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Blogging While Pissed Off

Yesterday I was reading posts on Planet Ubuntu and Stephan Hermann had two post about the plagiarism of his blog on linuxindex.com just got a glance from me. I did not really think it was important but this afternoon I was searching for a few tips on installing GoblinX on a virtual machine and in my search I found my complete post "Problem Solving and Not Installing GoblinX" on linukx.com and it was not mentioned anywhere that I was the writer of this post, apparently it was written by linux guy. My first reaction was "You fucking bastard". This was also my second reaction and third and fourth reaction. I am bit pissed off, no I am a livid. If linux guy was in front of me right now, he'd be laying down in a pool of his blood.

How do we protect ourselves from these no good cocksucking sons of a bitches? I think that there is no way we really can. I know that my posts are not the best there is, and that should be protection enough no one would really want to plagiarize an average blog. All these rip off artists are what is wrong with the internet today.

I guess I have vented enough for today, I sure hope that linux guy (AKA Motherfucking Bastard) sees this post and chokes on it, but before he does I want him to remove all my post that he copied and all other post that he has stolen and that he can choke on this post and dies a long painful death.

p.s. I apologize to all of you reading this expecting no swear words but I could not express the way I feel at this moment. Maybe when I calm down, if I calm down, I'll edit out the nasty word.

VirtualBox Bug in Ubuntu and GoblinX

As you know, being a faithful reader of Adventures in Computing, last weekend I wanted to try GoblinX but the CD I burned was corrupt and I did not have anymore at home. Well after writing the last post I tried GoblinX in a virtual cd drive in VirtualBox and VirtualBox could not capture my mouse. After googling it, I found out that their is a bug in the latest version of VirtualBox when it is used in Ubuntu with desktop effects and according to VirtualBox there is no solution to this critical problem. I have a very simple solution: turn off desktop effects and it works fine.

I have tried GolblinX as a liveCD and I like what I saw and what it did. I did try to install it using the HDinstaller that comes on the disc and I could not I did not have root privileges. I did not feel like work hard that night so I did not fool with it like I should have. I will work on it this weekend when I have more time. GoblinX looks good no matter which desktop environment you prefer. I have never used fluxbox so this is what I am going to try.

I am going to cut this post short because my supper is ready and I am hungry, hungry like the wolf as some would say.

Bad CD Changes Plan

This weekend I tried to install GoblinX on Virtualbox and it did not work out. I think that the CD I burned was corrupt. I am out of discs so I couldn't burn another one and try this one. I'll try again when I get the chance to buy some discs. I'll keep you posted on the GoblinX front. Maybe I'll try again tonight because I am intrigued by GoblinX.

On my OpenGEU box I installed some updates this weekend and I did not lose sound, whoopee! OpenGeu will live to see another day. Unless I decide to install GoblinX on this computer. The next time I format my computers I'll set them up so that I can install more than one GNU/Linux OS so that I can try more than a few distro at the time.

That is it for this short post. I only have one more to write before the end of the month and I hope it is about installing GoblinX on a virtual machine.

Problem Solving and Not Installing GoblinX

I did not use my Kubuntu computer for over a week until my previous post on Tuesday. I booted it up and updated it and since there was an update to the kernel I decided to restart the computer. I logged in as usual and the KDE was going through its logging routine and low and behold I am back at the logging screen. I logging again same thing, what the hell? I change sessions to KDE 4.0.1 and I log in properly. I search the Internet to find out if I am the only one with this problem. I find nothing. I have a headache and must go to work. I start downloading GoblinX to try and to have something to write about in this post. I leave everything until I get back from work.

GoblinX is done downloading. I decide to search for a solution to my problem and decide that if I can't fix it I would try GoblinX. I find a solution. Apparently using Kubuntu is not recommended for English Canadians. The en-ca language pack is what was screwing up my Kubuntu logging. To fix this I had to remove the English Canadian language pack from my computer and everything now works fine.

Now my adventure with my OpenGEU computer. Last week I had lost sound on this box and after 30 minutes of searching I find out that I had to reinstall emodule-mixer and alsa, remove the mixer from the shelf it was one, restart the computer and when the computer was back on put the mixer back on the shelf. The sound was back. After an update on Wednesday I had no sound again. I repeat what I did last week and I have sound again. I hope I don't have to do this after every updates. I decided that if I have to do this I'll install GoblinX on this computer.

GoblinX will be installed on a virtual machine this weekend because I am intrigued with it. I'll let you know about it in a future posting.

Nothing Going On

Why did I promise to write 4 posts a month one one blog and at least a post a week on another? Damn myself! I have written anything on this blog for so long because I have nothing new to write about. I still have four posts to write. I haven't really tried anything new since the last time. KDE 4.0.1 is slowly evolving but to be honest with you I haven't even touched KDE for over a week.

I did reformat the computer that I had elive installed on. Now it has OpenGEU, which for those of you that don't know is the re-vamped version of Geubuntu. This computer I have been using on a daily base. It is a fine environment for a computer with limited resources. Everything else is the same.

KDE 4.0: A Stepping Stone

Last year at the end of January an operating system was release which a lot of people were disappointed with and refusing to change over to it. You all know that I am talking about Vista. When it came out there were no drivers for existing hardware. It took to much space on the hard drive. It basically takes a super computer for all its features to work properly. It doesn't work the same as Windows XP, etc... etc... etc... A lot of people in the linux camp and even the Windows camp were saying that Microsoft released an Operating System that should not have been release before they worked out all the kinks.

Fast forward a year. Last week KDE 4.0 was released and there are a few things that are missing. We the users of KDE have lost options that we had in the 3.5.8 version of KDE 4.0. For example I can't figure out how to add another panel on the desktop. I can't even re-size the existing panel. The new menu system is horrible. There are a lot of Linux users complaining and there are as many Linux users defending the new KDE 4.0. Last year the same was being said about Vista. I think that we are too fast at complaining, we want instant results. I have been playing a bit with Vista and it is not as bad as everybody says it is, there are a lot of stuff I don't like about it but there is some that I like. With that said I would not choose it as my OS.

KDE 4.0 is a stepping stone for greater things to come. If you are switching from Windows or Vista to Linux and you want to work with KDE I strongly recommend you go with KDE 3.5.8 for now and hopefully within a year KDE 4.1 will be out and will have a few of its annoyances worked out.

I have to say to the KDE 4.0 developers you can't satisfy everybody all the time, we end users are bastards, when something is not to our liking we will complain until the cows come home and when it works fine we usually don't say a word. I would like thank all the developers of KDE 4.0 for all your hard work and dedication to the cause of free open source software, keep up all the good work.

KDE The Next Generation

Yesterday KDE 4.0 Was unleashed to the world. I got home from work late last evening so all I did was install it using this guide from Kubuntu. I checked if it was working, it was. I decided to rest and keep my adventurous soul in check and wait until this evening to check it out. After trying it out for the last hour or so I like the look of it and I have a lot of forgetting how KDE 3.5.8 works and learn a new way of doing things if I am going to use KDE 4.0. I find it harder than Enlightenment at the moment and Enlightenment is very different than anything else out there.

I won't get rid of my trusty KDE 3.5.8 yet but I'll use KDE 4.0 from now on to get used to it because KDE 3.5.8 will be forgotten by next year? Maybe, maybe not, only time will tell.

The Geubuntu Failure

In Geubuntu, for one reason or another, the repositories for Geubuntu and Enlightenment are not there. Last night I added them and updated my system. I also screwed up my system. The Gnome panel at the top of the desktop was hiding but not coming back. I was pissed off because I could not get it back so the simplest thing to do was to re-install and start over. I am used to this so I decided to give Elive another chase. I shouldn't says another chance, I should say a fair chance. I installed it and low and behold the screen resolution was perfect. I followed the same instructions as with Geubuntu to get the Thunar File Manager able to view the other computers in my network.

I'll continue to "play" around with Elive and keep you up to date.

The Elive Failure

Thank goodness one of my resolutions for this year was not to run Elive for six month. Yesterday I got rid of it and replaced it with geubuntu. This was all the Thunar file manager's fault. Thunar has no native network ability. As you regular readers know I have several computers and I want to be able to use any file from any computer no matter which computer I am using at the time. With Thunar I could not do it, at first. I found a helpful guide that explained how to do this for Xubuntu. I wanted a quick fix to this situation and when after about 15 minutes of trying to change my previlege I simply gave up and said to myself "self, this guide is for Xubuntu it should work for Geubuntu," I did not have to twist my arm within 20 minutes I had Geubuntu installed. After another half hour, I had to install all the updates and nvidia driver, I had the same problem.

At this point I should mention that I had another situation with elive that at first I was going to live with but with the "non"-file sharing between computers made this unacceptable. For one reason or another I could not get the screen resolution to work with elive. On this computer I am using a LCD monitor that has a resolution of 1440x900. In elive when I set this as my resolution my monitor was to small, what I mean is that I was not seeing the complete screen. As I moved my cursor to the edge of the screen I would see that part of the screen. I had tried changing the video driver but to no avail so I set it up to 1280x800 and only at this resolution was I able to see the complete desktop on my screen. It looked distorted of course. In Geubuntu after installing the "resricted" nvidia driver I could see the desktop as it should be in wonderful wide screen 1440x900 resolution. Just this has made it worth while to switch to Geubuntu. Now back to the Thunar situation.

I followed the instructions that I had found for Xubuntu, until it says to go in the Users and Group. Geubuntu has no Users and Group in the system menu. I screwed around a bit and figured how to change my previlege so that I could use the fuse file system. I haven't figured out how to auto start fusesmb yet, all I have to do is run the command: "fusesmb /media/network" and it works. I have to remember to do this when I start up the computer.

Fully Enlightened

As previously reported I was trying Geubuntu and Elive-Gem on virtual machines. Now I decided to take a bigger step: I have just installed Elive 1.2.4 on one of my computers. Why did I choose Elive over Geubuntu? I must say that Ubuntu and Kubuntu are my operating system of choice and that is the reason that decided to go with Elive, Geubuntu would have been another Ubuntu flavour. I know that Elive is based on Debian as is Ubuntu but Elive does not depend on Ubuntu as Geubuntu does. So the next few weeks I will be learning to do things slightly differently and I shall keep you updated.

Installing Elive on the computer was very easy even an amateur could do it. It is as simple as pooping in the install CD in the tray, rebooting the computer from the CD ROM/DVD ROM a few clicks to choose language video driver and you have the live desktop working. Clicking on the install icon will get you to partition your hard drive and decide where to install the root directory and if you want to create other file directories. You then choose passwords for root and users when all this is done you have to restart the computer. As with all Linux systems you have to log in the system when it starts and you will be asked to enter the root password to "tweak" the system and voila it is done. Now let the fun begin.

I don't know if the previous paragraph constitute educating you, the reader, something about Linux as mandated in my previous post, for now it will have to do. I have not broken any of my new year resolutions yet but the new year is only 13 hours and 33 minutes old at the time I am writing this.

I have to mention that every time I try a new Linux distribution it takes less time to install than ever, pretty soon we will find that waiting more than five minutes for an installation a tedious affair.

I will call this post, the first of many for 2008, done. So I'll keep you updated in my computing affairs.

Out With The Old In With The New

Everybody has new years resolution and I am no exception. The problem with resolutions is that almost everybody keep their resolution for a few days and then they give up. I have done this and so have you, don't deny it it's not becoming of you.

I have a few that I hope I will not break them. You might be asking yourself what this has to do with this blog. Well one of my resolution concerns this blog. I hope not only to tell you of my adventures with computing, I will try to educate you in the ways of linux. I will try to have one post a month explaining how I did something with linux.

Well with that out in the open I have to do it now. That is it for this time. I guess this will be the last post for 2007.

Happy New Year everybody and I will forgive you if you don't keep your resolutions because heaven knows I might not keep mine.

I Have Seen the Light with Enlightenment

I have been experimenting with both Geubuntu and Elive-Gem the last few days and I am quite intrigued. I have been using Virtualbox trying them out and I like what I have seen so far. Yesterday I was off from work and played around with both and I was so impressed with Geubuntu that I was one mouse click away from installing it one my laptop. I was to lazy to back up the files from my /home directory to my /storage one, so I did not install it. I wait a bit before I decide to take the plunge. I can't install Elive-Gem on the laptop because it won't support my wifi or audio card.

Both these operating systems use Enlightenment as there windows manager and it is different from everything I have seen so far. Maybe I'll install it on my eldest desktop, but not now, I wanted to try KDE 4.0 first when it comes out in January.

In the last two post I mentioned that I have been trying out other web browsers than the top two. Here are my finding. On the laptop I am using Epiphany with a bunch of there extensions. On this computer I am not missing Firefox at all, to tell you the truth I prefer Epiphany. On my Kubuntu box I have been using Konqueror which I find slow but I still enjoy it. I would choose Firefox over it. On my Ubuntu 64bit computer I have kept Firefox but I installed the 32bit version so that the flash player plug in could work. I might switch over to Epiphany on this computer. On this same computer I have XP with which I tried Maxthon and since I don't use XP often I find alright but I haven't used it to its full potential. At work I now use Opera and I am very impressed with it, it is very fast I would recommend it to anybody wanting to get rid of bloated browsers.

I guess my time is up for today.

Gutsy Again

I don't remember if I mentioned in one of the Gusty Gibbons posts that when one of my computer was freezing with Ubuntu installed on it I switched it to Kubuntu before I found out that it was a freak combination of my video card and motherboard. I was a bit disappointed because I wanted Ubuntu and Gnome on my newer desktop computer and Kubuntu on my oldest computer. On Monday I decided to switch them over with a complete Installation.

On the oldest computer, Newman, everything went fine as expected. This is the computer on which I am try Konqueror as a web browser, a bit more on that later. I am pretty much an expert on installing Kubuntu/Ubuntu and setting them up the way I like 'em. Installing Ubuntu on the newer desktop was another story.

I Had been thinking of trying the 64bit version of Ubuntu. On monday a few hours after switching Newman from Ubuntu to Kubuntu I decided to Sidney, the desktop, to Ubuntu 7.10 64bit. I downloaded the installation cd, popped it in and restarted the computer. After choosing to install I get a black screen, no signal detected, damn. After a few Google searches I found out there is a bug. I decide to install using the alternative CD, I hope this will work. It does install. I won't go through it step by step because we would be here for hours and we don't want that do we?

The screen resolution was screwed up! I have a 1680x1050 screen but all I was getting was 640x400! After fooling around with it a while I finally get to change it to the correct setting but I only get to see about a quarter of the screen and when I move my mouse to one of the edge I can view another part of the screen. I try several ways to fix this but to no avail. Being a fairly good problem solver, in my own mind, I decide to fix this in an unorthodox way. I decide to remove my video card and replace it with an older one.


During the installation I rechristened it Bubble Boy to continue the tradition of naming my computers after Seinfeld characters. My iPod is named after George's Alis Art Vandelay. Anyway, Ubuntu was installed without a hitch. I installed nVidia propriety driver and a few other packages and then turned of the computer and replaced my new video card and voila everything works as it should. I should mention that Bubble Boy froze twice when I had the older video card in it and it never froze with the newer card.

Now I will be trying everything I can with the 64bit edition of Ubuntu and if anything interesting happens I be sure to mention it to you. The first step is to get flash player to work in FireFox.

I can't install Opera since they don't have a 64bit version but I have installed it the computer I use at work. I like it. I like it so much that I installed it in my Kubuntu box, Newman, along side Konqueror. I tried making Konqueror faster by following a few tweaks I found on the net. That did make Konqueror faster but Konqueror was so slow that it is still slow. I now use both Konqueror and Opera on that computer. On my laptop I am using Epiphany 95% of the time and 5% is FireFox. I am getting used to not using my FireFox extensions and learning to use Epiphany's extension. I just added a few third party extensions and I am liking Epiphany more and more.

Well I have to call it a day if I want to get some work done on Bubble Boy tonight. I'll keep you posted.

Browser Wars: The Unknowns

Before I start with this post I'll just say that this is not the post that I was supposed to publish today. I had told you in a previous post that I was converting some Seinfeld episodes into iPod ready files. I decided to write a step by step account of this so that my fellow Ubuntu users could do the same thing whitout searching the web trying something and if that didn't work search again. Well let me tell you That post was so long I think I could actually publish it as a book. My experience in reading blogs is that if a blog is overly long the reader tends to lose patient and not read it completely, so I decided to shelve it until I cut it down to a respectful size.

With that said on with this shorter post. I already mentioned in the past that I was trying out the Epiphany browser instead of my beloved Firefox. Lately I found that firefox was a behemoth of a browser almost as bad as Internet Explorer from our "friends" at Microsoft. Firefox in a linux environment is now slow as molasses. It actually works faster in Windows than Linux! I guess Firefox should be considered a Windows Browser that is ported to Linux.

Epiphany is a small web browser designed to work with the Gnome desktop. My first impressions of Epiphany is "damn this is fast"! It is a hell of a lot faster than Firefox. It has it's own extensions, but not as many as Firefox. After using it a week I don't miss my Firefox extensions, much. There is a short learning curve when changing to Epiphany but I think it is worth it. Today I decided to try Konqueror, as a web browser, on my Kubuntu computer, in fact I am writing this using Konqueror. Another learning curve. My first impression of Konqueror as a web browser is "damn this is slow"!

I still use Firefox on one of my computer and at work. At work we use Windows so I have to use something else than Internet Explorer. I was thinking of installing the Opera Browser. I think I'll do that tomorrow since there is supposed to be a snow storm starting this evening and going through the night. Tomorrow it is going to be windy and I think that we won't be busy. Maxthon is another alternative for Windows users. It uses the Explorer engine but it improves on it.

Who will win the browser wars? I certainly don't know, but what I know is that Internet Explorer as all to lose and nothing to gain. It has already lost quite a bit and if Firefox improves itself when 3.0 comes out it has a fighting chance. I only hope they don't forget us Linux users because without us firefox would not have had a fighting chance at the beginning.

A Formatting We Will Go...

Last week was a hectic week for my laptop. A very stressful week also. On Tuesday I had an appointment for an oil change and brake check up for my car. After this appointment I stopped at the cemetery where my father was buried. That night I had disturbing dreams of when my father was in the hospital and I couldn't sleep anymore. So what did I do? I did something that I had been thinking about doing that last few weeks. I installed LinuxMint on kramer, the laptop.

By the time I had to go to work I had everything set up the way I liked it. I would put it through its pace that evening after work. After a few hours of "playing" with my new install and setting the layout as I liked it, I realised that It was exactly the same as Ubuntu once I had tweaked it. Why change Operating System when I was using the perfect one for my usage? So I flushed LinuxMint and installed Ubuntu once again.

I don't know what I did but my laptop was sluggish and when I played video, the video was jerking and I tried a few things to repair it but to no avail. Friday evening I again re installed Gutsy Gibbon and now everything is up to par.

If you are switching to Linux for the first time I huge you to try out LinuxMint because it has everything you need installed. I you want a bit more control in what you are running go for Ubuntu.

iPod meet Seinfeld

It is now official I have more songs on my iPod than ever before. After screwing it up last week I concentrated myself on loading songs on it and now I have more than 6000 songs on it. To top it all off since last evening I started to fool around converting my Seinfeld DVD box sets into mp4 files for the 'Pod.

If you have been reading this post you'll know that I have been calling my three computers Sidney, Newman and Kramer. Sidney for Sid Vicious the punk rocker that committed suicide after being accused of killing his whore girlfriend, Kramer for Cosmo Kramer from Seinfeld and Newman for Jerry's arch enemy, again from Seinfeld. And I would like to introduce to you my iPod which is named: Art Vandalay a George Constanza alias. As you can see I am a Seinfeld fan.

I mentioned in the other blog the reason for placing Seinfeld episodes on my iPod is that we will not have a lot of television shows to watch since no new shows are being produced because of the WGA strike.

I still haven't used the Epiphany browser to its fullest, but I will, and I try Opera once again and then decide which browser is the best for me.

I guess that is it for now. This post was not really informative but hey what the hell? I'm felt like writing something; and something is better than nothing. See you later.

iPod Troubles Will Drive You Insane

I know, I know that I have been lax in my blogging the last few weeks but I have good reasons for this. I was to write something about trying out Epiphany browser for gnome about two weeks ago but I did something stupid with my iPod. I decided to try Floola with the 'Pod. I screwed it totally. It seem to work fine but it screwed up the artwork. What do I mean? Well the artwork did not match the song I was playing and there was no easy way to fix it so I initialize my iPod to the factory setting and started putting music back in. I now hate doing this. I had over 11 days of music in it!

After about a week and a half I had most of the songs back in and I was using the iPod as a memory stick to bring some files to work for a friend. I plugged it in the office computer and I was busy with customers and when I sat at the computer the 'Pod was synced with my work computer. It was almost empty again. So last night I started installing songs back in the iPod. I am truly sick and tired of doing this. It was all my fault, damn me!

From what I saw of Floola it seems to be a good program, I recommend that you try it with an empty iPod so that you don't screw it up. If after you installed a few different album with the covers these covers match with the songs, I think that a few of you would stick with it. One of the great features that floola had is that the program does not install in the computer so you can keep a copy in the iPod itself and install songs from any computer without installing an unwanted program on some one else's computer.

I guess I have to continue putting more songs in my iPod so i"ll cut it short for this post. I promise you that you'll have to wait a shorter time for my next post.

Parking Is Dangerous For Your Hard Drive

Three days ago on October 26th, I read about a bug with Ubuntu that would kill my hard drive within a year if left unchecked. I read someplace where someone says that it is the fault of the BIOS vendor and another place it is the fault of the hard drive vendor, yet another place says that it is Ubuntu's fault. I don't care who's fault it is, we have to fix it and fix it ASAP.

The bug is that with laptops the HDD basically parks itself once a minute and according to most of the articles I read a HDD can do this 600000 which means that a hard disc drive will last a little less than 167 hours. In my case it is not as bad as that but my hard drive will only last 1 year if it continues at this rate.

When I first read this article I did not think that I was affected and that it was just a freaky thing happening to a few laptops. Yesterday I read more and started wondering if my computer was affected with this bug. I checked it and my computer was cycling once every two minutes or so, as I said not as bad as once a second but worrisome. I read of a few fixes but I didn't really have the time to try them so I waited until this evening to give it a go.

Let me tell you that I was really worried this afternoon, not because that my hard disc drive might fail within a year but because I might have to remove Ubuntu and install XP on my laptop. I have tried the fixes and thank God they are working on my desktop. I am very happy right now, so happy that I want to jump around and yell "hee hah", but I won't.

Almost all the information I got to fix my problem I got it from here, thank you Roald Hopman (AKA Ubuntu Demon) if it wasn't for you I would never have known what happenned to my HDD in a years time.

Gutsy Gibbon Up And Running

Gutsy Gibbon is up and running all the three musketeers, yeah that right I installed it on my lap-top, Kramer, last evening. Everything that I use regularly works, hee haa little doggies. I am very happy with this version of Ubuntu.

I had a freezing problem with one of my desktop computer, new-toy to be precise. I had installed Ubuntu on it Saturday and nVidia's propriety driver and the computer was freezing. I found out Sunday that my graphic card (EVGA 7300GS) and motherboard (E9N) for one reason or another were not really compatible. When I installed the drivers for Windows XP there was a patch for the graphic card so XP works correctly. I tried a few fixes and they seemed to work, but after a while the computer freezes again.

I did not have this problem when I had Kubuntu on it, so guess what? I reformatted it with Kubuntu and christen it Sidney, and what the hell I reformatted precious with Ubuntu and named that one Newman. I did all of this Monday evening.

Today I finished tweaking all three computers and Sidney froze again. I removed the nVidia propriety drivers. It still froze. I was getting pissed off. I read in the nVidia forums that there is no solution for this problem. I have a solution I go and buy myself another video card a GeForce 8500GT. Now Sidney does not freeze. I am a few dollars poorer but I am Video rich.

I am tired so I'll take a break and watch television and not touch any of my computers this evening. See you later.