Why My Life Sucks

Before I drop in to the madness that the Godzilla project is sure to be, I just wanted to point out the new blog in my daily blog list.

Meet The Law Dog. Born of American parents in Malta, spent his childhood as part of the ex-pat community in Nigeria, post about the correct way to make tea and is currently a rural west Texas peace officer.  Screamingly funny when the mood strikes, thoughtful at all times.  If I could some how arrange it, he would be one of the people that would show up at Art Dude and Redheaded Girl’s place in the country to remove the critters.   Once you read the blog you will know I don’t mean the dogs or chickens, but yeah, they have a bad infestation of them there.

Because, as many of my friends and family can tell you, I’m a bit touched in the head, and because no freaking distro out there does exactly what I want, I’m going to bit the big freaking bullet and do the “Linux for Scratch” project on Godzilla.

All the “data” on it was sucked over from smallbox any way, and, push come to shove, I’ve proved I can get a fully functional Mint 5 or 6 system up on it in less than 20 minutes, an hour if you really want to do the various updates.  The data should be safe any way, it’s on it’s own partion, but, again, the only thing that would be lost if it died would be the time needed to either SCP it over, or mount the extrnal drive, either way, I’ve got a machine with grunt and video grunt to spare, and, by all that is lawful good am going to get this thing doing exactly what I freaking want.  Not close to it, but exactly.  I’ve got small box, the crap top and Big Silver Tabby as a back up, so it’s not like I’m going to be net less.   Plus, like I said with the whole craptop experiment, I Need Projects.   Failure to have projects makes my brain mush.

The machine needs to let me blog (which means one of Firefox, Sea Monkey or Opera), work on photos (which means Gimp 2.6, all it’s plug ins), either dcraw, ufraw or rawstudio, and digiKam.

Bash shell, c/c++ compiler, wget, linkes, Midnight Commander are assumed.   I suspect it will end up with Apache2, MySql 5 and PHP5 just because.

The madness starts now.

Well, because digiKam, my base line photo tool of choice wasn’t playing nice with Flickr, my current time sink.

Found out why.   Seems that unbutu 8.10 is sort maybe based on KDE 4 (see other rants about that).  digiKam of version less than <0.10 are more or less KDE3 apps.   The shipped version of Konqueror is based on the KDE4 version, and digiKam is looking for the KDE3 version.

Fix?  Go back one level and use Mint 5, which, oddly enough, is based on 8.04, which is what the smallbox uses.  Also it’s a “Long Term Support” which means they will be doing bug fixes and security fixes on it for longer than on Mint 6.

I don’t understand the people that run linux distro’s any more.

I’m in the process of downloading the XFCE version of Mint 5 as we speak.

Plus, I really should have started with it.  It’s code name is Elyssa.  That should be a major hint I should be using it.  I just hope that the X11 drivers are some where near current so Second Life runs at something like normal speeds.  Hate to have to keep bouncing back and forth between Linux and Windows.

Road Dog Porter and Dr. Pepper look exactly alike, if there is about an inch left in the bottom of largish mug. It’s important to remember which one you were drinking last when you pick up the mug and take a swig to take your morning pills.

While Road Dog is a might fine porter, and one that I will be getting more of, it’s not what I want first thing in the morning. It’s mouth feel is really less than optimal after sitting out over night. Plus I’ve just about decided that hops isn’t something you should tasted before say, 2:00 PM, assuming a normal sleep cycle.

Over all, good package.  The current Gnomish version is what I plan on using as my base line install on any machines I update/upgrade in the near term. Being as it is just a slight re branding of Unbutu, however there are some issues.  Hardware detection (at least vs the xfce4 based version of  ubuntu 8.10) seems to work better.  It id’s the sound and video stuff on Godzilla (which is a mutant home built box first made by a moron, and no not me) rather well.

Some important points.

1. Avoid installing any of the “basic” windows manager packages with the term -extras attached
   1. kde-extras is really bad.  Kills networking, at least on Godzilla.  That being said, see item 6 below
   2. gnome-extras hangs the install because it conflicts with mint-gnome-artwork.
2. If you are a geek, turn off the auto check for updated packages.
3. If your not a geek, for all that is  lawful good, leave that turned on and pay attention to it!
4. Make a separate  /home partition.   If you are a geek and plan on doing cutting edge stuff make a $user_data directory and make make a symlink to it from the normal ~/ directory.  That way when you do step 1 (twice) you can just nuke the /home/$USER and not have to worry about damn dot files that have issues.  If your not a geek, just make a separate /home partition so your data doesn’t get lost when your pet geek re-installs the OS, for what ever reason.
5. Trivial bitch, /usr/sbin/update-grub is installed with out the execute bit set on.   /sbin/update-grub requires this.   This matters if you are updating releases on a regular basis.  The bitch is that this doesn’t get flag as an error during they update, so it will cheerfully download the current version, modify the package database as to which version you have, then assume that the older header files can be removed.  And will in fact tell you to do so.  Problem.  Grub didn’t make the new version a boot option.   Again, if this matters to you, you should be wearing your big geek pants and either 1) turn off the magic stuff in grub’s menu.lst file (bad idea) or issue a chmod +x /usr/sbin/update-grub command right after your first apt-get dist-upgrade command.   If none of that made sense to you, you don’t need to worry about it.    I’m sure it will get fixed soonish.  I’m going to file a bug report, just because.
6. If you are going to play cutting edge, remove the gnome network manager, It works great for out of the box dhcp automatic stuff, fails at fix ip stuff. Install a rational  /etc/network/interface file by hand.  Also install a rational  /etc/resolv.conf but that goes with out saying.

Yeah, 2 and 3 sound like they conflict, but they don’t.  If you’re comfortable with editing the /etc/apt/sources.list file to enable the cutteing edge, then do so from the jump.  However if you do that, it’s sort of like Gentoo, it assume your are wearing your big boy pants and will bite you in the ass if you do some thing dumb.  If you have no idea what that means, let the machine handle it for you.  Mixing the two will bite you in the ass and kill the machine.

According to their blog, they are not doing a KDE 4.1 version of the system, an idea I approve of, because it doesn’t feel ready for prime time, at least to me (among other thing the version of digikam I want to run will not work on it), so that they are waiting on KDE 4.2 to become stable before the release a version of it.   The XFCE4 version should be out later this month, which means I will be just living with their basic gnome version for a week or two.  Well, gnome plus my normal tools.  This is the first distro that I’ve decided to make a primary work station that doesn’t have Midnight Commander as a core install.  No big, I’ll just add it to my apt-get install list.

I’ve also decide that on re-branded systems, as long as they are also using the bases systems repositories to avoid meta packages.  Using them results in Bad Things.   So I’ll just go turn on the cutting edge repos and use apt-get/synaptic “by hand”, like a good little geek.

I think once the Xfce version (or flux box) comes out, I’m going to try it on Craptop, and of, course, get Xfce for Godzilla.  I’m not going to try either until they release it however.

I also suspect that the weird ass machine at the office that I’m supposed to make into a sell-able object is going to the the KDE 4.2 version, just because it is very pretty, and more or less looks like Vista.  It’s also unstable as hell, as far as I can tell (KDE 4.1).

There seems to be a trend here.   Windows XP, post service pack 2, stable, predictable, could be made into a usable machine with minimal pain.  OS X 10.4 (aka Tiger) Possibly the best OS ever done.  KDE 3.5.  My desk top of choice.  Rock solid, easy to use and fairly fast.

All of these have been “Upgraded” by version that are, no question asked, prettier than the one before them.  Vista, Leopard, KDE 4.  All require huge upgrades in the processing power of the machines they run on and all of them are broken out of the box.   I’ve just about come to the conclusion that if a major visual effect, out of the box, is a “mirror like” dock, the OS has issues.  If your base line UI requires 3D acceratede graphics to run, you are putting your efforts in the wrong place.

Over there on the right, under all my various propagandising there is my blog lists. I’ve added my work flow “what the fuck have I done today“. I almost used that for the domain, but thought about it and decided that the boss may or may not ever see it and if he does, he will be not happy with that name.

This, I suspect if of little use to any one else in the whole world, other than, maybe, my boss, because I use it as my what the hell am I doing list at work. It should be rant free, but it might have links to rants here.

I’m revamping my work flow system.  Godzilla, not the rapidly falling apart lap top is going to be my primary machine for stuff not done at $WeSellUsedMacsAndNewWiis

Because I can’t leave well the fuck enough alone, I changed the OS on the Linux side of Godzilla, yet again.  I’m using “Mint Linux 6“.  It’s pretty much a very thing plastic disguise over the Gnome version of Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex, so it’s pretty good to start with.  For what it’s worth, it’s live CD found and configured Godzilla’s weird ass on board sound card, which the Xbuntu 8.10 live CD did not.   I’m not surprised at that, it seems that the [K|X]buntu version seem to have a little more issues with hard ware.  Install seems to be a snap.   I’ve turned on the “3rd party drivers” to see what difference, if any it makes in second life.  glxgears indicates I should see some improvement.  More on that later.

I normally don’t like Gnome based desk tops, but this one feels more like KDE 3.x than any thing else, so I might not change.  I will be installing xfce4 and kde3.5, just incase.

When I go up north and fix Random Dafydd machine this will be the one I use. Why? First one to install a modern version of flash play for Firefox right out of the box. This is good.

Well, I’m of to check FPS and other geek-a-zoid things. Be back later.

If you happen to be one of the 4 people that use the internets and don’t know about I Can Has Cheezburger, it’s unlikely that you read my blog.  However, I’m adding it to the daily list now, just to get it out of the way, so to speak.  You can pretty much assume every one in the freaking world reads this, or at least it seems that way.

One of the things I’m doing is going through my “daily” blog list, removing the ones that I’m really not reading, and adding the ones I am to my blog list. You will find it over on the right hand side. Note that the “Family Blogs” are separate.

First up is “Boobs Injuries and Dr Pepper“. Despite the “Boobs and Dr. Pepper” part of the name, it is not, in fact about The Redheaded Girl. At least not the one I talk about here more or less all the time.

Crystal is a damn good writer, funny, witty and a tear jerker as needed. Read it. You will be glad you did. Her “The Crazy Chronicles“, and why she wrote them quite likely saved my life, and I’m not saying that lightly.

Not sure if this is a good sign or a bad one, but here goes…

The dogs have been going nuts for the the last half hour.  The Darling Wife is out doing new years at her friends, so the first time I assumed it was her returning.  Not so.  Then they went nuts again.  Then again.  I heard a car door open and close.  I looked out the window.  Flashing red and blue lights.  Flashing red and blue lights at 5:00 AM are never a good thing, even if you are a normal person, living in a totally white bread middle class section of totally normal mid-western city, most of which applies to me. The normal person part is open to debate. The rest totally applies. So I toss on a shirt and my slippers and walk out side in my flannel PJ pants.  There is an ambulance in front of a neighbour’s house.  Not the one with kids and fire crackers that caused the dogs to go nuts at midnight, but the other one.   Yeah, that one. Item 5.

I’ve known who the problem child was for a while, just never bothered to up date that post.

I don’t normally wish ill on elderly ladies, but I’m damn close to in this case. She’s caused at least a third of my issues this last year, one way or another.