Another Opinion Among Many

In July, I wrote about reading a Wired article on Hans Reiser and the sensation around his arrest for murdering his estranged wife (who is quite possibly alive).  The trial is going on now.  It appears that only the San Francisco Chronicle seems to be interested at this point.  I wonder whether it will again become world news if Nina Reiser is found to be alive.

In addition to the list of podcasts that I’ve gotten used to listening to, I have discovered The Jak Attack, with “Jon Watson and Kelly Penguin Girl coming atcha!”  Its got a bit of tech, linux, and Nova Scotia all mixed in a serious but goofy-enough package.  I like it!

I’ve been having difficulty when installing the newest releases of some Linux distributions (okay, all of them).  What’s going on is that my ATI Radeon 9550 AGP seemed to have lost some important support.  Nobody seems to have addressed the issue properly and I do see that others were having the same problems that I had.  For no apparent reason, the screen would lock up hard.  It was as if there was a problem similar to what was happening years ago with my old ASUS P3B-F board, which I had to fix with some solder and a capacitor - not the usual fix.

I found that rolling back to an earlier version of x.org (the graphical interface for many Unix and Unix-like systems) fixed my problem.  So, I’ve been using Debian Etch (the stable branch) since.  I’ve had to add some back port repositories and search around for some software to compile from source so that I can have late enough versions of some things.  This has worked out alright for the time being.  But, I’m a software adventurer at heart, and I like to try what’s new.

Enter NVidia.  I’ve been watching for a decent deal on an NVidia graphics card for some time, as they actually produce drivers for Linux for all of their recent cards (all but a few really really old ones, actually, and the x.org drivers will work for them).  That time came this weekend.  For $10 and my ATI card, I have n NVidia GeForce 6600.  This card is actually quite a bit newer than the ATI card (by more than a year), so it’ll give me a bit more mileage as well.

So, the first thing that I did was to enable the right driver for it under dear old Debian, which worked well (I think that I used Automatix, or did I? Good beer).  The next thing that I did was to try OpenSUSE 10.3 to see how it worked with the card.  Wow!  No lockups! I have that distro on a separate hard drive, so I may throw it back in soon and try it for a tad longer to review it.

The next thing that i did was to back up a bunch of files that I had on the 16G drive that held PCLinuxOS and wipe it in favor of Kubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon.  That seemed to work alright, booting me into a screen with the “nv” driver, which has no 3D acceleration but did boot me into 1024×768 at 85Hz, which is ideal for most CRT 17″ monitors like mine.  I enabled the restricted modules and got the proprietary driver for my card.  This caused my screen to go all wacky and I had to use the NVidia settings manager to set the card to the proper refresh rate.  Really, who uses 56Mhz? There seems to be something wrong with my user settings, though, as I cannot keep the settings.  I have to “zap” to the right refresh (which is easy, using CTRL+ALT+”+”), which is not ideal.  I’ll figure that out.  I created an account for each of the kids which do have the correct refresh rate.  I think that I’ll create myself another login and delete the original.  Maybe that’s the best idea.

I’m having a hard time getting used to KDE again.

I did learn something, though.  It seems that, like with SUSE, Debian now enables software suspend by default.  How did I find out this tidbit on my Desktop machine, you ask? It seems that I couldn’t boot back into Debian after installing Kubuntu, as it was looking for the suspend image on the swap partition on the Kubuntu (formerly PCLinuxOS) drive, which wasn’t there.  After logging into the Kubuntu desktop and searching around the internet, I found an obscure post on somne message board advising to try starting with the “noresume” switch on.  That meant adding the word “noresume” to the Kernel line in the GRUB boot list.  These incidents are why I became a champion of GRUB a long time before it was considered mainstream.  LILO is a thing of the past for me, and this problem is one of the biggest reasons.  I got booted into Debian to post this article as a result.  I messed with the /etc/fstab file to point to the proper swap partition, so that I can use the ones from both drives again.  We’ll see if I can reboot.

I just installed Dougal’s Easy Gravatars plugin. He’s just released version 1.1. Inserting Gravatars into your commenter’s comments is as easy as installing the plugin. It works really well. It was even super easy to move the image a bit with the built in “advanced” feature of being able to add CSS properties into the config page.  I’ve decided to go back to using Gravatars because I’ve always liked them, and since they’re now owned and hosted by Automattic,  they are blazingly fast, thanks to the gobs of speed and bandwidth they now have at their disposal.  This is great!

If you have a website and you want to control the amount of unwanted bandwidth usage or simply don’t want some of your content indexed by the search engines or image scrapers, then Khalid’s article on the invesp blog is a valuable resource.  It presents the necessary elements of a robots.txt file in the clearest manner that I’ve seen yet.  Its a good read for any webmaster.

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.

I’ve had my ups and downs with the two Radeon cards that I’ve used. One, a 9500 Pro AGP 128MB, has the R300 chipset, which has “experimental” support. The other (in my machine now) is a Radeon 9550 AGP 256MB and it runs on the RV350 chipset. There is excellent support for the R200 and below and there is great support (soon to get better thanks to the opening of the specs - thanks ATI). However, anything above a 9250 and below the 9800 doesn’t have great support via x.org or even the proprietary Linux driver that ATI provides.

Ubuntu has been doing well at getting around this. I hadn’t really experienced much in the way of trouble with the cards until the release of Feisty Fawn (which got corrected as it approached “final” release) and after Gutsy Gibbon (7.10), which I installed to see where its at. I’m back to the hard locks, which don’t seem to have any specific type of trigger at all with the free x.org driver and seem to occur when I try anything 3-D, with the proprietary driver, which sucks, because I wanted to try playing “America’s Army” and the Western mod for Quake 3 (on OpenArena).

Oh well. Ironic post after the last flurry of comments, I am sure.