failing like never before

8May/080

Fglrx Driver Issues

My greatest regret is that I ever bought an ATI graphics card. Back when I was young, carefree, and ignorant of the Linux way, I built my first computer. At the time, an ATI Radeon X800xl seemed liked a solid graphics card; decent performance at a decent price. But a few months after I assembled my computer, I learned about Linux and decided to try it out. I got a a Mandriva CD from a friend, and tried to install it on my spare partition. The installation itself went perfectly fine but when I tried to start X, I found it wouldn't start because of my ATI graphics card. I ended up blundering around a bit and trying to install ATI's proprietary fglrx drivers, to no avail. Eventually, I ended up dumping Mandriva and trying out Fedora Core because I had been told that Fedora had better hardware support.

Fedora ended up working right out of the box for me, and I even managed to get Beryl running after a while. Over the past few years, I've tried out quite a few different Linux distros. Most have been able to get my graphics card configured for me and the rest I've been able to fix with a little tweaking. The Linux Vesa drivers are nowhere near as good as ATI's fglrx drivers, which is why I've always just used fglrx whenever possible.

About a month ago I installed Debian Lenny on my computer. Debian, unlike Ubuntu or Fedora, requires a stronger knowledge of Linux since it doesn't auto-configure everything for the user. So I was pretty much expecting to get an error the first time I tried to start X, and of course I did. As soon as I got the error, I fetched the fglrx driver from ATI/AMD's site and installed it. After that everything seemed to be working fine. Until I tried to open a virtual console and everything went black.

29Apr/080

Enlightened Love

I've mentioned a few times in my previous posts, how much I liked Enlightenment 17, the desktop shell. Although E17 is technically still in alpha, it is surprisingly stable. Suffice to say, E17's alpha is about as stable as the final release candidate of Windows Vista. E17 has been in development for an ungodly amount of time, making the development phase for Debian seem lightning fast. But as I said, even now, E17 is still quite useable.

I had some problems with E17 a while back when I was running Ubuntu. I was using a third-party repository and one of the packages was unstable and ended up wreaking havoc with my Enlightenment installation. I eventually ended up removing all of the Enlightenment libraries and packages from my computer, and since I was too lazy to grab a stable snapshot from the Enlightenment servers and rebuild everything from source, I was left without Enlightenment for quite some time. I built E17 from source a year or so ago, back when I tried out Vector Linux, but it took a bloody long time, especially since I had to resolve all the dependencies manually.

Just a few weeks ago, I installed Debian (Lenny), having decided it was time for me get started on a more serious Linux distro. I'll write about my experiences with Debian at a later time. I decided to install E17 again, but this time, I decided to be a little more research first. In the Enlightenment user manual, there is a section on installation. The manual also provides some links to scripts that automate the installation process, which was really nice for me, because one of the reasons I like Debian is because I hate having to build everything from source and resolve dependencies. I tried using the "Easy 17" shell script to install E17, and it worked great. Easy 17 not only automates installation, but if you call the script with a "-u" argument, it will update your installation. You still have to resolve dependencies yourself, but that is to be expected.

6Apr/080

Control + s in Xterm

If you happen to be a noob like me, and are used to using a fancy graphical IDE like eclipse, NetBeans, or (God forbid) Visual Studio, then you're probably used to hitting <control>+<s> to save something (I think emacs uses "control + s" for saving too). If this is the case, then you've no doubt hit "control+s" by reflex when you wanted to save something in vim or vi. If you're using GNOME's Terminal or KDE's Konsole this shouldn't be a problem, although nothing will actually be saved.

But in xterm, "control + s" makes it so that you can no longer see terminal output. Basically, whatever you type is still processed by the shell, but you just don't see anything (I can't figure why anyone would actually want to do this). So for the uneducated, it looks like xterm has locked up and you've lost all your precious code. Fear not my friend! You can exit out of this funky mode by hitting "control + q."

In summation, if you ever hit "control + s" while using xterm, and everything appears to lock up, hit "control + q" to return to normal.

1Apr/080

Fedora Failed

A while back I ran a disk check on my fedora 8 live CD and got an error telling me that the disk was bad. So I checked the ISO image I had downloaded and it's MD5 hash sum, but found that there appeared to be nothing wrong with the ISO. Just to be on the safe side i downloaded the ISO again via Bittorrent (which takes maybe two minutes on my blazing fast school internet connection (the best part is, no can get mad at me for wasting bandwidth downloading illegally since fedora is open source)), and burned it to another CD. I restarted my computer and ran the live CD media check and it returned the same error again. Whereupon I decided to run the disk anyways, and it turned out fine.

Anyways, here's a little picture of the error message the fedora 8 live CD returned. I realize "fail" is a technical term, but it's still kinda funny...

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28Mar/080

SSH Saved My Life

SSH saved my life, its true. Allow me to elaborate.

I don't have a laptop, just an old Pentium 4 desktop. So when I came home from school for spring break I couldn't bring my computer home with me. (Imagine trying to carry a bloody huge computer through airport security.) So I did the next best thing, I left my computer on and connected to the internet in my dorm room so that when I got home I could use PUTTY, which I installed on my mom's clunky old Celeron, to SSH into my desktop back at school. If I wanted to, I could use X11 port forwarding to get a GUI. It was, to say the least, pretty spiffy. All my music and movies were just a few key hits away, and my code was easily accessible. But it wasn't just data, I had access to other things like my lovely Enlightenment desktop manager, Netbeans, and even Tux Racer.

Mind you, this isn't the first time I've used SSH. I've been SSHing into my desktop ever since I started college, but I've never loved it so much until now.

(OK, so to be truthful, SSH didn't really save my life, but I'm still happy.)

Thank you, developers of SSH and PUTTY, I love you all!

3Feb/082

Ubuntu to Mepis

So just last week, after I finished up my last midterm of the week, I installed Mepis 7.0 on an extra partition I had on my hard drive. Previously, I've been running Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon. One of the first things I did after installing Gutsy was to install Enlightenment 17, which I feel is possibly the best windows manager around. The only quibble I had with E (as Enlightenment is so often called) is that it is still alpha and bugs are therefore quite common. Eventually, I forced myself to switch over to using Gnome, which is the default windows manager for Ubuntu. I was annoyed by the fact that Gnome sucked tons of memory (especially when compared to E) and didn't look nearly nearly as good. Because I have a relatively old ATI graphics card, I had to install fglrx and xgl in order to get Compiz Fusion working. Xgl had a memory leak that would become extremely prominent after a few days. At first startup, Xgl would use around 20MBs of RAM, but after a few days it was up to 90, and by the end of the week it was using about 150. The end result was that I had to restart X ever day, which was a bit of a minor annoyance. I did try running Gnome without Compiz Fusion but the shiny 3D effects were just too cool to pass up.

31Aug/070

Zenwalk, Elive, and Vector Linux

A little bit about Zenwalk 4.6, Elive 1.0, and Vector Linux 5.8 SOHO.

I took Zenwalk off my computer, it just wasn't for me. For the most part, it ran quite well, it was fast and responsive and configured nearly all my hardware for me. Netpkg is pretty cool, it removes the chore of building everything from source and it also has dependency checking. But I had one really stupid problem, aside from the monitor resolution detection. When I pressed control+alt+backspace, instead of rebooting X, Zenwalk simply locked up. At first, I thought that maybe Zenwalk was just slow to restart X, but after ten minutes it was still locked up and completely unresponsive. Anyways, I thought Zenwalk wasn't too bad, but it just didn't fit me.

I'm going to stick over Elive for a moment, and talk a bit about Vector Linux SOHO edition. Its also Slackware based, and is amazingly fast, just like they advertise it to be. I didn't check how long it took to install, but it seemed quite fast, and bootup times were really quite amazing, practically instantaneous. Of course, just like almost ever other distro on this planet, VL didn't detect my monitor or set the resolution correctly. But unlike Zenwalk which, set it to a fairly readable 1024x768, VL set my resolution to 640x480. And of course, my monitor stretched everything out to fit it on my 22 inch widescreen, and I couldn't see a thing. I managed to shut down X and get into a command line so I could start editing xorg.conf. (I have to say, that the "gtf" command is my hero, I don't know what I'd do without it.) After a few false starts, I managed to get my resolution all set up and was able to finally use the GUI parts of the distro. I was able to play music and watch videos without doing anything. Like I mentioned before, everything was responsive and blazingly fast. I wasn't a big fan of all the extra software included (do I really need three different web browsers?) but after all I did get the SOHO edition, there's a lighter weight edition that doesn't have all the redundant programs included. Vector also has its own package management system and dependency checking. Its called slapt-get (kinda like Debian's apt-get) and is as easy to use as Debian's. VL is a great distro, easy to use for linux noobs (as long as their monitor isn't too big) and runs great right out of the box without any configuration. Its also supposed to be able to run really old computers and restore some new life into that pentium pro in your garage.

I decided to install Enlightenment in Vector Linux (Enlightenment is amazing, I'll write a little more about it later). I'm not much of a KDE fan (VL comes with KDE) and I always end up installing GTK based apps to replace the QT based ones. Really, the only QT app that I like is KTorrent. I couldn't find Enlightenment in the repositories, so I had to download the libraries and build them by hand. Anyways, I experienced some problems with the installing proccess. Its been a while and I've removed VL from my computer since, so I can't quite remember what happened. Anyhoo, I kept VL for a bit, and then I decided to give Elive a test run just to see what it was like, and if I could use it to replace VL.

I'll write a review about Elive later, but for now, I'll just say that Elive is a pretty nifty distro, and it works perfectly for me.

29Jul/070

Continued Review of Zenwalk 4.6

I tried reinstalling Zenwalk 4.6 again after I got home. Strangely enough, it installed and ran perfectly fine this time (my previous installation problem). I'm not quite sure what happened, or if I even did anything different. After installation, it prompted me with some rather simple questions to configure to hardware. I appreciated that it asked if I wanted to have numlock enabled on startup, a rather simple thing but a nice touch.

All the applications seemed to work very quickly and I did not experience any problems with any media codecs or Flash. I did have to configure my network connections myself but that was fairly easy to perform. Zenwalk is very speedy, especially when compared to distros like Ubuntu and Fedora, so it should have no problem working on a much older computer then my Pentium 4. I think I will be installing this on my old 400mhz AMD Duron just to see how it run

The creators of Zenwalk did a good job choosing programs to include by default. For each kind of task, there was ony one application, leading to a very slim distro. And the applications provided will do pretty much anything a basic user will require, watching videos and DVDs, listening to music, editing photos, browsing, the web, instant messanging, and much more. All full list of the applications included in the distro can be found at zenwalk.org.

After a few minutes of browsing the web, I noticed that images were strangely stretched out. It turned out that Zenwalk hadn't been able to configure my resolutiion properly. I have a Samsung Syncmaster 225bw (EDIT: 226bw, sorry) with a native resolution of 1680x1050 and Zenwalk was using 1024x768, so of course, everything looked a little funny. I went into the terminal and ran "vi /etc/X11/xorg.conf" while as root and added my resolution in. upon restarting X however, I got an error message and X wouldn't start. It turned out that Zenwalk had installed the vesa drivers for my Radeon X800 XL, so I installed Mesa, which seemed to fix everything out all right.

I was bit annoyed that Zenwalk had such a problem with setting my resolution up. Of course, I was using an ATI graphics card and my monitor had a pretty unusual resolution, but even still...

All in all, I found Zenwalk to be a rather wonderful little distro. I like the fact that its been streamlined and performs amazingly quickly, has a small install size, and is ready to perform pretty much all common tasks right after installation. However, I'm not really a Slackware type of person. I'd like to have a stronger package management system, and I'd prefer to have a little more "eye candy." Now granted, I could configure the system myself, but I'll be trying out another distro very soon.