Mindstab.net

So Janus (a Pentium 166mhz) hasn’t been put to much use lately. I’ve also been thinking about reinstalling everything on my firewall Frost. Frost is still running from a Gentoo 1.2 install. Needless to say, old. So today I decided to start turning Janus into a second firewall I can drop in when I need to reinstall on Frost. This way I can also take one with me when I move out and leave the family with one if they want. Also, when I get an Internet connection that doesn’t have lame port blocking, I can use her as a handy file drop. Frost has a total of ~4GB all cut up right now. Janus will have ~6.5GB and I can easily make about 4GB just for file storage. Handy.

Anyways, first things first I decided I should actually look at the ram I picked up when I got Janus. Never tested it. That was dumb. I’ve had Janus for a little over a year and I just boosted her from 64MB ram to 128MB. Woo. First emerge sync is running now.

I’m putting a Gentoo hardened install on her. Starting from stage1. This might take a while. :)

I started playing around with gallery. As such, this site now has gallery of it’s own. I’ll use it to warehouse pictures. Handy.

So for a long time I’ve been pining for a cheap laptop. Especially when faced with things like next month’s house sitting where I otherwise won’t have computer/net access. However, as per usual, I can’t afford one.

So in an act of desperation yesterday I dug Maxine out from under my chair/table and dusted her off. Maxine, if you don’t remember, is my old laptop. She’s a 150mhz pentium with 80mb ram. Last time I used her was about a yaer ago and I kind of gave up on her because nothing but OpenBSD would install properly on her, and in my last batch of install attempts, the latest version of OpenBSD was also having trouble. So I gave up on her for a bit.

However, like I said, I’m desperate. So, I hoped the new Ubuntu release would have sorted out the problems she had with Linux (Debian: too old for proper support; Gentoo: compiling everything was too hard for her and she failed; Distros in general: boot cd issues including no DMA hardware giving the kernel’s problems). I popped in the Ubuntu install cd and away we went. It wasn’t fast, but it got the job done. And now Maxine has her first usable Linux installation. I’m pleased and surprised.

It doesn’t run particularly fast, but it does run, which is more than I would imagine certain other operating systems from Microsoft might do (even if they are from way back in 2001). Considering most of the work I’ll be doing will be in the console and some web browsing, I’m in good shape. I can use mindstab’s squirrelmail interface instead of evolution for instance to save precious memory.

So congratulations to Ubuntu for breathing some new life into my laptop. I’m already looking forward to the next release which should include the work on memory reduction the Gnome team has been working on, thus speeding things up a bit more :D.

The last day of classes was yesterday. It’s nice to have those all done with. Just finals looming in the next two weeks remain. Then a short break and summer school. But it’s a light load, chemistry and psyc.

So last night I installed Ubuntu’s new release (5.04: Hoary) on my desktop. Was not really impressed. Doesn’t really seem to have any benefits over the last release. I was expecting, for instance, XOrg to work well and have composite working, as I did like 9 months ago on Gentoo, but alas it was all disabled by default, and even when I ran xcompmgr from the console, the desktop was initially covered in video garbage, and though it worked decently, it had show stopping issues like the logout dialog would never appear. Not very polished at all. Gstreamer still fails to even be able to handle dvds, so I’m still stuck with good old reliable xine. It also had wierd audio lag and played videos in a rather jerky fashion. Gnome has upgraded to a new menu spec. Fine, so who cares. Well, menu’s have now regressed to a non editable state. It’s 2005 and I can’t even edit my menu. Also, no head way has been made on the pick a default sound card front. I spent an hour online trying to figure out how to make Ubuntu not use the motherboard’s soundcard as default. I finally went with a hack method of putting the soundblaster module in /etc/modules so it was loaded first when the computer starts. Not very smooth or intuitive for anyone who doesn’t know a bunch about Linux already. Not very noob friendly. Had a hassle getting the right kernel source or header package so that I could compile my webcam’s driver. And once that was done, only gqcam seemed to be able to use it. Gnomemeeting seemed unable to get video from my webcam. Evolution has some new “feature” where the toolbar sits at the top of the screen glued to the panel’s bottom. Really annoying and I couldn’t figure out how to place it back in the main window so I had to turn it off entirely.

That’s mostly it for now, but I was kind of hoping for something a little more polished so I could push this on a bunch of my windows using friends, but this was still decently issue-tastic and still not using a lot of the cool features it could be (composite). I might wait and see how the 05.10 release looks. At least will should run better since a bunch of the GNOME dev’s are on a memory reducing quest. Hopefully over the next few months they’ll also make menu’s editable again, and Ubuntu will sort it self out.

I’m kind of disappointed in this release but I guess that’s what I get for getting my hopes up. I know there is a lot of cool tech and code out there and I wish it was more accesible to non developers. In summery, getting media to a usable state (from configureing video card to finding something to play everything) is still a bitch. Everything else could use a little more polish too.