I've been sick for the better part of the last week, hence my quiteness!! I'm now back in my office and hope that I'm over the nasties for this time. Would utterly hate to get sick for christmas where I've booked a holiday trip to Bologna in Italy…
Archive for the ‘RedGloo’ Category
11.12.2006
26.11.2006
I've now installed Linux as a dual boot on my system.
I've installed two different systems this morning and both of them have been succesful the first time around! The first one I did was Mandriva Free 2007, which is a free-speech free-beer distro, and therefore doesn't supply any firmware based drivers. After installation it had detected all hardware, but had not supplied drivers for the nvidia graphics card, my modem, printer or scanner. I easily installed the modem (under 5 minutes), but when I wanted to install the graphics driver I ran into problems, as the driver officially supplied from nvidia didn't support my kernel. I could not face any grievings after my XP experience yesterday, so I decided (rather un-scientific but pragmatic) to try another distribution with firmware.
As I'd already started with Mandriva, and decided to install the Mandriva One distro, which is a live distro (A Linux that will install and run directly from a CD, installation is then done after setting up hardware.) The initial boot up took a bit of time, but when I had a running system I realised that it had detected all of my hardware and furthermore automatically installed all drivers except for the printer. Unfortunately when I startedmanual installation it told me that it didn't have a driver. Further investigation showed that the Dell 725 color printer doesn't provide a Linux nor Mac driver… D*mn you Dell!! Well it was a printer we got for free when my wife boughther laptop, and we have been disgusted with it planning to buy a new one in January.
But everything else is running smoothly out of the box, even my scanner is scanning. The 3D effects provided with the xserver (gui system) is simply wicket!!
Compared to the Windows Installation process I must say that the Mandriva One installation was MUCH smoother and except for the printer it detected and installed correct drivers for all my hardware. If I'd had my old printer (A HP printer) it probably would have detected that automatically (it was on their list), but that doesn't really count. The XP installation was easier than the Mandriva Free 2007 installation, but it installed a mis-fitting driver for my ATA harddrive controller, which I'm very unimpressed by (the old XP SP1 installation did that correctly, the only good thing to say about that installation), but with the help of driveragent.com it was still a better experience…
The Mandriva Free 2007 distro was quite annoying to install, as I had to install all the firmware from the "Terminal" which by most ordinary users would be a turn off. That my kernel wasn't supported by nvidia was just the nail in the coffin!
The XP SP1 installation was by far the worst experience, as it simply did not work! I was flooded with all kind of nasties from the second I started my modem, even with proberly installed firewall and Anti virus.
25.11.2006
I've finally managed to get a (hopefully) clean XP sp2 installation up and running on my home PC. It wasn't as smooth as I'd expect, however it was MUCH smoother than the XP sp1 installation previously mentioned. I ended up having to install it 3 times in total before arriving at this clean installation.
- Installation went well. "Only" 4 devices were not provided for by drivers. (USB and Ethernet were found, that wasn't the case in SP1) The computer acted strangely frrom the outset. It was laggy, meaning that the mouse (and everything else) froze every (approx) 10 second. I'd tried that before on anther computer and the it was a problem with the driver for the harddisk controller. Hence I tried updating the controller driver with an old driver of mine, but something went seriously wrong, and I lost the CD and DVD => new installation
- Same as before => new installation
- Same as before, but I installed firewall, AV and modem first. Then I went to my friend driveragent.com where, surely enough it found a problem with the harddisk controller driver. I downloaded the one they suggested, and after installing it the computer has been running smoothly.
Conclusion: I'm not too impressed with the Windows installation, especially that it installed a wrong or mis-fitting driver for my hd controller without noticing. The device manager didn't show any problems, and it was only due to my (excellent) memory of another old computer and driveragent that I actually managed to get a smoothly running Window installation from a SP2 installation disc. That is in my opinion quite bad, because the normal user probably would have had to live with a freezing computer or get in expensive expert help!
I can't wait to do the Linux Challenge to see how that goes…
24.11.2006
This week-end is the big one! I'll re-install XP on my less than new home computer. I've found a XP sp2 disc, so many of my previous network attacks in the form of trojan horses and other nasties should be eliminated.
My hopes are that it will go much more smoothly, and that it will detect more of my old hardware automatically.
I hope to be able to perform the Linux Challenge as well, but that all depends on the success of the former challenge 😉 There I initially believe I'll have problems with my USB based DSL modem, but I've found a guide on how to install the firmware and I've downloaded all the files needed.
23.11.2006
Contrary to all rumours – I AM NOT FOR SALE!!!
23.11.2006
According to this article there is a new framework on its way called “castle”. It is supposed to work a bit like Ruby on Rails and enable easier web development on .NET. (They do have other tools incorporated such as aspect oriented programming.)
My question is, do we really need a Rails on .NET, I thought one of the purposes of .NET was to make web development easy!!
22.11.2006
The game Secondlife has been struck by a virus according to this article. It manifested itself by glowy rings in the virual world, which multiplied everytime somebody touched them. By human nature these rings were touched by people and started to multiply exponentially leading to heavy database loads. Therefore Linden Labs (the company behind sencondlife) had to shut down access to the world to "clean" up the virus mess.
Are vitual worlds better because they can be shut down? Imagine how easy it would be to clean up the polution in the world!
21.11.2006
I've been mentioning on different occasions that I'd re-organise my computer systems at home, and last weekend was the planned time for doing so. The plan was to take the "best" (read less old) bits from the 2 computers I had, and put them togther, and then install a dual boot system with windows and a linux distro. This is the Windows tale….
- I got all the parts put together quite fast. I had a problem with the CD-rom cuz I did not have the user manual (doh), so I didn't know how to put the switches. I figured it out after having installed windows on a wrong setup, which made it into the C: drive.
- Knowing that I had the correct hardware setup I started with a fresh windows installation. (My windows cd is an XP sp1 cd)
- It installed with 6 hardware drivers missing
- I installed the modem driver
- Downloaded a firewall and installed it
- After a reboot XP acted strange, all sorts of windows pop up, and when checking the firewall had 400 attacks in less than 5 minutes. So I figured that some of the attacks had gone through my firewall. I installed a virus check, and all of my windows32 folder was worms or trojan horses. I decided to re-install and drive to Uni to download and burn firewall and virus software on a safe system.
- Got back and installed everything. The system was still under attack, but it seemed to keep it out. (No strange effects, and virus control hasn't shown any viruses!)
- I tried to find the missing 5 drivers, but as my hardware is old (and of unknown heritage), I do not have them for XP only 98, me and 2000. I started to search for them, put couldn't find them
- In the end I signed up at driveragent.com for $30 where they in 5 minutes found the drivers I needed, and I intalled them.
Section 1 took a Saturday afternoon.
Sections 2-9 took from 10AM to 11PM Sunday, due to several XP installation attemps as my XP cd was a bit dodgy and didn't work everytime. I couldn't find a new XP cd except for a sp2 cd which didn't accept my authentication code. Apparently sp2 and sp1 have different code systems, and I would only want a genuine Windows on my computer.
All hardware drivers were working, but I still hadn't got my email up and running. I got that the next evening!
The next challenge is the Linux challenge. I'll report back…
I noticed a new community for the Black Vastness boardgame here on RedGloo, and I liked the name, so I thought I'd google to see if anybody had named something else Black Vastness.
The top link was the RedGloo Black Vastness community. Even beating NASA, way to go 😉
13.11.2006
So Novell has struck a deal with Microsoft. Microsoft makes a covenant not to sue Novell for patent infringment. You would have thought that Novell paid for this "service", but no Mircosoft is paying Novell for the right not to sue!!!!
Are we going to see a M$ patent campaign soon?
Will this "help" Microsofts campaign for software patents in Europe?
Has Novell sold its soul? (Novell doesn't even own the IP of most of the software ion SUSE anyway. It's GPL code from other open source projects…)