Arch, Mint, And A New Convert

Where to start? First of all, installing Arch went well.

It installed with relative ease, had a clean (text) installer, though it required me to do a few things such as install xorg and gdm, these were easy tasks. Initial thoughts are that it is a very basic system with almost no applications, kind of nice if you like to have control over every application installed on your system, but I find it a bit irritating. To be honest, I was expecting it to be very fast but it seems to take twice as long to open an application in Arch as it does in Mint. So because it only made things harder for me, and there was not an increase, but a decrease in performance, I will be sticking to Mint Linux.

It may be that I’m too use to having the Distro do everything for me, but it seems like too much trouble to bother with all the extra work, for at best, minimal performance gains. Maybe one day I will give it another try, but at current, it’s not what I’m looking for.

On a similar topic, I have convinced my brother to let me install Linux on his computer. He has a very old E-machine that has the same install of Windows XP that it had since we bought it, so as you can imagine, there are many documents, pictures, and music scattered throughout the hard drive. For the last few weeks, he has been having problems with spyware and viruses on it, I’ve tried to help him in every way I can, so when I removed the virus I thought it was fixed, but the virus keeps coming back from a mystery source. The spyware comes up on his computer, pretending to be an anti-spyware application, informing him that his computer may be infected with spyware, and that he should buy this software to have it removed. It wasn’t so bad before, but now he has one that completely removes his background and, in very large letters, informs him of this limited time offer. Long story short, he’s had it with Windows, and he said that he hears me talk about Linux a lot and wants to give it a try.

I’m currently in the process of backing up his files and when they are done, I will wipe the hard drive clean. I think I will set him up with Mint because it has been such a good distro for me and it is very easy to learn. All he does is use Microsoft Word to do some school work, Browse the web, and sometimes he plays Tac-Ops (A Mod for UT2004), so in this case, Linux can easily do everything he needs. I’ll set him up with OpenOffice, Firefox, and install UT2004 along with the mod. We should have another Linux convert soon.

auf Wiedersehen

Long time no blog

Hello everyone,

I haven’t blogged in forever it seems. The reasons behind this are numerous, but the biggest cause is having to spend more time with my school studies.

I guess I need to update at least once a year so here goes.

First of all, I’m currently downloading the Arch .iso to give a try, Mint is all good and well, but I get bored with my distros after a while and start wanting to try new things. As I’ve heard many good things about Arch Linux, and they just released a new update, I thought now is the time to give it a try. I will make a post in the next few days explaining how it went, and whether I will continue to use it or not.

Second, I’ve been using Songbird as my main music player since the 0.5 release and I’m really pleased with it, I’ve had no problems other than the long load times on a cold start, and on my Linux box I use Compiz, but it doesn’t have any of my effects in the Songbird window, but other than that it plays all my music perfectly, keeps my library clean, and it can even detect my Creative ZEN. This is just me being picky, but for such an early product, I really like where Songbird is going.

Very Merry Christmas

Well, I’m having a wonderful time so far, Christmas has come and gone another year, but as always, Christmas will sneak up behind us again in no time at all.

As far as presents go, I got the least amount ever this Christmas, and it was still the best yet. And I’m also thankful that it did happen to snow Christmas day, admittedly not very much, but still better than nothing.

On a side note, I would just like to say that I hope we don’t get lost in all the material things and forget the real meaning of Christmas, and that is celebrating the birth of Jesus Christ. I know that, even if I don’t get a single present, I still have my family and the Lord, and that is all I will ever need. Still, a present now and then doesn’t hurt.

Now, speaking of presents, I received Pirates of the Caribbean on DVD, a long sleeve Green Day shirt (quite nice actually), the T.I. VS T.I.P. CD (been playing this all week), and the new Creative ZEN with a cover for it. I still haven’t put the ZEN down yet, it’s a great little device, plus the SD slot means I’ll never run out of room for my music. I’m very pleased.

I hope everyone had a good Christmas as well, and I wish you all a very happy new year.

Christmas break

Christmas break is nearly upon us, though I still have to pull my way through 2 more days of finals.

Regardless of the finals, I’m having a pretty decent time lately, my life just seems to be on a high note. I’m not sure, but I think it’s because I’ll finally have some free time, and be able to spend it with my family over the holidays.

No matter what it is I find myself not as depressed as I was for quite a while, and I hope it stays this way.

Not much new other than that. As far as Christmas and gifts go, I set a new record for myself this year; Normally I would ask for all kinds of new things, but all I asked for this time around was an mp3 player.

I think as I get older, I find more and more that material things are meaningless, and that friendships mean everything.

As far as the blog goes, I’m not exactly sure if I’ll be able to get much done over the next two weeks, but who knows.

When I do get around to an update, I’ll be looking into making a guide for installing Compiz-Fusion on a Linux box and setting it all up, so check back in often.

Happy holidays.

New (Free) Computer

Very recently my father came home with some new (used) computers, asking him where he got them, he replied that they were outside of the local middle school. They were fairly decent computers, both HP d220m’s, I asked him why they no longer wanted them, and he said that they were supposedly broken, and so the super intendant at the school no longer wanted them, and said we could take them, so my father thought maybe I could fix them.

It turns out that they simply needed new RAM, so knowing this, I asked if there were any more, and he said that yes, there were some more at the school and he could take me to look at them to see if any were worth bringing home and working on. Most of these computers were old P3s and P2s that had been out there for some amount of time, but there was 3 newer Dells, and 1 HP(I use the term newer loosely, they are maybe 3-4 years old, but pretty decent).

So we loaded the 3 Dells, and 1 other HP, and took them back home, after opening them, and inserting RAM I found that 1 of the Dells would not boot at all, I tried switching power supplies, RAM, and Hard Drives to no avail, so I thought the motherboard must be fried from having been in the weather.

I tried the other Dell of the same model, and this one promptly booted and brought me to the login screen, success I thought, at the very least we have 1 useful computer to do something with.

I did the same with the HP and it had the same result.

3 down 1 to go. Now this last PC was the best of them all, it was a Dell Dimension 8300, which has a P4 2.6GHz CPU, so I really hoped this one would boot, and it did. So knowing this, and having my choice of any of the four, I picked this one as it had the best CPU, Hard drive, and Cooling, and took the RAM from the others, and placed it in this one.

The computer I was replacing was a custom built AMD Athlon XP 1800+, which only had 256mb of RAM, and an 80GB hard drive (running Debian Etch), so moving to a P4, 1GB of RAM, and a 120GB hard drive was quite a step up.

At first I thought I would try to simply put my 80GB hard drive in the new computer to save me having to reinstall and reconfigure everything, but due to the different model CPUs, it gave me an error immediately at GRUB. So I had to install Debian on the new machine and reconfigure it, but it wasn’t as bad as expected because I had a 1GB flash drive to move the files, and once I got samba working, I just moved them over the network.

Overall I am very pleased with this new computer, it puts the old one to shame, and Linux is amazingly fast on this hardware.

I’ve even got Compiz-Fusion running on the new machine, with some nice new effects.