Diary of a Wolfeman

Last Friday night, I ran an upgrade process on my main slack box, and finished it up Saturday morning only to find that I had somehow broken KDE. Unfortunately, it was beyond repair to the point I had to format and re-install.

Thankfully, I still had the latest cd’s from when I did the laptop, so no sweat, right?

Wrong-o.
For some damn stupid reason, it completely failed to see my network card, and no amount of pounding on it got any results. Ok, fine: replace the card. Still no go.
Fuck.
I don’t know what actually did the trick, but a few hours later I set the damn thing for a static IP, which did not work. But, when I stopped the process again to change it back to DHCP, it somehow woke up and has been working fine.

*Blink*

I have it mostly restored now to what I wanted originally, with the exception of two things: I still need to re-do the ATI AGP drivers, and now I have a sound issue. It plays sounds like MP3’s and other files just fine, except in the sound notifications section. (The little bleeps and whatnot that are supposed to accompany window minimizing and such.) They work under the root login, but not the user login.

*Blink*

This probably has something to do with how I restored my home directory, which amounted to me copying it en masse from a fat32 drive I had archived it to. Some little config file hiding out of sight. Now I just have to track the bitch down…

I love Linux, I really do – except for these little damn annoyances.

In a wake-up call for the IM generation, Slashdot reports on the new Terms of Service for AOL’s Instant Messenger service, AIM. To quote from the new document:

‘…by posting Content on an AIM Product, you grant AOL, its parent, affiliates, subsidiaries, assigns, agents and licensees the irrevocable, perpetual, worldwide right to reproduce, display, perform, distribute, adapt and promote this Content in any medium. You waive any right to privacy.’

Well now. Isn’t that special.

From the Slashdot forum discussing this topic, I have selected two posts that say most of it:

New Terms in A Nutshell All your base are belong to us

-And-

UUEncode Windows and send it to yourself over AIM.
Let Microsoft and AOL club each other to death :-)

Lovely thought, eh?

In any case, in moment of typical panic reaction to the reminder that AOL is truly the Root of All Evil, I have signed up for a Jabber account and deleted my AIM account. I stll have the Yahoo! account as well, if you don’t want to try Jabber.

Incidentally, I chose Jabber due to it’s open-source nature, and the fact that both gaim and kopete chat clients support it. I can now be reached at thecyberwolfe(at)jabber.org or thecyberwolfe on Ymessenger.

MSN Messenger, of course, is not an option no matter what program I use. I just can’t go there.

Okay, I think I’ve managed to hack apart this theme to something I like. A link to the original author’s site is at the bottom of the page and here.

What I did was take the original Devenir-en-Gris theme’s layout, then painted all the .png’s black, followed by color-tweaking of the headers. I also lost all the lowercase text transforms.

There may be further color adjustments coming, but I am satisfied for now. Not bad for a guy who barely codes html, eh?

If you haven’t noticed, I have been upgrading WordPress to version 1.5, and having a rare issue in the fact that it didn’t go seamlessly. My previous index page hashed the new options, so I’ve had to revert to a stock model until I can re-arrange things to my liking.

I’ve done some minor tweaking to it; the major tweaking will have to wait for a day when I am more awake. Until then, you’ll just have to deal with the greys.

No, not those greys, Captain Conspiracy.

Anywho, notice the bit off to the left there that says “Pages”? That’s a new feature, where you can plant long-winded posts to a journal type-format and link them.

Anywho, off to bed.

Ok, here’s the final rundown of the Linux Laptop Project:

Distro: Slackware 10.1, kernel 2.6.10
I started with SuSE 9.2 as an experiment, and was promptly dumped into RPM hell. Bleah. Suse is a good learner distro as a step up from Mandrake, but they do funky things with it. I would happily give it to my boss and use it for work, but not at home where I like things just so. Kernel choice was to keep current. 2.4.29 is stable, but has too much stuff crammed into it to make other stuff work. 2.6.10 runs smoother. (I no longer have to reseat the wifi card after coming back from standby.)

Window Manager: KDE
Like there was really another choice. Okay, there’s lots of other choices (this is Linux, after all,) but I have been a KDE user since 1.0 and just can’t break away from it.

Internet connection: Orinoco wifi
The D-Link got better signal strength in Windoze, but it came down to the fact that I could get this one working and not the DWL650. Win some, lose some.

Usability: Good
What, only good? The fact remains, this is a PIII with only 128 megs of RAM, when I’m used to having an Athlon XP2400+ with 512 megs RAM. I could speed things up a bit by using a different window manager, but I’m tolerant of certain things. It is running a bit faster than it did under Win2k, but not by an amount significant enough to brag about. (Bragging rights are reserved for the P4 / 1GB box at work.) Security, though is a slam-dunk.

Quirks remaining: 2 or three, nothing serious.
On boot, I have to stop the wifi card and reseat it for some reason; I’m sure I could get to the bottom of if I cared that much about it. One of the reasons I stuffed Slack into this thing is to get away from the multitude of reboots necessary under windoze. There are also some minor issues playing back video, and I need to get the power-management tweaked in. Like I said, no biggie.

Am I happy with it? Yes. Could it be better? Of course. But then again, it was free. :)

Who’d a thunk it…

While digging around the forums and bashing my head against a wall trying to get my D-Link DWL-650 wifi card to work, I ran across a blurb saying that Slack comes stock with an Orinoco driver already installed. It just so happens that the roomie has one of these lying around, so we popped it in here and (sound of minor tweaking) Poof! I now have working wifi access under Slackware on my laptop!

I can now happily compute in a completely Windows-free manner wherever I go! Yay!!

This is a happy ending to a happy weekend for me.

With all the crap that went down with my daughter during the week, things got off to a slightly rocky start with my girlfriend, but smoothed out after some booze and silly movies. We watched Catwoman first.

The overall plot of the movie was fairly well laid out, and the dialog wasn’t all that bad. Unfortunately, the movie was completely over-CGI’d, and would have been much better had the director opted to actually train Halle Berry to do some stunts. Of all the Catwomen over the years, she is the only one who did not have to do any real stunt work, and the movie suffered badly for it. They also opted to use fast camera moves to simulate fast actor moves, and once again the movie suffers. To top it all off, they cast Sharon Stone as the villainess, which I don’t list as a positive. General rating: Blah.

We followed that up with Resident Evil: Appacolypse, which was a much better movie. Not a real thinker, but a good fun zombie movie with Mila Jojovich kicking some zombie ass. Highly recommended.

Saturday night, I finally watched Moulin Rouge, a movie I basically knew nothing about. What is it with John Leguizamo getting the really bizarre roles?

Anyway, I actually liked the movie, despite the fact that the creative team behind it has done waaaaaaaaaaaay too many halucinagens in recent years. The hardest part of the movie is not letting your head get stuck with any one song, because they switch songs fast and often, mostly transposing pop hits from the last couple decades into something else. When the narcoleptic Argentinian busts out with Roxanne I damn near bust a gut laughing, and to see the show’s manager singing Like a Virgin is…disturbing to say the least.

So, I think I’m ready to face the week now, with the happy prospect of being able to be in the new shop – at least for Monday, anyway (wink). Knowing my luck, they’ll find a reason to keep me West after the meeting on Tuesday, but I’m suppoesd to open the East store Monday morning. And there is work waiting for me, as well as computer that needs to be picked up and paid for.

That’s enough for now, kids.

Well now, that’s better.

Here I am in SuSE 9.2 Pro on the laptop, successfully dual-booted with only a minor flaw that can be understood, and was frankly expected.

It turns out that there is a flaw in the original FTP 1.0 code that couldn’t see anything over 2 GB in size, and that is more than likely what caused the screwup with the first download. I was able to work around it by going through an Italian mirror that had handily chopped the iso into two parts, then stitched them back together before burning. (They thankfully gave me over 200 kb/s speeds for download)

After that, installation was basically just clicking “OK” at every question. I tweaked it to use LILO instead of Grub, but otherwise all the default selections were fine, including initial package selection. The only problem was, again, expected, in that it hasn’t figured out my wifi card yet. This is par for the course in Linux, since very few card makers and even fewer distros talk to each other for drivers. Stupid, I know. How to best get Linux into the workplace? Make it so that EVERY SINGLE piece of hardware gets auto-detected and works without user tweaks.

I know, I’m dreaming again.

Other than that though, all I did was install a current version of Firefox. SuSE includes one, but it’s out-of-date.

That’s going to have to be the end of the review for now though – it’s bedtime.

In this modern world, there are still some things that you simply have to wait for, regardless of how much technology you throw at them.

Comcast recently upped my download speeds to a whopping 4 Megabits per second. I have a relatively high-speed processor, hard drive, and half a gig of RAM. This, however, all means nothing when the server you are downloading from lets you top out at 25 Kilobits per second. What does all that mean? It means it took me a full 24 hours to download the latest release from SuSE Linux.

Of course, it was a 3 Gigabyte DVD ISO image.

With those speeds, however, one wonders if the other method for the free version of their distro has ever actually worked for anyone. They offer the option of an FTP install, where you download just the installation program and do the rest on-line, only downloading what you need, instead of getting the whole shebang like I did. Call me crazy, but I’m not too keen on spending the next 6 hours waiting to complete an install, when a dropped connection could possibly mean having to wait and start again from scratch. Ewww.

So, I will now attempt to dual-boot the laptop here with SuSE. Cross your fingers…
———————-
Well, fuckity. Apparently, I grabbed the wrong file or it downloaded incorrectly, because the package list isn’t there. I suppose I’ll try again.

Things have been nuts at the shop, what with preparation for opening the new location and our rather booming business. I finally got to set some time aside over yesterday and today to build the three new machines for the new shop. (A gig of RAM per box…drool…)

Wouldn’t you know it, but the very first chassis I finished ends up with a bum power supply. (Who the fuck names their company iCute, anyway?) Grr. So, I swap in a replacement (we’ll RMA later) and go off in search of the Windows XP license keys the Boss told me about…

…And they cannot be found. I spent an hour sifting through a half-ton of useless MicroShaft paperwork to no avail. It seems quite likely the employee they fired for pilfering a couple months back nabbed them along with the other stuff he got. All he left were the server licenses.

So, the Boss spends an hour on the phone this morning with Redmond getting replacement keys, and I finally get the time again this afternoon to install XP…

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Who Put the Donk in the JL421 Badonkadonk?

Yet more proof that Burning Man has gone completely corporate – these things are for sale. When you build it for a personal toy, that’s one thing, but these folks have crossed the line by selling them to unsuspecting hipsters who think they’re cool by trekking out to the desert to get drunk, naked and sunburned.

(Removing tongue from cheek now)