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’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.
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.
Ironically, I was griping today to my friend, Kory, about losing my jumpdrive. I had just discovered Portable Apps and had loaded a few to make my computing life a bit more comfortable when away from home. I don’t know where I put it after loading up Miranda Messenger and testing that it would connect to the Yahoo! network from port 80, the HTTP port which your web browser uses. I pulled the USB stick out of the front of my computer after installing this app and promptly misplaced it. I spent 1/2 hour looking for it, going over the house several times. To no avail, I could not find it.
Well, Angela just found it in the dryer. Yes, its at least gone through the dryer for 1/2 hour and more likely than not, its also gone through the washer as well. So, my little 256mb Lexar Jumpdrive Secure II USB Flash drive can, at minimum, survive the heat and tumbling in the dryer and still function!
I haven’t used the secure features of this drive yet, but its nice to be able to plug it into a computer and have it simply become recognized by the operating system. I’ve yet to try it on a machine running Mac OS or Windows 9x, but I can vouch for a quick recognition with Windows 2000 and XP, as well as instant recognition under Linux.
By the way, the picture is almost a full sized image. Its about 4 mm shorter than the real drive. It reminds me of a tiny pocket knife.
Nobody paid me to write this. I am just amazed that this thing still works. This doesn’t mean that I won’t accept payment for the good review, though…
