Month: April 2007

Server

There’s been yet another change that you shouldn’t care about at all… I’ve changed the server from my Ubuntu installation that I severely crippled with my incorrect drivers and xorg configuration. I backed up all the stuff to a partition, which I then restored from, and had the server up and running in a matter of hours, the only snag being not having a password for the SQL database, which was easily fixedz0rz. I changed to Xubuntu, which has a less resource-heavy window manager, and I hope that will improve performance. I have negated any possible gains by beginning to have my server crunch some Seti@home workunits just for fun… Well, let me know of any problems. If all goes well I should be awakened by my server blasting “What Would Brian Boitano Do” from the South Park soundtrack at 6:30 AM. Let’s hope I configured cron correctly this time.

Ubuntu Beta

I just installed the Ubuntu Feisty Fawn 7.04 Beta. I must say it seems much better at hardware detection, and booted up with a much higher resolution. This is a huge plus because it doesn’t require users to know to open terminal and run sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg to get a workable resolution. With Edgy, the previous Ubuntu release, the resolution defaulted to 800×640 on all machines I tried, small enough to make it impossible to see the entire installer window, which doesn’t seem to be that good of an idea. I hope it stops nagging me about how it’s using “Restricted Drivers,” which are closed source drivers from companies, making them harder to debug or fix. Load times for the Live CD were long, I hope that improves, and manually partitioning the drive with their partitioner was a hassle. Good thing it’s one-time-only. Link!

PS: If you’d like a dual boot, I’d suggest manually partitioning the drive. I’m not sure what guided does. I should probably find out, though. It may be easier…

EDIT: One of the things I like additionally is that Ubuntu auto-mounts your other filesystems and displays icons on the desktop. This means you can access your Windows files from Linux. If you have a recovery partition like I do, Ubuntu may add this to the bootloader and mount it as well. This can just be ignored in the GRUB menu, but if you’re like me, having a partition you won’t use on your desktop is annoying. In this case, run sudo nano /etc/fstab in terminal, and comment out the line that mounts any filesystems you don’t want. You should be careful mucking around in there, however. In my case, it’s the HDA2 mount line that I commented out.

EDIT 2: Argh. I started the Linux love flowing, and it doesn’t seem to stop. I also like the workspaces, which allows you to clear up your screen by switching desktops. Say you’re multitasking. Instead of cluttering your taskbar with all this minimized stuff, you can switch windows to another workspace. I’m having trouble explaining, but I like it anyways.

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Discovery Channel

Or more specifically, their “Big Science” series. I recently watched their Human 2.0 special, and it was interesting, but seemed to take all of its content down to the lowest bar possible and water it down with nauseating amounts of recap after commercial breaks, reused footage, effects, and sound bites, topped off with only tantalizing mentions of interesting subjects that the hour-long garbage pile only mentions. I was laughing at how overused the unneeded theatrical elements were, and was literally yelling at the screen for more facts and less meaningless filler timewasting! Discovery: If you’re reading this, assume your audience has more intelligence than one of those petri-dish brains you highlighted, and adjust the depth of your shows accordingly, please.

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