LANCOZA Blog

I did not plan on upgrading to Ubuntu 9.10 but when my network manager crashed and took 9.04 with it, I had no choice. I figured that upgrading to 9.10 would be as much work as re-installing/repairing 9.04

As it turns out, my 9.10 upgrade did not go very smoothly and that may or may not have been related to the power failure that dropped my box shortly before completion. I resumed the upgrade, manually installed the Microsoft TTF fonts and all was well.

I have not had much time to play with 9.10, 23h30 is way past my bedtime. If the spirit moves me, I may do some fiddling later this week, else I may get to sleep alot earlier.

Now that my graphics card driver is working as it should, I have returned to the loving arms of AWN . I still have to do a bit of tweaking and add a few launchers but aside from a tiny bit of lag, I am all set.

I am considering testing Gnome-Do again because it is far easier on the resources but AWN is so pretty, I might just live with the lag.

After much installation and re-installation, I finally managed to get my ancient Ati Radeon 7000 working with AWN .

Initially I thought that the problem was the low spec of my graphics card. But after breaking my graphics card driver a few times, I finally purged my Xorg.conf file and this fixed everything. It only took two hours. I have not had a chance to play with AWN because to my great shame I created an XP/Ubuntu dual boot and have been spending alot of my time in XP.

Ubuntu 9.10 has been released and although I am tempted to see what's new in this version, I also do not want to break my graphics card driver until I have had time to play with AWN some more.

Firefox is a great web browser because of all it's community created plugins - but it has also become a CPU and memory hog.

I upgraded to Ubuntu 9.04 recently and in the process of restoring all my settings and data, I decided to re-visit Opera . It consumes less CPU and RAM than Firefox and seems quicker. The downside is that it does not have the same plugin support as Firefox but this is a sacrifice that I am prepared to make.

I also sold my Core 2 PC and am currently working on my 5 year old AMD Athlon. What I have noticed is that if you want to work in a pretty GUI, then you have to have a decent graphics card - even in Linux. The really old, unsupported Radeon 7000 that I have is barely making the grade. Compiz is not an option, nor are any of the really pretty docks that I have found. Gnome-Do is just too slow to be a workable option. Cairo Dock and AWN are complete non starters, every time I tried to click anything with those docks installed, my CPU spiked to 100% for several seconds and then dropped.

 The really great thing about Linux on an old box is that I get better performance  because I am not running any anti-virus software. When I boot to XP on the same PC, I notice a significant drop in performance.

When I previously mentioned that the Modern Warfare 2 trailer was better than the teasers, what I actually meant to say is that it is amazing. By the end I wanted to make sweet love to it, I don't think that's wrong. The trailer gave me goose bumps from beginning to end. I know that I should not be seduced by it but if the game is half as good as the trailer then I will buy it. I will find out how good it really is in November.

 In other news, if you own an Xbox 360 and do not want to run cables through your home to connect to your nextwork - help is at hand. You do not have to buy the ridiculously over priced wireless ethernet adapter from Microsoft.You also do not have to haxorinate a 'cheap' wireless router . You can buy  a Gigaset WLAN Repeater from Siemens. The great thing is that you can use it as a wireless ethernet adapter or a wirless access point or even a wireless repeater. I love Swiss Army Knife type devices and this fits the bill perfectly.

If, however, the ethernet port on your Xbox is bust then you are shit outta luck my friend.

When I first upgraded to Ubuntu 8.04 I was caught in the rapture of a true Linux zealot. Flowers abounded and I am sure that I heard the sound of music. This was quickly erased by the proceeding 2.5 hour marathon to re-install my HP 1020 printer. This process was made all the more painful by the fact that the problem was caused when my printer ran out of paper. The printer froze in an error state and the only solution was to run HP-Setup and re-install the printer again. This is patently ridiculous. Before the Windows fan boys start rubbing their hands with glee - I do not blame Ubuntu for this, this appears to be a problem specific to the 1020 in Linux. Apparently problems can arise because the 1020 does not have it's own firmware and has to have the driver related info fed from the PC.The other issue relates to a conflict between CUPS and the HP software regarding the  USB connection. I cannot go into more detail because I was starting to fall asleep and with the printer re-installed I really didn't care for more information.

As of last night, my printer works perfectly. I re-installed Virtual Box and my Windows XP emulation works well too. There are a few areas that I wish that Ubuntu was more Windows-like and that OpenOffice was more MS Office like but as it stands I am very happy to have a PC which is spyware and virus free.

I have worked on Ubuntu 8.04 a bit more and I really like it. I have not noticed alot of major changes to the OS but the GUI looks more polished and seems to work alot smoother.

Linux has far better security than Windows and with the new releases of Ubuntu, they are closing the gap on the Windows holy grail of ease of use.

Each time we receive a price list from MI Digital , more hardware disapears from it. The first item was the wired controller, then the wireless receiver for PC and then the wired headset. I can't really imagine what will be next. If you have a warranty claim on any of the above, what will they do?

I can't see the sense of it. My guess is that the wired controllers are most popular with the PC crowd. But without the wireless receivers, they are completely out of options which means that MID is excluding the PC gaming market segment which also makes no sense unless of course it was not worth much to them to begin with. But Microsoft is heavily invested in PC gaming...

Divining the opaque motives of local distributors has never been easy, and the ever shrinking list of Xbox 360 hardware beggars belief.

I finally upgraded to Ubuntu 8.04 , I was tempted to do it on the day of release but sanity prevailed. A few months after the release, most of the bugs have been worked out and my installation was relatively smooth.

I had to download about 500MB of updates which took a while, and the install process was smooth until it failed with 4 minutes left. But a bit of Googling soon fixed the problem, I had to repair a few packages and then resume the installation.  I have not noticed any gound breaking improvements but I have read reports that wireless support is greatly improved.

The part that I am most happy about is the fact that I did not have to format and re-install in order to upgrade to 8.04. I was considering moving back to XP but with this upgrade I am going to stick to Ubuntu and see how it goes.

I was quite excited about this custom firmware which promised to provide a cheap wireless ethernet adapter for my Xbox. Until I realised that I don't have a spare wireless router in my attic and buying a new one would still cost me about R500-R600.

I then did some Googling and discovered that there are a few wireless ethernet adapters on the market which I could buy, but none of them are any good. I also prefer that the more expensive the device the more feature rich it should be. So an over-priced ethernet adapter should work with more than just my Xbox.

In the end Zak shot down my geek-project with a few well placed words. It would be cheaper to run a single cable from my existing wireless ADSL router to a cheap hub and then to my PC, Xbox and Xbox 360. In the end it may not get me any geek-points but is the more robust solution.

It took me four hours of research to finally figure out how to install flash in Opera.

First, you have to install Flash for FireFox which is straight forward, the next part is a bit tricky. You must install Opera 9.50 Beta and then point Opera to the Firefox plugins located in your home directory.

The thought of installing a Beta version did send shivers down my spine but I bit the bullet and I have not had any problems. Opera does load pages quicker than Firefox and Opera is not prone to crashing when displaying
pages which contain Flash.

Install the Adobe Flash plugin because the Open Source version which ships with Ubuntu is bad and does not work well at all on the sites that I visited.