more responsive than Kubuntu.
(various notes on linuxes follow follow)
Please note that even where it says "Doesn't boot", this is not a condemnation of the distribution. These are simply my notes about this particular laptop with them. I was curious to try them all, and many 'unique' factors of the laptop I was installing on conspired to defeat them. This doesn't mean they're bad or that I wouldn't try installing them on a different computer. Or simply: Your milage may vary.
Puppy Linux: One of my all time favourites. It is a great emergency system that can be installed, and one I have used on a Sony Vaio with great success after a hard drive failure (booting from CD, saving to USB memory stick). It includes most of what you need on an amazingly small (50mb) bootable CD. Its also incredibly quick once booted as it runs from RAM. Unfortunately, its one of those that just doesn't run on this particular laptop. Still, if you want to check out Linux without installing it, this is the one I'd recomend (even if the webpage is ugly).
Knoppix: Another emergency system, based on Debian. Runs, but it hates the video card without tweaking and even then isn't 100% happy. Power management doesn't work without a lot of work.
Debian: As Knoppix. I also didn't like the install program. A lot of trouble recognising the USB CD drive at boot.
Kubuntu/Ubuntu: Another Debian based system. After some config tweaking I solved the video and suspend issues. In fact, after two days of tweaking, I thought I'd found a winner. Then I installed a compiler with the package management system. Here, I had issues with the package system. Its meant to be like the Debain one. The compiler, which was missing libraries, didn't work (time.h missing after installing GCC 3.3.1 and 4? How does that happen?). So I thought I'd uninstall and reinstall them. This was aparently a bad move, as without warning, it then proceeded to uninstall the entire desktop system and many of the command line tools (like apt-get). Go figure.
Fedora Core 4: The text installer was very nice (the graphical installer does not work with the graphics chip in the laptop). After the install, much tweaking required for suspend and graphics. Not entirely satisfied.
Mepis: Looked very interesting on another PC. Unfortunately, as with Puppy, it crashed before completing the boot process.
Gentoo: Very appealing system, however, after a full day of configuring options, its profoundly annoying to realise I missed something somewhere and it doesn't boot.
Damn Small Linux: Didn't boot.
ArkLinux: Didn't boot.
Zenwalk: A very interesting looking slackware based distribution. Again, locked up during the boot process.
Scrawled illegibly by Meathe at 12:10 PM
November 07, 2005
Frustrations and a product review.
For the last week or so, the screen on my Mac laptop (yes, I have one and I like it), has been misbehaving in such a way as to eliminate the display on the bottom third. Over the weekend, I took the thing apart (not an easy task as Apple thinks both that form is more important that ease of service and that you shouldn't be poking about inside anyway). It appears a contact behind the LCD panel had worked its way loose, and after fixing that, it all seems much better.
Restarting the work desktop this morning offered me another surprise.
Boot... Bluescreen... Automatic reboot. Of course, the blue screen is displayed for less than a second, making it incredibly difficult to see whats in the error readout. I'm currently in the fourth hour of trying to resurrect it, into the umpteenth chkdsk /r. If you're wondering where I am, I can surf the net, but nothing else is working (telnet, IM). Fingers crossed that I'll have it working shortly.
On to the product review. One of the purchases I made after a home HDD failure was Norton Ghost 10. One of the things that I was issued at work recently was Norton Ghost 9.
The diffeerence is far larger than one version number. 10 is easy, painless and simply works (and works well). 9 just doesn't work. The irony is that with 10, I would have been able to back up and restore my PC without much fuss. However, 9 didn't work out of the box and todays project was meant to be to get that working.
Ghost 10: Truly excellent software.
Ghost 9: Should be burned at the stake.
It looks like a HDD replacement and a reinstall. Some days, you just can't win.
Scrawled illegibly by Meathe at 01:49 PM
November 02, 2005
Ten things.
Webkittyn has tagged me, so I'll pass on the goodness.
The Rules:
List ten things that make you happy in no particular order.
Tag 0-5 friends.
- My wife
- Travelling
- Coding
- A quiet bar/lounge with subdued music
- Settling down for a slow evening with a well written book (fiction or non)
- Learning new things (technical or not)
- The dog and cat
- Making things work (occasionally as they weren't indended)
- Flying
- Family (happily, these are friends that I'm related to) and friends
Tags:
Coyote
Utopia
Ginger
Ahriman
Scrawled illegibly by Meathe at 11:40 AM