Windows Vista, World of Warcraft? Back to Mac

I quit Fedora, LOL. I installed, updated, and a yum install kmod-nvidia brought me to a terminal after a reboot.

openSUSE had this ridiculousness with not having a flash plugin with Mozilla Firefox on 64-bit arch… and… well that's not openSUSE's fault.

I installed my ill-gotten copy of Vista, and will probably have to pony up for some legit copies for my Media Center and gaming addiciton… speaking of which, I logged in to my WoW account management page, and noticed my account expires… tonight. Canceled… I'm not re-upping for another six months… even though I pretty much re-installed Vista just to play.

I might be ready to go back to Mac. I'll never be able to justify that Mac Pro machine though, and ugh… I dunno. I think I'll just trade and sell some hardware and snag an old PowerBook from my buddy Triikan. Then it's the iPod… and then a Mac Pro anyway, probably… LOL.

Back on Fedora

openSUSE was a pretty positive experience. during the past week, I installed from the KDE4 Live CD and DVD. I never used GNOME, and I think I could get along in KDE 4. However, I'm not really reading as many positive stories as I'd like about it.

I'm back on Fedora as I type this, having just installed from the DVD. That out of sync error on startup went a way when I switched from a crappy old eMachines CRT to an old crappy Hewlet Packard Pavilion M90 CRT. Go figure. I'm still running GNOME, and I'll probably keep doing that, unless something fabulous or catastrophic happens that requires me to switch desktops.

It is good to be back with a familiar desktop.

Oh, I did try Ubuntu a couple of times during this weekend too… not bad… I think I just don't want to be a lemming. Is *that* bad?

Router Resurrected

The power supply in my Smoothwall router failed. Fortunately, I had a few extra ones laying around. I guess I should have figured it'd happen with a power supply that must have been at least 10 years old. The machine is a Pentium III 450 MHz with two 10 Mbit 3com cards. It works great as a firewall/router.

I just need some thing smaller, and quieter, and that my kids can't just walk up and turn off randomly.

Catching up… Facebook is okay.

I've really got to get my addressbook in order. Since I've made this committment to staying in touch with relatives and friends, and then I got this T-Mobile Sidekick (and couldn't call my brother back because I lost his new number) and switched e-mail accounts and stuff, keeping up is hard.

Facebook has really turned out to be a boost to my self esteem. I keep getting notes from people who knew me from my “rockstar” days. It's a relative term… I pretty much went into hiding after college, and only a few people even knew what happened to me. Now all my friends from growing up are sending me little messages with the obligatory “hope all is well” statement. It is really okay.

The extra social stuff on Facebook is a bit of a distraction, but since I really just respond to the e-mail requests that I get, it isn't bad. I'm not going to complain too much about the invite I got.

How to be a distro junkie

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00002, originally uploaded by mvpittman.

Well, in 8 minutes, this x86_64 KDE Live CD for Fedora will be fresh off the torrent, and I'll see if I “really” want to use openSUSE some more, or just try out KDE 4 on my current distro of choice.

I noticed that I've got a lot of CDs printed here, and I figured I'd try to use Flickr to post to my blog. I'm currently running off of my Fedora 8 i686 Live CD, and I just took a picture, hooked it up, and here we go.

Yeah, not needing the photo gallery function of FastMail so much.

openSUSE is looking good

Okay, I'm writing this from openSUSE 11. I wanted to write a quick note to let all my faithful blog readers know how I liked the experience so far. I'm burning DVD images that I downloaded in KTorrent, which is a nice application. K3B is as awesome as everyone says it is.

I installed from a LiveCD, but I had the same problem I had with RC1 on all but one machine. The install image copies to the hard drive and boots, but the user setup doesn't take. I'm logged in as “linux” and the “mvpittman” user I set up isn't available.

The K-Menu makes it really easy to find applications I need though… typing “user” took me to the yast setup for users.

I'm writing this message in KMail, which is also a nice application. In particular, I like it not *sucking* and being *slow* and bloated like Evolution. Also, it has support for Managesieve, which would let me change the filtering rules on my mail server, without logging into a web interface.

Too bad FastMail messes up the inbox hierarchy, and doesn't have managesieve support. I think I'm going to trial TuffMail again.

I'm writing this message in KMail because I didn't find a blogging application, like maybe Kblogger, I think I could deal with that. A template would work just fine to let me get all the extra crap I'd normally select using logjam.

I'm going to install GimP (again, a positive nod to the search at the top of the KDE Slab menu — “install” got me to the place to add repositories, and search for programs).

Maybe I'll get the printer set up enough to print these DVD labels I downloaded in openSUSE. (Searching for “printer” got me started again with YaST.)

So far, I haven't done anything that I couldn't have done in Fedora, unless that KDE slab/search thing isn't availble in Fedora. So if this printer works all funky, and a DVD install messes up like the Live CD did, then I might just switch back.

Oh yeah… one-click-install pwns you. Going to http://www.opensuse.org/nvidia/ was pretty simple.
However, I had to run nvidia-xconfig to get it to actually take, which wasn't really documented anywhere. I finally figured that out when some attempt to get compositing effects got me to the NVIDIA configuration utility and let me know that the driver wasn't active.

Oh, and once I got that running… The tiny fonts that I really didn't mind so much… they just sprung to life. And then there's the CCSM goodness… “Hollywood got nothing” indeed. I'm liking this alot… I'm going to move on to re-installing from the 64-bit DVD and see how that goes.

Fedora 9 upgrade, successful openSUSE… eh, not so much…

I'm posting this from a Fedora 9 desktop. I had some issues upgrading before, but I did an install of Fedora 8 (after a quick battle with openSUSE 11 KDE Live CD) and burned and printed DVDs for Fedora 9 on both x86 and 64-bit arches…

Rather than try preupgrade again, I just did the Anaconda upgrade with the DVD.

Turns out the problem I was having with the monitor going out of sync was because my xorg.conf file was using the “vesa” driver, rather than the “nv” driver or “nvidia” driver… weird… vesa should *always* work. Changing it to “nv” got me up and running.

I still have the NetworkManager circular dependency issue.

Oh, and I think I understand why distributing an SVG of CD artwork is desirable. I can import to the GIMP at whatever resolution and dpi that I want… in this case a 4000×4000 pixel image at 1440 dpi, rather than the default 480×480px, 90dpi… much better printout. Might actually be time to contribute some instructions.

Looks like the cups server is all foobar too. Damn. Did I say something like, “I'm going back to Fedora because of the easy printer configuration”? I hope not.

I don't blog about my family much … Scott sleeping in his bed.

I'm sure 4 out of the 8 people who actually read my blog wonder why I don't talk about my family much… or rather, “why are all your posts about computer hardware?” Well, I don't really want my family exposed to the Internet. It's vicious.

However, I'll share this tidbit. We finally got Scott back to sleeping in his bed. We visited the pediatrician for shots and a checkup on Wednesday, and he recommended we just hold the door closed until he went to sleep. That was long. He got up again around 4:00 AM, and I repeated. Celebration!

Holly's “on duty” tomorrow night.

Firefox 3, FoxMarks, Compiz-Fusion, and Fedora 8

I needed to do some actual work with my computer, and needed a computer up and running. I also needed to print out a bunch of documents. My old crappy CRT had some sync issues with Fedora 9 after install, my laptop test machines were running openSUSE, where I didn't know how to setup my printer properly… so I wiped and installed Fedora 8, and got it done.

Too bad Firefox 3 isn't available on Fedora 8 from any “official” source. I guess there's the remi repo, but I assume there's reasons it isn't in the base repo for Fedora 8… might be time to try Fedora 9 again, because FF3 is about five times as awesome as 2. One thing I did notice on goin back to 8 was that I had forgotten how to get CCSM working on Fedora 8. I thought I needed to add something to my session so that it would run on startup, and my Google-fu failed miserably on finding that. Turns out Foxmarks has old copies of my bookmarks stored… scary… but useful in this case… I had a bookmark once to the blog post and the bug that gave me in the information, but I had deleted it.

I haven't been home on my PC to enable it again, but I'll probably beat on my computer some more to try and get Fedora 9 behaving properly. We'll see. I checked for the openSUSE release this morning before work, hoping to let the torrent ride out while I was away for the day, but no dice. Oh well. I'll probably go back to Fedora anyway, since my printer works by simply plugging it in, which is awesome.

Kodak EasyShare 7.0, ehh… no.

I got an e-mail about Kodak EasyShare 7.0 being released… I'll have to e-
mail Deb and let her know, since she's still on Windows.

I guess I need to investigate digiKam on this OpenSUSE installation. Maybe it
has a flickr export. If it doesn't suck, maybe I'll just switch her to Linux…
or not. We'll see.