There has been a lot of hype surrounding the Ubuntu Linux distribution recently. I decided to give the Live CD a run on my fiance's system. I was bitterly disappointed. The Live CD doesn't come near to living up to the hype it's given. What follows are a few problems I ran into:
1. The Live CD doesn't have ADSL support (at least doesn't have a gui for it). To me this means the live cd is crippled because Internet access is a major feature of Linux. I realize there's only so much to put on a live CD, but why put any Internet software on the CD if end users can't even connect to the Internet.
2. The Live CD crashed the first 2 times I tried booting it.
3. Many programs on the CD would not load even with 384MB RAM.
4. The XServer seems to run too high for the LCD. As the XServer loads a lot of horizontal stripes race across the screen. It's not so bad when the server has finished loading.
I didn't even test the printing facilities or check out the other hardware support, it's possible that sound and the USB cam wouldn't be supported. After having tried the SuSE Live CD I have to say Ubuntu lags behind SuSE by a wide margin.
Monday, March 07, 2005
Friday, March 04, 2005
Another cool project - pvpgn
I've abandoned the idea of putting anything in that old SGI Indigo case, it really wasn't worth the effort for a cool case, but I started a new project which has been moderately successful so far.
As everyone who has read my web log for more than a few days knows, one of my favorite games is Diablo II LOD. I do have Transgaming's Cedega, so I can play the game under Linux, but I wanted to do something a bit more, playing alone can be boring after you've run the Cow level for the zillionth time.
So I decided to set up my own Battle Net closed server. One of the important decisions was to keep the server portable, so it could be taken places without requiring a lot of heavy lifting. A laptop would have been ideal for the project, but they're still too expensive just for running a battlenet server, so I opted for a slim Compaq Desqpro, a 450MHz with 64MB RAM and a 4GB hard drive. The Working Centre has a couple of these machines for about $65, but be warned, they don't come with CD-ROMs and finding a CD-ROM that fits would probably cost as much as the machine.
I did a network install of Debian Sarge with a minimum of packages. After the base packages had finished I added apache, mysql, less, and ftp so I could use some of the more advanced features of PVPGN, the player versus player Battle Net software. PVPGN use to be called bnetd until Blizzard threatened to sue the developers. I could be wrong, but I think Blizzard pressed the suit against the open source developers, but the EFF, Electronic Frontier Foundation, has stepped in to help financially and legally – thank god, the servers certainly don't hurt Blizzard and it's rather greedy of the company to try and shut the project down.
Anyway, I have my server all configured. I can log on to the IRC, Internet Relay Chat, portion of the server with my xchat Linux client, but I can't seem to connect using Diablo II LOD v1.10. I checked my bnetd logs and they seem to be showing that I'm trying to log in as localhost 127.0.0.1, but I'm actually trying using a different machine. I'm wondering if my wireless router both are connected to is passing the right I.P.
I'm going to add a SCSI card I bought a few weeks ago at the UW surplus sale for $1.00. I have an external SCSI CD-ROM and a tape backup. I may have the machine double as a backup server.
I've never been one to back stuff up because a lot of things I do are experimental. That said, I had my machine perfect a couple of weeks ago, then I ran into a problem not being able to log in to a KDE session with my usual account. I had to wipe the account and create a new one. I erased a lot of settings that I wish I had back, so I may set up the pvpgn machine, aka duriel, as a backup server too.
Tonight I'm going to try pvpgn's irc channel to see if I can't get the problem solved.
As everyone who has read my web log for more than a few days knows, one of my favorite games is Diablo II LOD. I do have Transgaming's Cedega, so I can play the game under Linux, but I wanted to do something a bit more, playing alone can be boring after you've run the Cow level for the zillionth time.
So I decided to set up my own Battle Net closed server. One of the important decisions was to keep the server portable, so it could be taken places without requiring a lot of heavy lifting. A laptop would have been ideal for the project, but they're still too expensive just for running a battlenet server, so I opted for a slim Compaq Desqpro, a 450MHz with 64MB RAM and a 4GB hard drive. The Working Centre has a couple of these machines for about $65, but be warned, they don't come with CD-ROMs and finding a CD-ROM that fits would probably cost as much as the machine.
I did a network install of Debian Sarge with a minimum of packages. After the base packages had finished I added apache, mysql, less, and ftp so I could use some of the more advanced features of PVPGN, the player versus player Battle Net software. PVPGN use to be called bnetd until Blizzard threatened to sue the developers. I could be wrong, but I think Blizzard pressed the suit against the open source developers, but the EFF, Electronic Frontier Foundation, has stepped in to help financially and legally – thank god, the servers certainly don't hurt Blizzard and it's rather greedy of the company to try and shut the project down.
Anyway, I have my server all configured. I can log on to the IRC, Internet Relay Chat, portion of the server with my xchat Linux client, but I can't seem to connect using Diablo II LOD v1.10. I checked my bnetd logs and they seem to be showing that I'm trying to log in as localhost 127.0.0.1, but I'm actually trying using a different machine. I'm wondering if my wireless router both are connected to is passing the right I.P.
I'm going to add a SCSI card I bought a few weeks ago at the UW surplus sale for $1.00. I have an external SCSI CD-ROM and a tape backup. I may have the machine double as a backup server.
I've never been one to back stuff up because a lot of things I do are experimental. That said, I had my machine perfect a couple of weeks ago, then I ran into a problem not being able to log in to a KDE session with my usual account. I had to wipe the account and create a new one. I erased a lot of settings that I wish I had back, so I may set up the pvpgn machine, aka duriel, as a backup server too.
Tonight I'm going to try pvpgn's irc channel to see if I can't get the problem solved.
Wednesday, March 02, 2005
New used hardware
I picked up some used hardware the other day. Two Asus Pentium II motherboards with 233MHz and 266MHz processors for $0.99 and $1.99 respectively. I'm not sure what I'll do with the boards yet, but I've been toying with a few ideas for file/print/dialup servers and I'll probably create another mp3 box.
What I'm discovering is that it's tough to find cheap desktop cases, everyone has tower ATX cases which don't look anything like a stereo component. The case is the main obstacle to getting these machines running. I already have a couple of processor-less boards sitting in my closet, though one is both slot and socket.
The past couple of weeks I've also been thinking about wiring up the house with Cat 5 cable and creating a dial-on-demand dialup server so that Roy could access the Internet and I could keep my modem. I'd go broadband, but I don't plan on staying here much longer.
I also picked up a couple of 10/100 NICs for $0.99 each, a real find since I'm down to a 10MB/s card with both RJ45 and BNC connectors. Some guys were dumpster diving and I sallied nearby and saw them toss a couple of external SCSI cables to the front so I reached in and grabbed them. There was an old Alpha in the dumpster with the top removed. It looked too awkward, and because I wasn't there for Alphas (I was looking for a Sun box) I decided to leave it, but I did pull a RAM chip from a nearby board...I still haven't checked to see what the chip is.
Last night I spent some time at Kevin's house trying to figure out why his palm III wouldn't sync under SuSE 9.2. Everything looked in order package-wise, though he had a little bit of misconfiguration in KPilot, I would imagine it happened after things didn't work. As it turns out, the real problem was that permissions were not properly set for /dev/ttyS0. The sojurn reminded me that I really should get my m125 syncing under Linux again. I haven't used my palm much because it eats 2 AAA batteries every day! If you're thinking of buying a used m125 - beware! I'm also not a big fan of the screen - the screen is too dark for my taste. But I love handheld technology, and having sunk another $125 into a logitech keyboard for my m125 I'm not so quick to give it up. The Avantgo software/service is my favourite thing about the Palm, but I've never set it up under Linux, though there appears to be a connector for KDE.
Daniel Allen, a co-developer on The Working Centre Linux Project, got an article published in Linux Journal this month - congratulations Daniel!
I've been mulling through Marcel Gagne's Moving to Linux the Business Desktop. Chapter 9 was a bit difficult to follow, but most of the chapters have been the same old stuff I already know with one pleasent exception:
rpm --rebuild
I didn't know you could rebuild new rpms on older systems. According to the book I can take a rpm designed for Fedora Core and rebuild it for Red Hat 7.2. -- news to me. I'm a little disappointed there haven't been a lot of "business ideas" in the book. I think I'd like something that adds a few case studies beside examples. I wonder if the reverse would be true of rebuild? Could I take a Red Hat 7.2 binary and rebuild it for Fedora Core? How about another architecture?
Tomorrow I'll be dropping by The Working Centre to add a couple of accounts to the samba file server. Apparently a couple of the guys want areas to privately store stuff...hmmn, sounds like porn., maybe I'll also add a script that reports if a particular user is using a lot of space...
What I'm discovering is that it's tough to find cheap desktop cases, everyone has tower ATX cases which don't look anything like a stereo component. The case is the main obstacle to getting these machines running. I already have a couple of processor-less boards sitting in my closet, though one is both slot and socket.
The past couple of weeks I've also been thinking about wiring up the house with Cat 5 cable and creating a dial-on-demand dialup server so that Roy could access the Internet and I could keep my modem. I'd go broadband, but I don't plan on staying here much longer.
I also picked up a couple of 10/100 NICs for $0.99 each, a real find since I'm down to a 10MB/s card with both RJ45 and BNC connectors. Some guys were dumpster diving and I sallied nearby and saw them toss a couple of external SCSI cables to the front so I reached in and grabbed them. There was an old Alpha in the dumpster with the top removed. It looked too awkward, and because I wasn't there for Alphas (I was looking for a Sun box) I decided to leave it, but I did pull a RAM chip from a nearby board...I still haven't checked to see what the chip is.
Last night I spent some time at Kevin's house trying to figure out why his palm III wouldn't sync under SuSE 9.2. Everything looked in order package-wise, though he had a little bit of misconfiguration in KPilot, I would imagine it happened after things didn't work. As it turns out, the real problem was that permissions were not properly set for /dev/ttyS0. The sojurn reminded me that I really should get my m125 syncing under Linux again. I haven't used my palm much because it eats 2 AAA batteries every day! If you're thinking of buying a used m125 - beware! I'm also not a big fan of the screen - the screen is too dark for my taste. But I love handheld technology, and having sunk another $125 into a logitech keyboard for my m125 I'm not so quick to give it up. The Avantgo software/service is my favourite thing about the Palm, but I've never set it up under Linux, though there appears to be a connector for KDE.
Daniel Allen, a co-developer on The Working Centre Linux Project, got an article published in Linux Journal this month - congratulations Daniel!
I've been mulling through Marcel Gagne's Moving to Linux the Business Desktop. Chapter 9 was a bit difficult to follow, but most of the chapters have been the same old stuff I already know with one pleasent exception:
rpm --rebuild
I didn't know you could rebuild new rpms on older systems. According to the book I can take a rpm designed for Fedora Core and rebuild it for Red Hat 7.2. -- news to me. I'm a little disappointed there haven't been a lot of "business ideas" in the book. I think I'd like something that adds a few case studies beside examples. I wonder if the reverse would be true of rebuild? Could I take a Red Hat 7.2 binary and rebuild it for Fedora Core? How about another architecture?
Tomorrow I'll be dropping by The Working Centre to add a couple of accounts to the samba file server. Apparently a couple of the guys want areas to privately store stuff...hmmn, sounds like porn., maybe I'll also add a script that reports if a particular user is using a lot of space...
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