About a month ago we decided to upgrade to the latest Linux Mint on some of our computers here.
The installation on my wife’s system went really fast and really well. In fact, I have to say the end-to-end installation for Linux Mint was very quick. It was the quickest of the distros that I tried to install. Approx 20 minutes to install and maybe 10-15 minutes reconfiguring and upgrading packages.
My setup has two Acer LCD monitors 1680×1024 (ATI HD3450) that gives me a desktop that is 3360×1024, and for that the installation was not so smooth. Technically it took me about the same time to install but only one monitor stayed on after booting. Then it noticed I had an ATI card. I remembered the ease of installing the previous version ATI drivers so I clicked ‘yes, go ahead’ and that was when the fun began. After installing the driver it then recognized the second monitor, but only as a mirror of the first.
After many hours of modifying my xorg, crashing and then reinstalling, the best I managed was to get one monitor mirrored or two separate desktops that I could move documents between, or a big screen that was one and a half monitors in size.
I then tried Mint and KDE 4.xx. Also didn’t work, but it didn’t matter as it would not allow me to play sound. Several times I went back to Linux Mint Felicia, which worked EVERY TIME, no issues. I then came across an article that suggested that the issue lies with Xorg 7.3 and up and the kernel. As I had no issues jumping distros I thought this was my chance to see some other variations in action.
The latest PCLOS had just come out (PCLOS2009). This was funny because it gave me a 1024×800 desktop. After reconfiguring I could get 1280 something but I was having sound card issues. I felt I should try something else. I had been listing to Distro Watch recently and heard the man talking about how stable Debian was.
After installing Debian Lenny which really is a nice distro, (a little retro, but I could have seen myself keeping it) I had two monitors working in mirror each time I logged in. Basically I had similar issues as I did with Mint, except I did not get the black space invaders screen of death as often. I was usually able to recover. Bottom line-I could not compile the Debian version ATI driver because of error messages.
Then I went over to the dark side-Ubuntu 9.04. Don’t get me wrong, without Ubuntu there would he no Mint, I just like being different.
Here is where the video setup woes ended. I came across this message on the forums:
I followed the installation, step by step, and wow! I now have my monitors working in big screen mode I have Compiz working and the video is no longer flickering like crazy (I always had to turn off compiz when watching pod-casts). Yes, the dark side of the force is strong with this one.
I have been so busy this year at nights and weekends – sometimes work…(Boo) … sometimes…. Linux (yeah!)…. Sometimes vacations (yeahhhhh!!!).
But Vickie has been able to steal some time from her schedule to design herself a little Cyber-coolness.
My wife got given an old laptop from her work. It was going to be thrown out but they gave it her on the condition that we made sure there was no confidential company information left on the hard disk and, if there was, made sure it was erased.
The computer, a Dell 3800 Inspiron laptop 256 MB Ram 14GB hard drive Pentium III Celeron-was not in the best of shape.
The first hurdle was it was password protected but no one could remember the password.
Second hurdle was the touch pad and ‘stick-mouse’ did not work
No built in Ethernet.
CD ROM drive
Internal modem is a win-modem.
The battery could not hold a charge.
My first thing to do was comply with the terms of the agreement and to check to see what was on the disk. I started up an old live version of Puppy Linux on a CD and was able to read the Windows “My Documents” directories for several people and it appeared that the directories were all blank. First step done.
The next thing was to see if I could get the mouse etc to work so I undid the screws for the keyboard. I noticed that the plug that goes to the mouse pad was disconnected, I thought, “Could that be it as simple as that?”
No, I was not that lucky. I tried various combinations of plugging and wiggling of the connector and the surrounding area and eventually I felt that this was a long time to waste on something that was not really needed. I found an old Logitech tracker ball mouse and plugged it into the mouse port on the back of the computer.
At about the same time they were cleaning up the office and found a spare battery, I placed it on charge and found that this second battery pack was actually keeping a charge, so I now have a basic computer that ‘works’.
So we made our way down to the bay area at the end of May to this year’s Maker Faire. The most impressive display was the (approx) 10ft Tesla coil. I love the way everyone cheers when the Tesla coil finishes. (Worth opening it up in full screen to watch).
When you see the things made here, it makes you want to go and do something yourself right away, but by the time the vacation is over and it’s back to work, you realize that there really is not enough time.
Notable was another type of Tesla (this time the car). Of the Teslas they had on display one had the body off. There really is not much inside those things.
This hairy beast was walking around on all fours, and was very impressive.
The only bad thing I would say was it was VERY crowded and it helped to stay the full day because the beginning and end of the day was the best chance to get near anything for a good view or to ask questions.
We stayed at the Crowne Plaza in Foster city and they looked after us very well.
I have been so busy for just about every weekend since going to the Newcastle Maker Faire, that when this weekend came around I thought “Computer time!”
After seeing that there was a new PCLinuxOS available I started checking to see if there was an update for the EeePC version for my EeePC 701. Sadly it seems not yet.
I had used EeePCLinuxOS (running from a pen drive) and for a while it seemed to work, right out of the box. But I had some problems with a video podcast recently and thought I would see if there was a fix. I looked at the Ubuntu variant that is now called Easypeasy.
Now, I like the look of the menus on this distro, except for a few niggly things like the wifi light always being on. Another niggle is that it takes over 2 minutes to boot. One enhancement I would like is to be able to do a menu search by just typing the name into a dialog box on that main screen.
I will search for another distro and see if I can get that little blue light to go off.
Well, we just got back from a quick trip to the UK to visit family. One of our little trips was to go to Newcastle for the weekend to visit the first UK Maker Faire. We saw the dates coincided with our trip and felt it would be fun to make the detour to Newcastle.
We knew it would be small as it was the first one in the UK, but boy was it fun to go and talk to like minded people who just make things for fun. There were a few robot exhibits and various other things that kept us busy. One of the best exhibits was a ‘retro’ lunar lander style game except it was not graphical, it actually had a bunch of stepper motors and servos and an arduino to control everything. You then controlled the thrust to land a model lunar module. Totally cool.
I had never been to Newcastle before and found it quite nice. We stayed at the Marriott hotel next to the Metrocenter in Gateshead and took the bus into Newcastle each day. The hotel and staff were well above expectations. The Maker Faire was across several venues within Newcastle but all within easy walking distance. The picture above is of one of the mechanical exhibits that someone had made complete with fire breathing nostrils.
So there are a number of posts about guys testing their partners to do typical functions in Linux that they would normally do in Windows. A couple of days ago my wife announced that she wanted to have a particular fancy font for one of her craft projects. When she used to boot to Windows, her computer would have a lot of fonts that she would download and install. So I perched over her shoulder and kept an eye on what she was doing she went out there and found several instructions for a Redhat distro I explained that she needed instructions for Debian distro. Well, unperturbed, she typed something else into Google and found better instructions. I told her what a sudo is and how it works and she followed the instructions. She manually copied the fonts to the location she wanted them to be. Then at the command line she typed in the commands fc-cache -f -v etc.
She successfully installed the fonts with a little mumbling that it was easier to do in Windows. This was all done with minimal prompting from me.
Today she installed a program from package manager and mentioned there is no way she is going to boot back into Windows anymore.
So over Christmas I removed the electronics and placed it to one side to add back later.
I carefully examined the dome and marked it up for filler.
The main reason for this is even though it was working quite well a small issue bothered me.
There is a lens where the laser beam shoots out. The angle of this due to the up down visor had a rather acute angle.
Given that Gort is close to 8ft tall maybe it would not be noticeable.
Well now if I can get the mechanism to work the lens will look like it is at the correct angle.
Here are some pics.
Over the Christmas break I took a long look at Gorts head and I felt that some parts of it needed to be reshaped. I was not happy with the visor, although I was happy with the movement of the visor.
I made a new visor with different curves. I reshaped the ears and repositioned one ear. I marked some areas for further touching up, bumps and ruts.
This has taken me a lot of my time to carefully adjust and mark changes.
The pictures here are the newer visor and head the visor was a ‘dry fit’ and so looks a little wonky.
I ripped out all the electronics, with the intention of reusing the circuit once I have the head looking correct.
One of the issues with the old visor was that the angle it was at because of the dome. So I have cut away some area inside the dome to allow the area under the visor to be at less of an angle.
Installing a new release of Linux about every 6 months gives me a good excuse to back everything up, which is not a bad thing. However I hate all the tweaking that is then needed to get everything back to **just right**.
So it was a pleasant surprise when I installed Mint 6 Felicia this past weekend. I was expecting my dual monitor setup to be a big pain in the you know what. But I have to say I was amazed at how easy it was. It detected my video card and I told it make a large desktop and voila!
I thought to my self ‘Hmm.. that was easy …almost too easy’.
My first impression was ‘Cool, this has improved a lot since Mint 4,’ which had me going around in circles for several hours trying to get dual monitor support.
I then went to open Firefox. Nothing. Tried again. Nothing.
When I looked at the hidden .mozilla directory it had a lock and an X emblem on it and when queried it said root only. I found I could run it as a sudo user in terminal.
It took me a while. My solution was to add my user account by using the chown command sudo chown : .mozilla (and then all its subdirectories and file). I also had the same issue with .adobe and .macromedia directories that prevented flash working.
I am now in the process of adding all those other tweaks, but in the back of my mind I am wondering how can some files become root? Why does this happen and would this happen again? Should I reinstall over again while I have not got too much time invested in getting it **just right**?
