That there is some windows programs running in linux without a virtual machine. I had heard about wine for years now and decided to check it out using dvd shrink. The install was easy and I installed DVDfabHD decypter as well. I had been having issues with K9copy and made a personal backup of my southpark movie this new way. It went really fast and used both cores. Happy.

I use linux as my main OS at home, but have a windows partition for movie maker and steam games. Well I had an old 5,400 RPM 100 GB drive in there and the MBR got written to it somehow on my last install. I wanted to get that out of my system and figures I would enjoy Hardy Heron since it is pretty much done (been using it on my laptop for months).

XP was easy and so was the ubuntu install. I have a 300 GB second drive that holds all my data so there was not need to create a separate home partition. It is formatted fat32 so both OS’s can use it. After loading up the nvidia driver I set up dual screens with the nvidia settings GUI, no need to edit xorg.conf, which was really nice. Compiz is enabled by default and I bumped it up to the cube by installing CSM. I have a canon printer which has heen a headache in earlier ubuntu installs. This time it was ready to go out of the gates, drivers and all. All I had to do was click make it my default and all was well. Lets see windows do that.

30 cool ones

Downloaded ubuntu Hardy alpha 6 for the laptop. It is pretty darn cool from what I have seen. Got wireless, compiz, the new gnome, and firefox 3 on it. Had a bit of an issue with scim messing with my language, but got rid of that. Took me a bit to get the xorg working well since I did not notice there is a new way to do it graphically. The nvidia settings GUI got my resolution correct which is a first. No hacking necessary.

I picked up everything with ease. This will be the next LTS distro so they are making it pretty cool.
Gotta love an OS that puts out a new version every 6 months. I am not ready to switch at work yet since I doubt vmware server is ready for Hardy yet. Still for my home PC it works great.

Impressed I am.

So on our new laptop I had gone through the pain of burning off the restore discs and then wiped the sucker completely clean. I even deleted the partition that contained the restore info. Well a few things did not work out and I decided to start over and thought about getting vista on there to play with it some more, plus I like the movie making program. So I pulled out the restore discs and got going. To my surprise it recreated my restore partition as well. I resized the vista to 50GB with the linux install disk and it all better now.

Jeesh how long ago was it I bought the new laptop? Anyways I spent an entire week worth of evenings and hours on the weekend struggling to get the internal wireless working in ubuntu linux. While looking around and deciding to buy the laptop I did I researched the compatability of a broadcom BCM4310 chip. Broadcom does not provide info on their drivers so Linux geeks have to reverse engineer drivers. There were lots of tutorials for using ndiswrapper to get it working so I figured it was gonna be no problem. I lost a good amount of hair and struggled to not drink away my sorrows dealing with that dam wireless chip. I reinstalled at least 8 times.

I gave up after a while and started looking for a wireless expresscard. I did not want to have a USB one sticking out where my clumsy ass would tear the socket out of the laptop. There is not much out there for expresscard wireless adapters, but I was glad to see belkin had one. My old laptop used a Belkin card and it worked really well with linux. Did a quick search and saw it worked nicely with linux. Well over lunch it showed up on my door step, a brown box containing a Belkin F5D8073 N wireless card. jammed it in the slot, copied over the windows driver folder, used ndisgtk to load the driver, reboot and off the wires I was. Joy.

The funny part is I still sit 5 feet from the router with the power plug connected

really digging the new laptop. Thing is really light and small. Got a clean vista partition on there and ubuntu rocking. Both are running really fast and good, cept for wireless in ubuntu. I will get it, but it is taking me a while. The broadcom wifi chip is not very linux friendly.

Got a pretty cool DVD player from woot. It is one of those that can play any type of disk or file and the description said it had a coax out on the back. That was a huge thing for me because of our setup at home. The kitchen TV mirrors whatever is on our living room TV via a coaxial cable that also goes into my PC. Well it was not that kind of coaxial It is basically a RCA port for audio. Oh well, with some tinkering I can prob get a switch box or something, but the DVD player is so much better than our old one.

I googled for it and found bunches of xmodmap’s and other crap. I just make it another ctrl key.

System –> preferences –> keyboard –> layout options –> Ctrl key position –> make caps lock an additional Ctrl

apparently so. most definately gonna check these out. Here is a page with lots more cool games and vids.

found here

and has its own website here

I have been running the newest version of ubuntu, gusty gibbon for a bit over a month now. It is what I run at home and I am quite pleased with it. i think it is oficially released tomorrow. And you can always grab it from the Legislatures mirror which should be much faster than the official repo’s.

I have been a huge fan of Automatix and they usually wait till the distro has been released to serve up Automatix for it. Well that time has come. I am looking forward to installing it tonight and getting a few extra things working.

As the picture above shows, Linux is friendly with windows. I run XP virtual machines inside ubuntu rather than booting into windows. I dual boot and XP has a small partition for gaming purposes. Well Friday night I decided to wipe my whole system cuz it had Windows Vista and Ubuntu Feisty Fawn on there. Vista was such a pile of crap. It ran so slow and was annoying as hell. Gusty Gibbon, the new release of ubuntu was out and I wanted to go with that. I wanted to get XP back on there so I could get the new HL2 loaded up on there.

Well more like using a beta version of Ubuntu and their not being the modules to install vmware server, which I should of known made me fail. Back to feisty for a bit. I will wait till Nov or so for my work PC.

I could of hacked it for a while and got it, but I was having other issues as well. Just too bleeding edge for my work PC.

Oh and I am a few minutes away from installing Gusty here on my work PC. I had hosed my feisty pretty bad, time for a freshy.

HFS…I just spent 1.5 days trying to get wireless to work on my new linux box, and it finally happened!

This is the first of many difficult hurdles ahead, but none-the-less I am very happy for the moment.