Virus, CUPS (etc.), Radco, Evil Ray.

Yet another holiday and yet another (human) virus. This is starting to piss me off.

I haven't had printing working on tom (my main machine - runs FC2) for months. I fucked it all up by using the CUPS web interface which totally confused the Red Hat "system-config-printer" gui tool. I'm downloading a newer CUPS (I'd already done this to try and get USB printing working) and a newer HPIJS to see if it'll fix things.

The new Radco superstore is very nice - a huge improvement. Shame the ceiling fell in there yesterday. (The Co-op without a web site in Radstock, for the curious).

I was attacked (OK - it missed) by a feisty ray on Friday at the Seaquarium in Weston-Super-Mare. Odd. Very interesting creatures though. I could have watched them for hours.

monoforge

I've set up a monoforge account. Wonder what I'll do with it.

Gaim, BLAM!, notification panel, xscreensaver, bus, Liverpool, workrave, Lq

Various things:

1. Gaim - I wish gaim would show me as "away" automagically. Lq started typing at me the morning (from Oz) but guess what? I was still at home in bed. (Aside to Lq: hope you and A are having lekker time - thanks for message!)
2. BLAM! - Read this with excitement. Finally worked out that it only disappears from the GNOME notification panel area when I've read/ma
   
3. GNOME notification panel area: a bone of contention with some people. When I close gaim, it keeps running in the notification panel (the behaviour I want). When I close BLAM! the application quits completely.
4. Why xscreensaver still looks like it did when I first started using it, by JWZ.
   
5. The bus hit a car on the way in this morning gouging a hole in the car's front tyre.
6. Liverpool is the most modern and forward-looking city in Britain - they're banning smoking.

Back to work - and workrave is telling me to have a break (again).

Ubuntu Warty released

Ubuntu Linux Warty has been released. I'm running the release version now (and appear to have been for most of the day). Very nice. All the contentious graphics have been replaced with more usinversally acceptable ones (which is a mixed blessing, I suppose). Everything is stable and rock solid.

All I need to learn now is how to build .debs and I'll be as happy as Larry. (Who he?)

PostgreSQL weekly news

I can't believe that my humble (but glowing) blog entry on PostgreSQL training was linked to from PostgreSQL weekly news.

I meant every word I typed though. I am now a PostgreSQL convert!

Ubuntu Theme furore

The fine folks at Ubuntu Linux are getting ready for their first release (Warty Warthog a.k.a. 4.10) and have just started making the final changes for the first "Release Candidate". Way to go - a lot of hard work from some very clever people.

So what's up? Well, they've changed the default GDM theme, gnomesplash theme (that splash image you get as GNOME starts up) and the desktop background.

The old defaults featured the beautiful, stylish and simple ubuntu logo (three stylised people of different races in a ring) and text. Very nice, conservative, modern and professional - with a subliminal, powerful political message.

The new themes (and bear in mind ubuntu is all about humanity, and their themes are called "human") feature - shock, horror: humans!!! OMG! The humans in question are young and happy Africans of different racial groups: one bloke and two women.

• In the GDM background they're all happy and smiling and in a ring like the logo, on a white background. Very nice. Modern, different and human.
  
• In GNOME, your background should default to a nice brown background with the ubuntu logo showing through. Due to a previous bug (hey, it's beta software), some people got the monthly "Ubuntu calendar" background. Same shade of brown as the default background, but with our three African chums all shown naked from the top up (the ladies retain their modesty by positioning their arms well).
• gnomesplash isn't there long and is somewhere between the two.
  

The new themes/images are different, if a bit cheesy in some peoples' eyes. I'm almost won over though. I think it's a brave, radical change. Humans! On computers! Whatever next.

But I'm going to go on record and say I think the 3 people should keep their clothes on. It doesn't bother me. It doesn't bother Debbie either. It'd just be a bit more tasteful/less embarrassing in the workplace.

Here's Mark Shuttleworth's take on the whole thing: Mark's e-mail (can't argue with a man who has been in space).

PostgreSQL training 2

Had the second day of PostgreSQL training today. At last I understand how it works (to administer it). MySQL is a lot simpler to understand but is nowhere near as powerful/clever/well-suited to the enterprise/whatever.

Simon Riggs rocked as a trainer because he deserved ultimate respect. All that knowledge - wow. (I'm sorry; that wasn't a sentence).

Impressive stuff, especially version 8 (currently in beta).

PostgreSQL training

We're having on-site PostgreSQL training from Simon Riggs of 2nd Quadrant.

It's a bit different having training from someone who really knows what they're talking about. Other trainers may "know" their product well enough to train, install and troubleshoot it, but this guy knows the guts of the system being one of the contributors to it. (Not that he's full of himself nor is he mentioning it all the time or anything like that - he's humble and a likeable guy).

It's a damn fine course, and I'd recommend getting PostgreSQL training from these people any day. Props to them.

Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell

I'm currently reading Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell - a book I knew nothing about until I picked it up a few weeks ago in Ottakar's in Wells. (Apparently it had just come out that week). I bought a black copy.

I'm only about 1/5th of the way through, so this isn't a review. It's just odd that I should

1. purchase a book which I'd never heard of before
2. purchase a book by an author I'd never heard of before
3. purchase a book by a female author (I'm no sexist, it's just the way things go - although I do have all five Harry Potter books ready to read at home)
   
4. purchase a new, hardback book
   
5. purchase a book mainly because the cover(s) looked good

Strange that it was that almost instantly reviewed on /. and then I saw loads of adverts on the tube in London. Do geeks have an in-built sense of "we must read this"? Are we attracted to the same thing? Or is the book more mainstream than I think it is? (I never really have understood why certain things I like are mainstream and some aren't).

The book so far is very good - I keep trying to cram in moments when I can read it between work, parenting, food, talking to Debbie and sleeping.

The associated web site www.jonathanstrange.com is an intriguing idea - good looking, extra content, associated stories and more. If only all web sites were like this (reminds me of the original Blair Witch one).

worldofnic.org is live

I've moved from www.nic.uklinux.net to worldofnic.org (hosted by ukfsn.org). At last.

The CSS (nicked from here) is still slightly wrong and I'm thinking about a 3 column layout, but apart from that it's all systems go.

Next will be smarty and then mysql back-end.

nic's web-history:

1. www.bath.ac.uk/~mapnjd (c. Feb. 1994-2000)
2. www.maths.bath.ac.uk/~njd1 (c. 1995-1998)
3. www.nic.uklinux.net (c. 1999-2004)
4. worldofnic.org (Oct. 2004-...)

Of course, no-one ever reads it, but that's another story!

Still here in London

So I'm still here in London.

/dev/random turns out to be in a patch (112438-03) for Solaris 8 which I've now installed. Now I'm just waiting for the first two disks to sync... and someone's just come in and told me that the machine room shuts at 7pm. Not tonight it won't. I at least want / and /usr mirrored before I reboot (to get the kernel module loaded so OpenSSH can start).

More importantly, my car is going to be stuck at the Park and Ride all night. (I'm not going to get home until about 10pm or later at this rate). I hope no pillock breaks into it.

Stuck in London

So I'm stuck in London at ULCC doing a Solaris 8 re-install (don't ask why) on a SunFire V880.

The joys.

First, a cut down (ie. faster) install failed because it hadn't installed awt, needed for the installer to continue and install the second CD.

Next: why do Solaris Patch Sets take so long to install?

Why isn't DiskSuite installed by default?

Why is so much other stuff started by default?

Where is /dev/(u)random? My OpenSSH build needs this and it's gone off on holiday somewhere...

I know Solaris 8 is old now... Let's hope 10 is saner. (Bet it won't be).

Elinks

Kudos to blogger: you can post using elinks (which I'm using now). You don't have to use a GUI browser. My main problem is I don't know the navigation keys off by heart and keep losing what I've typed by going backwards, or navigating away from the compose box and not being able to get back again. It's also a lot faster to render in elinks than in Gecko, etc. as the graphics for the WYSIWYG editor can take a long time to download.

Nice one blogger - if only all sites were this good.

Firefox and the common man

I wore my Firefox T-shirt to a family party last weekend, and was shocked when my Dad asked, "What's Firefox?"

It shows that sometimes we geeks can fool ourselves into thinking that the rest of the world will soon be marching in time with us. I'll burn him a CD when 1.0 final is released. And perhaps Thunderbird, too.

P.S. Debbie just read this and said "that's really interesting - not". More proof, if any were needed. :-(

Ubuntu 3

More comments about the fab Ubuntu Linux.

I installed it on sylvester (my venerable Dell Inspiron 2500 laptop) using "Sounder 9" (the Sounder pre-releases are known to install properly). First the problems:

• The supplied version of grub is bollocks :-) It's obsessed with ext[23] as opposed to any real filesystems (XFS, JFS).
• Not an ubuntu problem, but I got my keyboard wet, which screwed things up wonderfully!
• The installer is dog-ugly - I'm used to anaconda.

But that's it! My other install went horribly, so I didn't know what really went on. (The other install wasn't from a Sounder disk and didn't even install the kernel, grub, modutils, ... let alone a desktop)!

What you get with this install is a fully-featured, working GNOME 2.8 desktop installed with everything you could actually want. Unbelievable.

This is only a preview release of the first version of Ubuntu and it's nearly as good as Fedora Core already.

It was also a piece of piss to get my prism54 card working properly - a quick look at the wiki and that was it. Fantastic. (The firmware was already in the right place). I'm loving laptop-mode, too. Clever.

I'm becoming a convert, and I've used Red Hat Linux/Fedora Core since RHL 4.1. Weird...

Firefox inroads...

Seen on the interweb at a big corporate site

This Web site is best experienced using Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE) version 5 and above, Mozilla Firefox or Netscape 7 and above.

Get Firefox - the future's here today.

Ubuntu take 2

So, this ubuntu thing installed badly (but it's a preview release dummy!), but redeemed itself with the Debian tools to get the system up and running.

Not everything is perfect, but I didn't expect it to be, but everything is the latest spanky version which is not something you'd expect from traditional Debian.

I think I'll keep it on here and keep learning.

Ubuntu Linux

I downloaded, burnt and attempted to install Ubuntu Linux on my work desktop.

Low point - the current (preview) release (of Warty Warthog - 4.10 apparently) fails to install. Why? Because it can't install a certain package (intird-tools) because it's already installed. At that point, everything else fails.

OK, boot up LNX-BBC, chroot into the / directory and type "apt-get -f install". Marvellous. That's a debianism that came as a great surprise. Now I just need to write a grub.conf and grub-install it and I'll be back up and running.

Felt very pissed off having to leave work before I got it running, but I'm sure it'll be fine within a few minutes of arriving on Monday.

So, Ubuntu looks promising, and understanding Debian better will make me feel like a more rounded person. Plus, I've never really wanted to touch Debian on x86 before because of the lack of "currentness" - Ubuntu comes with GNOME 2.8 which is only available for Gentoo 2004.2 and Fedora Core 2.91 at the moment...

And another thing, I do realise that there are now a plethora of distros out there (and that's another rant altogether), but it should be noted that Mark Shuttleworth is behind Ubuntu, which can only mean one thing - future success. Here, at last is a new distro that aims high with decent financial backing. Red Hat and Novell/SUSE had better watch out. There's a new kid in town.

EAC

I've moaned previously about a "CD" I bought which wasn't a CD-DA disc, but some copy-protected 5 inch silver coaster, which would only play in my main CD player. On recommendation from [mRg], I downloaded EAC (which runs on the evil OS). Fantastic. I took over six hours to copy to .wav files, but now at last I have a copy that will play in my car and on all my computers and my DVD player (which the original couldn't)!

It just shows that copy-protection has been and always will be crackable. Plus, I should have had the right to play the disc wherever I wanted in the first place. So what sense does copy-protection make? None at all.

Take heed record companies - pissing off your customers does not make a great amount of sense. It's months since I bought this CD, and I haven't been able to play it much at all. This means less enjoyment - less satisfaction and less value for money. In fact I've been pretty disgruntled. Next time I buy one of these pieces of shit, I'll rip it with EAC, photocopy the cover and send the original back. Something I've never done with my other >1,000 CDs (or >1,000 pieces of vinyl for that matter). This will:

• reduce your income
• piss your resellers off
• compensate me for the emotional distress you've caused me with this non-CD.
  

Bastards. Silly, silly bastards

A9.com

I've switched from vanilla google.com/co.uk to using A9.com. It's really nice and does a lot more than google. Fine for while I'm at work (with bandwidth to spare). At home, all those images would take an age. Although, I could use it to centralise my bookmarks. Hmmm. Hopefully, they'll let you switch to international versions of amazon at some point.

Also loving the search bar in Firefox - with the various plugins you can download. Clever.

gDesklets

I discovered gDesklets - a really cool piece of eye candy. On the work desktop, I've got iweather (introducing me to weather.com - pretty cool), stickynotes and the RAF Clock running (the monitors wouldn't start/work) but it did take out GNOME this morning.

At home, it won't start at all. (It didn't help that the first time I built it the machine ws heavily overclocked and cc1 SEGV'd). Weird.

So props to the eye candy, but shame about the stability. Looking forward to this all working better.

Good gaim, good gaim.

Gaim 1.0.0 is out. Fantastic. I use it under Fedora Core 2 and the evil OS now and it's pretty damned good. Well done to all those involved.

I've built an FC2 RPM (ok, some RPMs) from the provided SPEC file. You can get them at the following links:

• SRPM
• gaim
• gaim-debuginfo
• gaim-devel

Enjoy.

Software foundations

In the begining was the FSF and it was good. But being good was not an
excuse for being holier-than-thou.

Now we see an ascending star in the server software arena, the ASF. With
SpamAssassin joining the ASF, they more from just being that "Web and Java
stuff" outfit to a wider remit. What if any other prominent free software
changed licences and moved to the ASF?

Then there's the Mozilla foundation - top quality products for the desktop.
If you aren't using FireFox then what's wrong with you? ;-) (Of course, Camino,
Epiphany and the Mozilla suite might float your boat more, as might Safari and
Konqueror). Thunderbird is pretty good too (although Epiphany is my mailer
of choice). I can't wait to see Sunbird come on in leaps and bounds.

There are more foundations (GNOME foundation, KDE e.V., etc.) and they are important (to
us Unix-heads, at least) but I'd argue, not as important as the ASF and Mozilla foundation.

The GPL is the FSF's coup de gras.The FSF in and of itself is important. But the GPL is more important
than the FSF. The FSF's power is waning.

(Associate FSF member #1154)

Blogger so unreliable

Blogger has been really (and I mean really) unreliable recently. It's enough to make you want to move blogs. But again? I can't be bothered with that.

I know that I should have installed something on my own website (drupal, bloxsom, WordPress, etc.) but I was lazy and went for a service-based solution. Now I'm paying the price, I guess.

People wonder why I recommend Red Hat

For exactly this reason. You can s/Red Hat/SUSE/g if you like, but that's the raw facts. Live with it.

Dabs, USB, joy

I bought a 128MB USB 2.0 pen drive from dabs - part of their dabs value range. Only £19.99 including p+p. Obviously I wanted bigger, but I don't need any bigger. (1GB came in at under £90). This is just for using work's bandwidth to take home updates etc.

For some reason (check lkml) USB mass storage went a bit haywire recently in linux kernel-land and on my work desktop I had to go from Arjan V kernel-2.6.8-1.533 to Rawhide (FC3) kernel-2.6.8-1.540 to get it to work, but apart from that - it's fantastic.

Kewl little device.

Coldfusion, Java, pain

Oh god, why is Coldfusion such pain in the arse. When it works it's OK, but it's a shit to configure, relies on the ever-stable Java (normally OK these days, but currently SEGVing on me) and generally crashes out a lot. Plus, the toolkits for Coldfusion can generate shite code.

Don't use it. There's no need. It's cack.

ATI Petition

Sign this to get proper driver support from ATI. My Gigabyte 128MB Radeon 9200 works, but not as well as it should...

Is Windows ready for the desktop?

I know that this title has been used as a joke before, but I'm serious: is Windows ready to use as a stable, secure platform for me?

Answer: as ready as Linux is for you.

System: Windows XP SP2 on XP2100+ with 512MB RAM.

Stability: Windows XP is a stable platform on which to run applications.

Security: OK, OK, SP2 makes an effort, but isn't as secure as anyone would really like, but a great way to improve security is not to run MicroSoft applications. Use Windows as a platform to run better applications on.

Great applications that run on Windows and improve security and your life in general:

• Firefox - a superior, standards-compliant web browser. Never use Internet Explorer - it only brings you trouble.
• Thunderbird - a great e-mail client with built-in Spam-filtering, and guess what, better security. Never use Outlook Express or Outlook - they are worse than Internet Explorer.
  

Firefox and Thunderbird are the top-tier applications that will make your life better. You must also buy an Anti-Virus program. I can't make any recommendations here.

If you have a copy of Microsoft Office, it is the best office suite for Windows, but you probably don't need it. Get OpenOffice instead and save yourself hundreds of pounds.

• OpenOffice - more secure, almost 100% compatible with MS Office (honestly - you should try the 1.1.x versions if you've only tried previous versions).

If that's what you use your Windows box for (web, e-mail, docs, spreadsheets, presentations) then using the above applications will save you money and in the end time (as you won't be so readily infected with viruses).

Now ask yourself, why pay for Windows anyway? Take the time to install Linux and get these applications, (or in some cases, better applications!) better security and even better stability out of the box.

Midsomer Norton South train station

Took the kids to the "Somerset and Dorset Railway Heritage Trust" - currently consisting of Midsomer Norton South train station and a few hundred yards of relaid track. See these pictures I googled for.

It was the open-weekend and the little ones went on a small (8 inch track?) electric train, that they had laid over the main line. We also rode the footplate of the 1970 diesel engine they have there (they have no other working trains yet) which even though it was a diesel was still pretty schweet.

Along with the usual train paraphenalia (books, videos, and Thomas-related stuff for the children) there were displays about the local wildlife and the Somerset Coal Canal. Old rolling stock was being repaired, refreshments were available, and the children enjoyed the bouncy castle. An Austin A30 sat outside in beautiful condition.

The new "woodland walk" was officially opened: this is a lovely small wood just downhill of the station. The actual new path is very short, but leads you out to the fields beyond, running alongside the old trackbed. There were a fair few birds hopping and flying about in the wood, which made it feel alive.

We all had a great time and I'm looking forward to next year to see how far they've got on.

If you're local and like the idea of a nice amenity for families, or would like to see steam trains in MSN again: why not become a member?

P.S. I am not a trainspotter. I just like trains, history and nature.

P.P.S. When I was younger, MSN always stood for Midsomer Norton, nothing to with the other MSN...

Proprietary software shock

I can't believe it, you can't believe it, no one can. However, it is painfully true: I've been using Hello to upload pictures to my blog. Moreover, I've been using Picasa to manage my pictures. They both only run on Windows! I have truly sold my soul to the dark side. They are both closed source.

The real reason this all started is because my camera-phone (a Nokia 7250) only talks to Windows. If you can write a decent Linux interface, be my guest.

While the dodgy "cheap" non-Nokia software + cable I have works, it ain't pretty. "Hello" also isn't the nicest piece of software in the world - it's a bit limited. (I edit the posts afterwards). Picasa, however is sweet - a really nice program, that feels nice to use. OK, so one could put all it's core functionality inside Nautilus (with symlinks) - that's not the point. It's eye-candylicious and a joy to use. Beat that, HIG-obsessed, open-source software.

Plus Hello and Picasa are now owned by google (blogspot's owner) and are free (as in beer). Which blogspot also is. Ethics, schmethics - I'm a hypocrite and I and don't care.

A picture of tom

That Akasa fan in full, in action on the side of tom. You can just see where I scratched the case in this murky jpeg.

Recommended GDM Theme: Saki

Just a quick note to say that I love the GDM theme known as Saki. It looks really nice, compact and kewl (except on my work PC, e082, which uses huge fonts for GDM and RHGB - anyone know a fix?)

Firefox

OK, obviously I never use IE when I'm forced to use Windows, I always use Firefox.

I followed the excellent work of the Fire*/Phoenix group since 0.1, downloading each release/milestone, until I discovered Galeon and later Epiphany.

I love Epiphany - it's simple, GNOME HIG compliant (which is a good thing), but I've switched to Firefox (at work, at least) for some simple reasons: Firefox looks and feels like a fully feldged GNOME application (apart from the icons); Adblock, Sage, other plug-ins; identical interface to the browser I use in XP (damn, I mentioned it)!

Oh, and I love the Firefox icon/branding. Very cute. (By Hicks Design, who seem to have a good eye for design - kudos to them).

Link farm:

1. Mozilla Europe Firefox page
2. Firefox site
3. Switch to Firefox
4. Take back the web

Enjoy.

OpenSolaris

Cruising blogs and Sun's blogging site and you see mentions of OpenSolaris - the open source version of Solaris. So it lives, it breathes, it even has a name...

Also (back to Solaris 10, which still excites me) see the top 20 exciting things in Solaris 10. Kewl.

Solaris 10: truss

truss with thread support - thank you Sun!

One thing that is fucking difficult is trussing a multithreaded program (not that I expect it to help any with BIND, which seems to work by magic ;-). So thanks Sun for this.

xfs, ACPI, SiS 745, bloggers, ni[ck]*

So I fixed the underlying cause of my problems by looking at this non-bug on the kernel bugzilla; now my machine powers off properly. A suggestion from Nicolas Brouard.

I had to run xfs_repair against / (/dev/hda7) on tom (from the FC2 rescue CD - loving the new mirror.ac.uk for download speeds) to completely fix it.

Thanks to Nik Borton for pointing me at one direction for a possible cause. I love blogging and I love bloggers.

Hmmm, a 'nic', another 'Nicolas' and a 'Nik'. A whole world of ni[ck]*s.

xfs, power, kernel 2.6.8-1.520 and /etc/fstab

Curious one this. Debbie powered tom (my main machine) off a bit hastily earlier (thank you Fedora for not understanding ACPI on my motherboard properly, even though Mandrake did) and I managed to lose /etc/fstab. Not nice. What was it doing open for writing at shutdown time?

Well, I think I may have got a little bit of filesystem corruption (heaven help me) as other things have been acting strange (wvdial and xcdroast - not the most reliable parts of the system anyway...).

Fingers crossed people.

mirror.ac.uk and Fedora Core 2

Two things:

1. The ever lovely Richard Mant got fedora.redhat.com mirroring correctly onto mirror.ac.uk late last night. Cheers Rich. Big virtual (and real) love and hugs to you for that.
2. New settings for /etc/sysconfig/rhn/sources : change as follows

   #yum fedora-core-2 http://mirror.ac.uk/sites/download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/core/2/$ARCH/os/
   
   #yum updates-released-fc2 http://mirror.ac.uk/sites/download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/core/updates/2/$ARCH/
   
                                                                                
   
   yum fedora-core-2 ftp://mirror.ac.uk/sites/fedora.redhat.com/2/$ARCH/os
   
   yum updates-released-fc2 ftp://mirror.ac.uk/sites/fedora.redhat.com/updates/2/$ARCH
   
   

Ta-da. Enjoy.

GnuCash

I've just converted all my accounts (which I've been doing by hand for years) to be in GnuCash. Along with 2 months of receipts (and everything else) it only took 3 and a half hours. I'm really impressed - this has got to be one of the best pieces of Free Software that there is.

Just like Novell/Ximian Evolution (unless your using 1.5) it's a GTK 1.2 app, which means it doesn't look as good (or share libs with other apps) but apart from that - no complaints. Simple, easy to use (once you grasp double-entry), sane - how many other Free apps are that good?

M-x yow

(XEmacs joke for the unitiated).

I feel like I've been punched very hard in the face. I had my front teeth dealt with today. Or rather, I had my middle two top teeth taken down and moulded for crowns, another played with and buit up to (near) its original height and a final one smoothed off to mirror the height of that one.

Now my dentist is very good; I didn't feel a thing at the time. However, an hour or so after and yow - that hurt! It's starting to hurt less now, so I know it'll be alright tomorrow, but that has got to be one of the worst pains I've had in my life (without involving a hospital or a third party).

New home

So I bought a domain at last. Now I've just got to move in. I'm not going to copy over the old uklinux web site. I want the new look I've been promising myself for a year or so. Watch this space for updates...

My next computer 2

Previously in the world of nic (blog edition), I wrote that my next machine would be badged (if they still do) as the equivalent of a "6300".

That kind of assumed that I'd need a desktop machine. But if broadband ever makes it out here, I won't need a fixed machine connected to the modem - an ADSL router, a touch of WiFi and shazam, no fixed computer desk any more. (I'm using my laptop wirelessly at the moment to write this, but my main machine is dialed up (bit of ssh action) and acting as a router).

So, I was thinking about replacing my main machine with a new laptop... At the moment, assuming Fedora Core compatibility, I'm thinking about perhaps an Acer Ferarri 3200 (Mobile AMD 64 2800 based + ATI graphics) or Apple Powerbook G4 (1.5GHz 15" or 17" - no need for Linux! except maybe YDL for pointless fun) or some Sony or even HP thing. It'll probably never leave the house so a 17" monster won't be too bad.

Now I just need to find the money... One advantage desktops have is that they're a heck of a lot cheaper and not everything needs to be upgraded at once.

I am not alone

At the weekend I went to a CLIC funded conference, called the 1st annual UK Survivors' Group meeting. Other countries have had these things before and globally, all groups like CLIC can talk to each other about how such events are co-ordinated through the ICCCPO.

Anyhow, enough of the shameless link-farming.

What was weird for me, was meeting other "survivors" (that appears to be the term used, although it sounds like we were in a 'plane crash). I've never met one before, and meeting 20-30 in one go was amazing. The other "survivors" were such lovely people and I mean that. What was really weird was that I seemed to just click with them all. The common bond we all shared meant that we seemed to be able to understand each other at some subliminal level.

I have made many new friends and a new understanding of myself. I am not alone; there are other people like me.

Teeth

I can't believe I've got to spend over £200 on my teeth under the NHS. What happened to "free at the point of delivery"? (Still it's £400-£600 privately).

UK Linux dot NOT!

I've been using a uklinux.net account for my web site and e-mail since it started (about the end of 1999 or early 2000). Dial-up has been variable with them, and I discovered that my cheap 'phone call company, The Phone Co-op offered cheap internet dial-up (even then, the quality has been variable, and I've fallen back on Tiscali when I've had to - only twice in two years).

However, I've always wondered where my UKLinux money went - they say it went to support Free Software, but how? I've read Jason Clifford's account of what went on and I'm pretty pissed off. I also feel rather sorry for him - he's a nice bloke who was a bit naive; it's not that the rest of the UKLinux crowd are evil - they've always been nice to me and have given good service. But where did my money go?

So anyhow I've signed up to ukfsn.org, and I'm going to register a domain name. Everything changes, I suppose, but I've used the same e-mail address for 4 and a half years (along with my niss.ac.uk one which I've used for about 7 years) so it's going to be a bit of a change for me, my many contacts and e-mail subscriptions. Scary. It's the geek equivalent of moving house!

Diary of a drugs cheat

Dave Millar's sorry tale. I actually feel sorry for him - at least he feels guilty for what he's done. I suppose many pro-cyclists and other athletes are in the same boat - too much pressure, too young. But if cry-baby Virenque can come back after cheating then why shouldn't Millar if he wanted to?

Bore de France or Tour de Pants

What a boring Tour.

Facts:

1. Every other contender to Lance Armstrong has dropped out.
2. Great cyclists that used to do really well supporting Lance Armstrong in US Postal can no longer keep up with him, when previously they could pace him up every hill.
3. Lance Armstrong is the best cyclist of our time - a true sporting legend that will never be forgotten because of his dominance in this one race.
4. Lance Armstrong is drug free.

Maybe.

My next machine

My home PCs have gone from Pentium 200MMX (+SCSI) to Athlon 700 to Athlon XP 2100+ (1733MHz).

By my reckoning, my next PC should be badged as a "6300" (whatever that means, oh and Intel are dropping such a naming convention). Whatever, what I really want is x86_64 (Athlon 64) and HyperThreading (Pentium 4/Xeon). Will that ever be available? Who knows.

As for disks, I still can't warrant the expense (or noise) of decent SCSI disks (let alone FC-AL ;-). I hope SATA is running at 200 or better by then.

CD Writers

Man I've just had to upgrade my CD writer at home, a 24x4x4 device. Perfectly adequate I thought (and cost £ 170 some years ago). Until today that is.

I used a 52x32x52 writer in my machine at work (thanks you, boss) and was blown away. I burned 2 copies of RHEL ES 3 (4 cds ea.) in next to no time. So I ordered a new writer from ebuyer.com for under £ 25 (incl. p&p).

I am such a techno-junkie loser. ;-)

Tour de blog: boredom

With all the main contenders dropping out apart from Lance Armstrong, the Yellow Jersey competition has become boring already this year. The KotM prize always is thanks to super-cryboy, cheat, Virenque and no-one cares about the team prize. Which leaves us with just the Green Jersey as the only interesting thing in the tour. I can't believe I said that.

Oh and kudos to Thomas Voekler, the youngster who has done the Yellow Jersey proud by rinding at 150% since he gained it. What a guy.

Tour de Blog: Virenque deux

So it turns out that Richard Virenque can only climb well for a day now that he's not a cheating dope user. Oh well, so much for my being nice to him in a previous post.

Loser.

Tour de Blog: Virenque

I've never been enamoured with Richard Virenque. He's always ridden with the bunch and then gone for the KotM points at about 10m before the line, with no challenges. Not exactly the "super climber" he thinks he is. Then we had the Festina team drug scandal, where all the rest of his team put their hands up and said "OK - we did it" and he, the team leader, cried and cried and said it was so unfair because he was innocent.

In the end he admitted that he was as guilty as the rest of them. Guilty of being a cheat. A dirty stinking cheat with no right to have worn the KotM jersey or be remembered. Cheats suck.

But now he's clean, and yesterday's stage was something of a revelation. Man that boy can climb. Providing he can beat Lance on a stage in the Pyrenees, or at least stay with the leading bunch we'll know whether he burned himself out or not on that breakaway. But for now, I've forgiven Richard Virenque. Anyone who can ride like he did yesterday, drug-free, deserves praise.

Using Microsoft Internet Explorer? Stop now!

Switch to Firefox explains why you should and how you can.

Tour de blog: Robbie McEwan

I could not believe the speed that Robbie McEwan approached the line in yesterday's tour stage. Shame he couldn't maintain it to the line, but still - he's got to be the fastest sprinter there this year (out of those who've shown their colours).

Tour de Blog: European bikes

Despite me gushing over American bikes the other week, after watching the Tour for 3 days, I'm getting all hot and sweaty over Italian framesets and the like in the Tour. Despite the American big brands really knowing how to make a nice-looking bike and Taiwanese giant, er Giant reshaping road frames forever, Europeans know how to make a bike with style; that's an important difference.

Tour de Blog: Not 1664

Remember the good old days when the Tour de France TV coverage was sponsored by "Kronenbourg Seize Cent Soixante Quatre [long pause] sponseur du Tour de France". Nice and French and totally in keeping with the Tour. Even last year we had Halfords who sell comodity bikes to "real" people - good for the Tour - good for cycling.

But now we have fucking yank piss sponsering the TV coverage. What the fuck is that all about? Why would any cyclist or francophile want to go drinking American mass-produced beer? Not the most relevant piece of advertising I've ever seen...

Tour de Blog: Skoda

The Tour de France is more than just a bike race. There's the scenery, the people, the bikes, the kit, the sponsors and the whole cavalcade.

One of the things that's changed this year is that we no longer get beautiful Alfa Romeo 166s as the standard tour staffer's cars, but now have utilitarian (although, in reality quite good, but not in any sense lustworthy like an Alfa) Skodas.

Shame really, but perhaps the Alfas were distracting me from the actual race.

More Fedora Core 2 stuff

Fedora Core 2 Tips & Tricks more apt/yum/up2date archives.

Smarty

I'm considering re-implementing my web site in Smarty.

"Why?" you may well ask, when surely only 3 people ever look at it. In fact, my entire site could probably be written in shtml (although it does contain PHP parts that are far more powerful than you could do in shtml, and could be extended to do much more) but where would be the fun in that?

Tour de Blog

So the only sporting event that I follow has started. Unfortunately, the only "British" cyclist is not in it (doping...) and the incumbent champion is, as usual, being accused without any proof of being a drugs cheat. (I have ordered L.A Confidentiel
from www.amazon.fr.)

I hope that Lance Armstrong isn't a cheat, because he is a truly amazing cyclist. The last few years have shown him to be at a level beyond everyone else. I hope that this year he actually has some competition; Tyler Hamilton perhaps?

It's a shame about Lance's personal life going pear-shaped (and going out with a pop star - for heaven's sake). Mind you, he does have a bit of a tendency to act like a wanker.

I'm also looking forward to Cippolini winning at least one stage, and for his sake, actually finishing the Tour for the first time.

Vive le tour.

Harry Potter 3

This film is fantastic. The first film (Philospher's Stone) was the best children's move ever made. The second (Chamber of Secrets) was a great movie too (although I hate Dobby ;-). This film however is more rounded than the first two - there are darker sides to even the main characters. As the characters are that bit older now and being, well, teenagers, they're showing more adult emotions and going through a tougher time. I'm looking forward to buying the released DVD when it comes out and watching it again.

Mono

Downloaded Novell (Ximian) Mono today. It reminds me very much of Java 0.9/1.0 - it crashes a bit.

The speed is better than Java in the old days though, but then again, my CPUs are 1.13GHz and 1.73GHz - not the 25MHz to 150MHz we had back then. :-)

A little victory

So we've had a small victory in the workplace: the standard desktop browser has been replaced with a choice of Firefox or for some strange reason, Netscape. This is due to the permanent number of serious security holes in Microsoft Internet Explorer.

So a little Open Source victory on the desktop, but we're still losing the war at the moment.

GPRS

Wow - I'm using the company's laptop and GPRS card. Now for you broadband or WiFi hotspot users this may not seem great, but for me this is actually faster than my landline at home.

Plus the ability to sit here in some car park in Bristol and VPN and SSH into a computer at work and fix it is pretty damn kewl. In fact, amazingly kewl.

I'm turning into one of those old gits who is permanently impressed by new technology!

Scorched Earth

Talk about a blast from the past (hopefully with a funky bomb): I downloaded xscorch (FC2 RPM).

The last computer games I played and enjoyed were Commander Keen (various versions), Wolfenstein, Doom (various versions) and Scorched Earth. Scorched Earth rules because it was great fun to play with many players - loads of laughs.

Useful for FC2 users

"FC2 with some cool future linux stuff" - I'm trying out evolution 1.5.9 (aka 2.0).

Interchange

Been playing with Interchange today. It's pretty damn powerful, ridiculously huge (I'm joking - it needs to be) and keeps consultants in business with its near-infinite number of options.

Pretty nice, once you get into it.

American bikes

Despite my love of Italian things, I've got a bit of a crush on American bikes. I've got an old Specialized Allez Epic (in fact, manufactured by Giant in Taiwan, but that's another matter) and the 2004 S-Works E5 Road frame is gorgeous.

I've also got a bit of a thing for those fat-tubed Cannondales. In fact, seeing one on the front of Cycling Plus (issue 13 ?) was one of the things that got me back interested in cycling as a grown up.

Don't get me wrong, I'd love a Cinelli or a Colnago but they are flaming expensive. I figure an American frame with Campag on is the way to go.

Wireless Success (again)

After many painful months using Mandrake 10, I installed FC2 on my laptop and finally got my Netgear WG511 card working again last night. (The last time was in December on FC1).

Dear Sun Microsystems...

Dear Sun Microsystems,

your patchPro product is rubbish.

Please work out a decent way of applying patches to systems (see Red Hat's RHN for an example).

Yours, as ever,
nic

Specialized

I'd just like to give a big congratulations to Specialized for their crash-replacement policy on helmets.

I cracked the back of my King Cobra helmet the other week (the "Brain trust" bit), so I popped into Total Fitness and they told me to contact Specialized directly.

Dig this: I could send my current (useless) helmet back with £32.99 and get a brand new 2004 S1 (I chose a red and white one). That's damn good value! Basically this means that once you've invested in a Specialized helmet, you've got cheap replacement helmets for life - nice. I posted the helmet back on Saturday and received my new one this morning (Wednesday).

Specialized - your customer service is exemplary, I take my hat (or helmet) off to you.

User Friendly on blogging...

Sid on blogging. I won't explain further!

EFF

I decided to join the EFF. Mainly because of Software Patents but also for the right to copy my own media.

For example, I bought a "CD" from play.com which turned out to be an import with copy-protection. It is not a CD-DA disc.

I can't play it on my computer. I can't play it in my car. I can't copy it to have a copy in my car (I don't usually take original CDs in the car - I take CD-R copies instead). So it's fucking useless.

Mr Floppy

Mr Floppy-Drive that is (as opposed to anything else).

I finally, after 10+ years in computing, found a real use for a floppy drive. I haven't really had to use one since I worked out how to make El-Torito CDs (about the time of Red Hat 6.0).

Kickstart installations. I did them some time ago (about Red Hat 7.x) but forgot all aboput them. Now that we've standardised on hardware (HP Proliant DL series) and OS (RHEL 3 and 2.1) it's become an easier task to do. An NFS install is as fast as a CD install (or faster, just) and I can go off and do other things, safe in the knowledge that all the installs are guaranteed equal. (Don't try FTP installs - they take an age and are unreliable).

The Senior Windows Monkey also uses floppy disks to automate installs. If I get any higher in the organisation, will I have to use punch cards?

Brain reviews

I've got two reviews published in this week's brain. I'm especially happy with the review of Made in Sheffield (DVD).

Fedora Core 2

Fedora Core 2 is out. Downloaded via bit torrent (as usual).

Pretty good so far apart from a few niggles:

1) X configuration is bollocksed.
2) gdm uses a HUGE font !
3) anaconda failed to install grub

Good things.

1) GNOME 2.6 looks nice
2) Everything still works
3) XFS filesystem support (yay!)

Solaris 10 zones

My god. It's ages since I got excited about anything in the OS (or OE) world. It's got to have been a long time since I had anything nice to say about Sun but here I am excited about Solaris 10.

Here's why: Zones. (For Sun's official site, read this link).

Complete virtual computers (including root access) that run inside the global (real) computer. Whoa! Read that sentence again!

Of course, we never may get to use this feature but it seems like a pretty cool idea. Run lots of separate customers on one big box. (Although, running one big box can cause it's own problems: big Sun machines can take an age to reboot; can't share apache processes across the zones (without running it in the global zone and thus breaking the security/separation provided by zoning) so memory use is up and the machine is less efficient).

It sounds a good idea to me.

Cycling (again)

Cycled to work again today. Avoided the so-called recommended cycle routes and just bombed down the main road. This was far faster.

On Tuesday it took me an ermbarassing 45 minutes in and 55 minutes home. Today it took just 35 minutes in (respectable) and 50 minutes home (not particularly fast).

In fact, at 35 minutes, cycling is the fastest method for me to get to work (vs. Car, Bus and Park+Ride).

I am famous (OK not really)

I went to build the latest version of exim from Nigel Metheringham's SPRMS today and did a quick check on the differences between his .spec file and my own customised one.

I was happily surprised to see that he'd folded in my changes into his! So there you have it. I am famous. ;-)

(Though I've found another necessary change to get it to build, but that's another matter).

This is why free software is good. We all get to share our knowledge around (like academics) and thus make the world a better place for everyone.

gnome-blogger

Got gnome-blogger working. It looks at plant.blogger.com by default which is now not correct. Telneting to it on port 80 shows that you need to substitute www for plant.

NB: Note that it doesn't get the title right - I've had to edit this back through the web interface. Arse.

So I haven't really got it working 100% after all.

Cycling

I cycled in to work for the first time since last August (I think). Certainly the first time in ages.

The smell of wild garlic, the permanent hubub of birds flying around both made me forget that I was actually cycling fairly slowly. ;-)

Last year I put a road-triple on my hack/communting bike so that I now have 30/21 gear (about 38.6 inches) which makes it a lot easier than struggling up the big hills around Bath in a 39/21 (about 50.1 inches) which is impossible when you're not fit or haven't cycled for a while.

(OK, so it's not impossible, but you're at Level 4 all the way and at a low cadence).

Hopefully, I'll start cycling in and keep cycling in a few times a week.

Blog moved

So I moved my blog here from a Slashdot Journal. Why? I don't know really.

What I wanted to do was install a PHP-based blogging package at www.nic.uklinux.net but time, PHP-version clashes and the huge size of some packages (they do multiple blogs) meant that I couldn't.

So I investigated this, which is free, themable and more.

Expect more dross, lies, stupidty and most importantly ranting than ever before. ;-)

Mandrake 10.0 final

Upgraded all my machines to MDK 10.0 final. Slick.

It's a pretty good distro, which only misses out on a couple of points: urpmi is a bitch - configuring is not easy (even with the many sites dedicated to helping you); downloading large hdlist.cz files is a pain on a modem; seems to like having local CD copies available (err, my machines span 2 sites); updates aren't available all the time - perhaps this is part of MDK's general "subscribers get early access model" (et sim. phpnuke) which is silly and annoying.

My only other comment was on a personal stupidity moment. Overclocked, my IDE bus is not 100% reliable (with CDs mainly), so upgrading was a dumb thing to do: I wasn left with large amounts of /usr/bin /usr/lib /usr/X11R6/[bin,lib] and etc/pam.d bollocksed (ordinary files replaced by files which contained random data).

Luckily rpm still worked fine so (after dropping back to 133/33 and) a few lines of bash created some 'rpm -Uvh --force --replacepkgs' goodness that sorted it all, but I still felt a bit foolish.

You live and learn ;-)

Case modding - how not to do it (16:36 Tuesday 06 April 2004)

I put the Akasa 12cm fan in the side of my case by first drilling holes successively larger until I could put the jigsaw in.

I'd marked out a maximal and minimal pair of concentric holes (I'm not interested in perfection) and so got down to it.

Pieces of advice:


1. Make sure you mask off the case. I hadn't realised that the actual jigsaw would scuff/scratch the case under it's entire body. (Dumb, I know). Not that this matters on my shit case hidden in the dark.
2. Fix the case to a rigid object before commencing any cutting. The whole case (or side panel) vibrates and moves around like nobody's business; as do your arms and your eyeballs.



A combination of the above factors meant that I didn't cut the hole in completely the correct shape (its a bit too big on the lower left hand quadrant for a length of about 20mm and peaks up to 4mm of extra hole, in a tangential direction).

Still the motherboard is cooler, the case looks cooler (thanks to the 4 funky lights in the fan, and the Biochem warning grill).

But if you want to do it properly, don't cut corners like I did.

I can honestly say that I could never cut an accurate window in a case.

Originally published on 16:36 Tuesday 06 April 2004

Overclocking 2

So I got a fairly decent couple of fans: an Akasa 80mm fan for the front mobo side (blows on the disks) and an Enermax 92mm for the back. I also put some Coolermaster RAM heatsinks on one side of my 512MB DIMM.

The result? I can safely take my 1733MHz XP2100+ up to 1898MHz (equivalent to a hypothetical Athlon XP2325+). Or 1% more than before!

This bodes fairly well, as it means I can put an XP2600+ in, and run it as an XP2873+ (nearly XP2900+) which is pretty sweet.

Motherboard temperatures are down to 30C (from 43C) and the CPU is cruising at 46C (down from 52C). Pretty sweet. I've a 12cm Akasa fan to put somewhere, but will need to ensure I don't screw the airflow up. I reckon with branded memory (CAS2) I should be able to squeeze even more out.

I did get the machine to run for a while at 1911MHz (XP2342+) but then it went a bit haywire :-( Oh well!

LNX-BBC (10:52 Wednesday 10 March 2004)

LNX-BBC rocks. I fixed tom (my main machine last night with this). In the end I didn't really need X or networking (but they worked) as I managed to back up all my important data to a spare XFS partition (yes it can read/write to XFS) on a spare disk.

Installed Mandrake 10.0 community (using XFS as per usual) and got back my old home directory etc. Fantastic.

Mandrake 10.0 Community

Upgrading the laptop and my work desktop went pretty smoothly. (Especially on the desktop, where I mounted the 10.0 Community disks on loopback and conned urpmi to look at them there).

My i810 based laptop (Dell Inspiron 2500) is still a bit screwed. For some reason networking is barfed. You can just about get it working but without a default route. Useful. ;-) Sound is as broken as it always has been and the installer flickers like a broken telly. No graphical boot (is that because there's no framebuffer?) Can't get my prism54 card to work either. To be expected really.

Ballsed up my main machine last night. Will fix tonight (using a rescue disk).

Originally published on 13:45 Tuesday 09 March 2004

Mandrake 10.0 RC1 and i810

OK, I re-installed my trusty Dell Inspiron 2500 with Mandrake last night. Not pretty.

The installer flickers and jumps (but I can live with that) and to be fair there are known issues with MDK 10 on i810.

The worst part was X. I seem to have to need to modprobe intel-agp (or after googling you can see on the cooker list that you should add intel-agp to /etc/modprobe.preload) before I can start X.

Next steps are get rid of the KDE login crud (done: vi /etc/sysconfig/desktop) and try and get my prism54 card working once more.

Oh, and why is grub so ugly on MDK? We want splash screens!

Worst of all: where are all the packages? It seems to have ignored my package selection at install time. C'est la vie. Update: No, they are there, I just needed to rebuild my menus. (04 March 2004).

Mandrake 10.0 RC1

I installed Mandrake 10.0 RC1 for the first time last week on my work desktop. This is almost heresy for me as I've been pretty much a Red Hat user/advocate/defender/apologist for about 7 years.

My first experience of Mandrake was either 5.1 or 5.2 in 1998 around my friend Beanz' house. Back then it seemed (or was) Red Hat Linux with just newer RPMs (importantly, newer Enlightenment and Perl from what I recall). Nothing to see here.

In 2001 when my friend Simon Windsor and I got identical laptops, I installed Red Hat 7.1 and he installed Mandrake 7.2 or 8.0 (I forget which).

Mandrake at that point had rpmdrake (I think) - which was very much like SGI Irix's swmgr (software manager). Red Hat had, er, f*ck all. Even now with RHEL 3 and FC 1 redhat-config-packages is a coarse, hack (I love cycling 5 times through a set of 3 disks...).

The install is pretty slick, but you to wonder at the duplication of effort between the perl-based Mandrake install and RH's Anaconda.

Which leads me to my next point: why in the name of all that is holy is there so much duplication of effort. Dudes (and I mean Red Hat, Mandrake and others (YDL, even Debian)): stop writing different tools to do identical jobs. RH have a large number of GPL GUI programs to configure everything, as apparently does Mandrake. e.g userdrake vs. redhat-config-users : they're f*cking identical!!!! Yet completely separate implementations... This is insane.

Cons of Mandrake: only one really, and it's not a Mandrake problem, it's a GNOME/whatever problem. Please, oh please, would all apps have a similar look and feel for their icons. Red Hat have done this themselves through Blue Curve. The rest of the GNOME world needs to catch up. Oh, and no GNOME 2.5 (because it isn't quite ready) ;-)

Pros of Mandrake:

1. Galaxy theme is nice.
2. Install was a piece of cake (even easier than Red Hat? Is that possible?).
3. Uses the Frame Buffer. Something Red Hat either fails to do, or they can't be arsed to do.
4. Gnome menu is sane, unlike Red Hat's where it is too tall and logically similar ideas are split across several menus.
5. *drake commands are pretty nice
6. Nicer default fonts.

Basically, today I'd probably recommend Mandrake over Fedora Core to a desktop user, which is something of turnaround for me.

Originally published on 15:46 Tuesday 02 March 2004

Hi-fi stupidity or is it?

Visited Sound and Vision (which I still refer to as "The Hi-Fi Show") on Friday.

Along with the usual array of lovely stuff, I was most impressed by something I didn't believe in: Mains cables. True Colours Industries demoed the difference between standard mains cable and their own "Constrictor" mains cable. The audible difference was astounding: tighter bass, wider soundstage, clearer, "more beatiful" treble. I had to buy one (even though I couldn't really afford it)! So I bought the 6-way block, and the results at home were even better.

The Velvet Underground were clearer and easier to follow. Norah Jones was more musical and, again, clearer. Richard H Kirk and the Aphex Twin were more taught and, yet again, clearer.

It's like a veil has been lifted or I'd cleaned my ears out. It's like a complete hardware upgrade. And yet, I'm scientifically skeptical that these things work!

Orginally published on 11:37 Monday 23 February 2004

Overclocked at last

Finally got around to overclocking my venerable XP2100+ which natively runs at 1733MHz. At a whopping (OK, not that whopping) 1884MHz that's a massive (OK not that massive) 9% increase. The same as a theoretical XP2289+ (or nearly an XP2300+).

Not the greatest increase in the world, but noticable. The memory bus still runs at 4:5 so that's 181.25MHz = 362.5MHz DDR (vs. 333MHz standard).

Nice.

Thanks to Coolermaster, there's no noticable increase in temperature or noise. Wow.

But then 9% isn't much, is it?

Originally published on 22:57 Wednesday 18 February 2004

Moderation PB!

modded to 5. Oh yeah: /. god, baby. ;-)

Originally published on 17:46 Tuesday 17 February 2004

Hauppauge Win Nova T

Now I don't know whose fault this is, Hauppauge's, MSFT's or what, but I am sick the back teeth of my Win Nova T card. It just doesn't fucking work in any way shape or form.

I can scan for channels and it shows that I am receiving all the channels (at 100% level - I'm almost within line-of-sight and 10km to the transmitter).I receive the EPG fine. I even get the Digital Teletext for BBC Parliament.

However, I receive/display no picture and no sound. Which makes it fucking useless.

If you are intending on buying one of these cards for use under Win XP, I can only recommend that you do not as the drivers are clearly shite.

Of course I really want to use it under Linux, but the instructions and (command-line) interface are fucking awful. I guess I'll have to try though as trying to get hardware working under windows is like hitting your head against a wall that you can't see.

Prism54.org

Tried the latest CVS snapshot from Prism54.org last night with my Netgear WG511 card.

Perfect. No moans, no quibbles, just brilliant. I can now surf, scp ISO images, you name it, wirelessly around the home.

2.6 noticable improvement

Here's a quick noticable improvement I've noticed in Kernel 2.6 over previous versions.

If someone FTPs ISO images off my (cheap, IDE-based) desktop machine, then it still remains usable and responsive. Nice.

SGI XFS in Fedora Core 2 (woo-hoo!)

I read that Fedora Core 2 will have XFS in it out of the box! At last!

ext3 always feels a little clunky (although I've no evidence for this) compared with XFS. I've never tried JFS and Hans Reiser, although a genius, is an arse. I'll stick with what I know.

Originally published on 12:35 Friday 23 January 2004

An Indy and Debian. Part 2

After re-partitioning (to bring / up to 460MB) and re-installing Debian 3.0r1 (woody) I must say that I'm reasonably impressed. Well, it works and this isn't the most common hardware around.

However - I want eye-candy and I want it now! :-)

Gnome 1.4 - I mean; for f*ck's sake. Wasn't that released 3 years ago or more?

So - how to get a newer Gnome. Well I thought I'd try Sarge which I suppose most people would view as being a beta of 3.1.

Nope. libc6_2.3.2.ds1-10_mips.deb won't install. A quick google later and I find out that I need a newer kernel from here. This is one of the trials of being on an obscure platform.

Back up and running again and I retry: When all's said and done apt-get dist-upgrade is seriously cool.

If I get this mips one all working, then my next project is mipsel on a Cobalt Qube 2.

Wireless success!

Fuelled by alcohol, I finally got my wireless network card (Netgear WG511) to work last night.

Mainly thanks to this simple to follow set of instructions.

I love Linux and I love Linux users!

An Indy and Debian

I bought a dream-machine on ebay: an SGI Indy R5000. OK so realistically, it's a 10th as powerful as my Athlon XP at home in virtually every way, but you know. It's seriously cool.

IRIX wasn't totally there any more (/usr was NFS mounted...) so I decided to install Debian. After all "everyone" says how great it is and stuff. Especially "apt" and how great Debian is at dependencies.

This is complete bollocks.

I'll skip over the Red Hat 4.x installer and less-than-useful X configuration tools (I did it by hand in the end). Everyone knows about Debian's installer and that it needs changing (but only if you're not as 133t as all Debian users :-). Anaconda rocks - no more whining Debian drones, just do it.

So apt is all singing all dancing is it? Well Debian had it before Red Hat had up2date (and apt :-). Dependencies never a problem? (Not that they have been on Red Hat since 7.2 but Debian bores can't cope with the truth).

Well let me tell you this: it is very easy to completely F*ck over a Debian box. Why? Because apt doesn't check disk space for you before the whole install takes place and so bombs out half way through with an inconsistent set of libraries.

Debian sucks. I'll probably try to re-install it (something I've NEVER had to do on any version of Unix/Linux).