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djotaku's twitter feed
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- http://www.gnu.org/fry/
- Clinton Supporters: Are you really such sore losers that you're prepared to screw us all over for four years just because you lost?
- More Christian Tech Goodness: http://tinyurl.com/6c8587
- When I was a kid, I played some corny Biblical video games. Now this comes out: http://tinyurl.com/5mxczl Will it sell?
- From now on all LPGA players must pass an oral english test. Who cares if you speak english if you can swing a stick at a small white ball?
- I thought my blog looked a little weird and then I remembered that I had ad blocker turned on and my google ad was therefore missing.
- Foobar2000 the strangely named audio player with the neat features
- I'm annoyed that my Civ 4 BTS hasn't been auto-updating. Just had to download over 300 MB of patches just to play Fall from Heaven 2.
- @ASPwizer: Nothing wrong with you, Honda Elements are the cars that winners drive. q;o)
- Also, sharing: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ericsbinaryworld/sets/72157606917571613/
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Jul
31
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Jul
31
Gnome in Fedora 9 Part 1
Category: Fedora, Gnome | 
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First of all, I guess we got all jealous of Ubuntu because we have a startup sound now. There goes signing in with the speakers on late at night or early in the morning. Second, I apparently no longer have any functionality in Gnome. There are no panels, I can’t right-click the background. I can rotate a cube, but that’s about it. Oh, and I can move my mouse around. Time to figure out what went wrong.
Apparently it’s some kind of metacity bullcrap because Gnome with Openbox gets me panels. Also, I’m getting two error boxes that are completely whited out. I’m pretty sure if I could read the error that I’d be able to figure out what was going wrong. Or at least have more information to ask others. I think it’s possible something that’s supposed to load into the panels is causing problems. Now things have locked up. I’m thinking it could possibly be a fight between updatesd and packagekit, but I’m not sure. I think this may be so because when I tried to do something in yum, it said another app was using yum. The IRC was, as usual, not much help. I have something like a 5% success rate there. I rebooted just in case that might clear up the problem with yum. I think I’ll first start with Gnome/Openbox and see if it freezes up again. chmodding 775 my .gnome2 directories improved things somewhat in that now I get some, but now all of my panels. There may be other files with the wrong permissions somehow. Eventually I just do a chmod 775 .* after noticing there were other files with seemingly wrong permissions. I had a promising start when GDM now finally showed my login picture. It hadn’t showed it until now and I hadn’t realized. But still no luck with Gnome.
When I looked in my .xsession-errors file I saw some sabayon errors. Specifically “No profile for user ‘username’ found. Perhaps that’s the true source of the problem? I looked online and sabayon has something to do with profiles for Gnome. So I typed in sabayon and it asked for my root password. Then I created a profile and associated it with my user account. Let’s see if it works now!!!
Nope, looks like that was a different, unrelated problem. So on the advice of someone from the mailing list I installed and ran gconf-cleaner. Then rebooted. Would this be it? No, this did not solve the problem either. I guess I’ll come back to this once I figure it out.
Trawling through .xsession-errors I see that mugshot is part of the problem. It’s a bit annoying and I can always come back to it later. So I decide to yum remove it. This also removes bigboard, online-desktop and online-desktop-gmail *-google-calendar, *-google-docs and *-google-reader. The online desktop never did work correctly for me, so good riddance.
yum install xorg-x11-fonts* on a whim from something online. Afterall, it’s either a font or a color that’s wrong. If this doesn’t work, it’s possible that my xorg.conf file might be causing the problem by referring to a font server that’s been deprecated. That’s the next thing I try…. Ok, I try getting rid of my xorg.conf to see if this fixes things - it appears this was an error with other Fedora users. So hopefully it finally works and I’ll have a solution to my problem. HOLY COW! That’s all I needed to do all along! I feel like pulling out my hair!
Well, at least it’s fixed!!! Now to get dual-screen, etc working again.
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Jul
31
Linux: A True Story
Category: Linux, xkcd | Leave a Comment
from our friends over at xkcd:
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Jul
30
Yum Upgrading to Fedora 9
Category: Fedora | Leave a Comment
Ok, I noticed that most complaints on the Fedora mailing list seemed to have been solved and it has bene a few months since Fedora 9 came out. So I figure that it’s time to finally upgrade. Also, my biggest problems appear to have been resolved. Although X.org is still in beta, nvidia has released drivers that will work in the interim. And today KDE 4.1 was released! I expect it’ll be in Fedora any day now. I was going to wait until it was there so I wouldn’t have to download all the KDE packages twice, but I figure it’s not that big a deal.
Just like the upgrade to Fedora 8, I’m following the procedure at http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/YumUpgradeFaq
Here’re the steps I took and any problems I had.
- Remove all .rpmsave and .rpmnew files.
For this I just ran locate on .rpmnew and .rpmsave and then deleted the files - Find orphan packages with package-cleanup –orphans
Found some FC7 annd some FC8 packages. None of them failed with %postun - Install yum-fastestmirror
- yum clean all
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rpm -Uhv ftp://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/releases/9/Everything/i386/os/Packages/fedora-release-*.noarch.rpm
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mv /etc/yum.repos.d/fedora-updates.repo.rpmnew /etc/yum.repos.d/fedora-updates.repo mv /etc/yum.repos.d/fedora.repo.rpmnew /etc/yum.repos.d/fedora.repo Just like last time, this wasn't necessary for me
- Update third party repos. For me this was livna
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ctrl + alt + F1
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Log in as root and issue command telinit 3 Takes a little while
- Uninstall thunderbird
- yum upgrade
Ok, I have problems with ogle, BitchX, thoggen, kdemiltimedia-extras-nonfree, ogmtools and libdvdplay. Probably some lingering dependencies from Freshrpms, although I’m not sure. So Now I have to yum remove them and try again. Hopefully these don’t cascade into many others needing to be removed. Now, it only needs to remove libdvdplay-devel, ogle-devel, and ogle_gui. Much better than my last upgrade. So here we go again…..
yum upgrade…. (no elipses in your commands)
It looks pretty neat as all the stuff blows by in the command line. Remember not to go too far until you answer yes to the actual upgrade prompt or you’ll lose valuable time.
2.8 GB to be downloaded…this may take a while….
It started at 1930 and finished at….sometime between 2335 and 0630 the next day. And it logged me out. - yum groupupdate Base
Hmm… yum looks different now. 4.4 MB of packages to download and install. -
yum groupupdate "GNOME Desktop Environment" \ "Development Tools" \ "Hardware Support" "Sound and Video" \ "Graphical Internet" "Fonts" \ "Games and Entertainment" "Printing Software" \ "Administration Tools" "Office/Productivity" "System Tools" 85 MB of downloads.... Had to yum remove pirut, the old package manager, because it conflicted with gnome-packagekit then run the command again
- yum groupupdate “KDE (K Desktop Environment)”
Surprisingly, only 4.4 MB
And what’s with this RPM Fusion Free thing? -
/sbin/grub-install BOOTDEVICE no errors caused....
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cd /etc/rc.d/init.d; for f in *; do /sbin/chkconfig $f resetpriorities; done Gave the output: service functions does not support chkconfig service halt does not support chkconfig service killall does not support chkconfig
- reboot!
Lots of unable to send message problems - I think this is related to upgrading from System V Init to upstart….anyway….it reboots
As it reboots, I notice the popping sound that everyone’s been complaining about when udev comes up. Wow! The graphical boot works for me again!! It hadn’t been working since I updated to Fedora 8 (or maybe Fedora 7) No more watching the text scroll by. The new GDM theme is pretty slick looking. (At least the background is - the part where you enter your username/password is pretty blah….)
I’m able to log into Xfce (I had it set as my default ever since that Xfce post last month). It looks pretty slick like the icons have been replaced with some new slick SVG ones. Interestingly, Evolution has moved from network to office. And it’s no longer called Email, it’s called “Evolution Mail and Calendar”. Also, tons of icons appear to be missing within Evolution. They just show up as a icon with an X in it. Same thing with Rhythmbox. But, everything seems to be functioning correctly. Also, all my desktop icons are gone too. Perhaps they refer to a theme that’s no longer in use? I go to Xfce’s menu then Settings -> Settings Manager -> User Interface Preferences. Changing the theme from hicolor to Bluecurve brings back the icons I know and love…at least on the desktop. Rhythmbox has also now found its icons, but not Evolution. I take it down and start it up and now it’s back to normal! Sweet! So after my upgrade I’m pretty much able to use everything just like I used to. Looks like yum upgrade continues to be a viable way to upgrade Fedora.
Later today I’ll log into Gnome and see what’s changed there. Perhaps they can bring me back from Xfce’s clutches? And as soon as Fedora goes to KDE 4.1 (any day now) I’ll be checking out the new KDE to see if 4.1 is a viable transition from KDE 3.5. (I never tried 4.0 because everyone said it was too beta)
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Jul
30
Orioles Photos Part 2
Category: General | Leave a Comment
The exciting conclusion to my pictures from the Orioles game:
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Jul
29
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Jul
29
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Jul
28
Orioles Photos Part 1
Category: Photography | Leave a Comment
Saturday, I went to the Orioles v Angels game. Here are some of the shots I got:
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Jul
27
Linux Mint 5.0 Light Review
Category: Linux | Leave a Comment
This month’s Linux Format Magazine had Linux Mint as one of the Linux distros on the DVD. I’ve been hearing a lot of people talk about this Ubuntu-based distro. So Mint is based on Ubuntu which is based on Debian. Why not just base Linux Mint off of Debian? Ok, so given that it’s based off of Ubuntu and Ubuntu is becoming synonymous with Linux because it’s so easy to use, why would you want to use Linux Mint? I check out tout the Linux Mint About Page and I’ll sum it up here. Basically they appear to be focused on making things even MORE user-friendly than Ubuntu. It appears that they intend to do this in in two ways - by having the media codecs and firmware available and by having some better user interfaces.
It ran as a LiveDVD and I booted her up. Here’s the default desktop:
Very nice, very sleak. You can see that it recognized my NTFS external hard drive. You can also see that this version’s name is Elyssa. Just as Ubuntu goes down the alphabet for their names, Linux Mint goes down the alphabet, selecting a female name for each version. It appears to be running Gnome with the taskbar on the bottom like Windows. Tomboy, the note-taking program is right by the program menus as well as the “view the desktop” button. When I clicked on the program menu I got a bizarre looking menu.
And then I clicked on Applications and Places and lost my whole menu and couldn’t figure out how to get it back. This is bad! You should never be able to eliminate your menu and be unable to get it back!
If there’s somethingI can see turning users off of linux, it’s your menu dissapearing into thin air. I was finally able to get it back by right-clicking on the menu and clicking -reload plugins. There are two good things about this menu. First of all, it’s always the same height no matter how many applications you have. It just ends up with a scrollbar on the right. Second, you can search for programs by typing the name in the bottom. This way you don’t have to go through every category if you can’t figure whether Blender should be in graphics or sound and video. For settings they’ve gone with a Windows-esque control panel type of scheme:
Let’s see what comes up for software portal, which is, interestingly, something different from package manager. Apparently software portal takes you to a website where you can see program reviews and then install the program. Pretty neat idea - borrow (or maybe licensed?) from Linspire’s Click and Run.
and the website & rest of process:
In the end if failed because I said local repositories and it couldn’t find all the files. No biggie, I don’t feel like trying out more packages this way, but I figure it probably works overall. So what’s package manager? It’s good old Synaptic. It also failed this way so perhaps it has something to do with the fact that I’m running a live DVD.
Ok, let’s take a look at the software. It’s pretty much what you’d expect from any other distro - Firefox 3, Open Office.org, The GIMP, etc
Overall, I don’t see anything that’s especially any more user friendly than Ubuntu. Yeah, this is the light version so it doesn’t come with codecs, but I’ve never had any problems in Ubuntu watching DVDs, listening to MP3s, etc etc. It’s a nice looking distro, but nothing to write home about.
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Jul
26
Puppy Linux 4.0
Category: Linux | 2 Comments
Back in May I reviewed Puppy Linux along with a bunch of other lightweight Linux distros. This month Linux Format Magazine included Puppy Linux 4.0 on their disc and I thought I’d check it out. I’m mainly focusing on how things have changed and improved or gotten worse since Puppy 3.01. I burned the disc and put it into my test rig computer.
The first time it Kernel Panicked. So I told it to go completely in RAM like last time. Then it had some kind of “bread failed” kernel error and paused for 60 seconds. It tried to use UnionFS and kernel panicked again. I gave it one more shot with loading completely into RAM and ACPI off since that can sometimes wreak havok with Linux. It finally worked! Interestingly, when I rebooted, I had a hard time making that work again. Sounds like something the Puppy devs need to fix. However, I guess it could be something wrong with my burned CD.
Once I finally got it working, I was surprised at how well it worked with my wide