After trying to save my Windows XP installation as it was, I decided that its just ttoo hard on the head to figure out what’s wrong, since I don’t have all the problems layed out to me in a nice little /etc directory that I can edit with my text editor (going to learn vi some day, too). I’m sure that its as simple as that if you know where to look, but Windows makes it far too cryptic to really figure out what’s going on inside your computer. So, I’ll do what their own techs would have recommended as a fix after soaking me for several hundred dollars on my credit card over the phone with someone who’s command of my own language would be limited and their command of Windows XP even more limited. I’m wiping the whole drive and reinstalling Windows. Lets see if this will fix the issues.
Archive for the ‘Computers’ Category
Here I go reinstalling Windows XP on my other computer for the second time in as many months. I don’t think that this “upgrade” is going to work, but I have to try to get it to pull out of super slug mode and accept the drivers for my printer that had been working fine up until last week. What a pain!
And, its not like an install of Mepis or Linspire, where you have about a 10-15 minute install and your hard drive’s full of goodies. My well-known components will require drivers installed to work properly because the support won’t be there “out of the box”. Oh well. At least its not ‘98 or BeOS.
Update
I’ve not been successful in doing an “upgrade” so a chkdsk and a few corrupted file later, I think that I might have something that’s workable. We’ll see. At least I got the printer/scanner working. That’s a start.
Update
Rebooting causes changes to the video driver to be lost. Since there’s no easy configuration file to edit, it sure looks like a reinstall of the OS. Lovely.
I see that the whole world but me has wrote (not muc) about Wordpress 2.3. I haven’t. I have been running it since the beginning, as soon as the 2.2 code was declared stable (really, before that). Perhaps I’ll write about it. You’ll notice that my site is reasonably responsive and that’s because of the new version of WP.
I’ve also installed Debian 4.0 on my machine. I’ll likely review it soon.
I also have a few movies that I should review. Maybe I’ll get to that after all.
Who knows.
According to this Reuters article, Microsoft, the “world’s largest software maker had abused its dominant market position to crush rivals.”
This is not acceptable by the EU and the Union has ruled that Microsoft is wrong. The company may now have to change it business practices now as a result of the ruling, as “The verdict may be appealed only on points of law and not of fact.”
Read this. There may be more suits of the same kind now tried with other companies, which may create a more fair business environment in Europe. Perhaps there will be spillover to the rest of the world.
I’ve been playing around with Granular Linux for the last week, and I must say that I kind of like it. I’m not sure if its going to replace the standard PCLOS install that I’ve been using or not. I decided to use a capture application called recordMyDesktop and convert the resulting ogg theora file to mpeg with FFmpeg, so that I could upload it to YouTube for all to see what its like running a full screen video capture while running Beryl on KDE. I just set the effects to random and let it go. Check it out:
The URL to the video is here if you don’t see the video embedded. I used these tools on my Pentium 3 machine with 512MB RAM. It has an Radeon 9550 256MB video card and a slow hard drive controller. Most of the time, these captures are done on really fast machines. I thought that it’d be neat to see a few of the neat things that you can do with Beryl.
Actually, Beryl runs quite smoothly and rotating the cube of desktops is pretty slick. The KBFX menu was a neato add on that the Live CD had and anybody can enable it, but the normal Mandriva way of doing the menu comes out first on the hard drive install. Trying to capture a full screen raw video did push this machine a bit too hard, though.
A while after I won my Sony NW-E403, I discovered podcasts. I hadn’t really downloaded and listened to very many of them, though. My usual internet downloads would be the weekly show from UnwelcomeGuests.net and Jeremy’s LQRadio podcast. I began to sporadically add to these, occasionally having to convert some of the low bitrate files to play on the Sony. After getting the Creative Muvo V100, that I referred to here, with its 1GB capacity and expanded file playability, I began to search around for other podcasts to listen to regularly.
It turns out that I may listen all week without hearing any music now! So, for those who have been interested in trying out this thing called Linux but need a bit more reinforcement, some of these podcasts might be useful to you. There are more out there, but I’m just getting into the swing of things.
Here’s the list:
- Linux Reality - I like Ches’s subject matter ranging from newb to experienced
- Lottalinuxlinks - Dave’s chat about Linux - usually from his car it seems
- LQ Radio - Jeremy’s sporadic show about all things Linux
- The Linux Action Show - Bryan and Chris are just zany enough to make them my fave
- Going Linux - Advice for those who just want to use their operating system
- The Linux Install Podcast - Ed Labonte and Ben Cheever install linux and describe what they are doing
- Linux News Log - a new one for me - packed with stuff
I hope that someone finds this to be useful. I founhd all of these by googling the term “Linux Podcast” and checking the results. Podcast Alley is a great place to get lost, as is the Lottalinuxlinks page.
