Monthly Archives: May 2006

D-Link – DP-G310 – 54Mbps 802.11g Wireless USB 2.0 Print Server at TigerDirect.com

Here is a piece of hardware I’d like to have. Espeically since I’ve not got my house fully wireless. Its a wireless USB printer server. Its allows you to wirelessly print to a USB printer. This is great because you don’t have to take your laptop or anything to your printer to print, just print wirelessly. Any computer can use it, and multiple computers can “share” it and print to it at the same time.

The only thing that concerns me is I’ve never seen anything of this nature on any pages about Linux. I’m assuming it would fully compatiable, but I don’t know. It’s something I’m definatly going to look into. The price seems steep at first, but I think it would be worth it. Taking your laptop down or up the stairs just to print is a hassle. Much less your wirelessly connected desktop! I guess you could take the printer to the desktop, but that would be a major pain in the butt as well.

Well, thats just another piece of hardware for you cats to look into. Enjoy the Penguins!

If any of the creators of the GIMP read this, thank you very much for creating such a wonderful program.

Over the past several days I set out to create some web banners and such for the new forum I’m not a moderator on.

www.tuxforums.org

Its an excellent forum, and I’m not saying that because I’m a moderator either! On to the point though. I’ve never created any graphics of any kind before, and before now I’m never seriously used the GIMP either. Needless to say I don’t count using the pencil tool to draw mustaches on pics from the internet. The subject of helping the website spread and grow quickly came up in the moderator section. To which I contributed the idea of creating some web banners people can post on thier site if they’d like to help spread the news of the new forum around the internet. Being the bold one that I am, and perhaps a bit foolish to, I quickly volunteered to fill the job I had created. Well after several hours learing how to use the GIMP without an instruction manual I managed to come up with two banners, and two buttons to spread the word about the site with. Here is the link if anyone would like to view my first attempt at advertising and artwork:

http://tuxforums.org/forum/banners.php

Post any comments, good or bad that you would like! I would love to hear what anyone thinks. Enjoy the Penguins!

Hooray for Gentoo! (sorry had to get that out of my system)

The more I use this distribution the more I love it. I have noticed though that a lot of my friends on TuxForums.org use Arch. This makes me curious because to my knowledge this is a new distribution and I’d like to try it and see how it works. Perhaps I will start dual booting with that instead of Kubuntu. Not that there is anything wrong with Kubunutu, but I’m curious and want to see why everyone else is using Arch.

After a quick search on Google I found an article in the Gentoo wiki which described how to set up your install to periodically reset the clock according to some time servers. It checks and resets it on boot, and then it checks and resets it periodically while you use it as well. After installing and configuring that I still had the wrong time. I was off by an hour. So I realized my computer was running off of central time and not eastern time. So I had to go back into the Gentoo Handbook and setup my timezone. Somehow I guess I missed that step during the install. So now my clock is running the correct time. Thank goodness, that was really bothering me! I really like the aDesklets a lot more than gkrellm2, but one of the deskelts requires some masked packages that I’m not prepared to install and run on my system, so I’ll still be using gkrellm2 till they are ready. What’s wrong with gkrellm2? Nothing really. My only real complaint is that aDesklets never make the screen flicker, their pretty, easy to configure, skinable, and even come transparent. gkrellm2 is easy to configure as well, and it can be pretty, but I have yet to see it transparent, though it is skinable. One thing I really realy love about aDesklets though that gkrellm2 doesn’t have is that no matter which desktop I’m on, 1, 2, 3, etc. my desklets are still there without a glitch. gkrellm2 just sits on desktop 1. Perhaps if a gkrellm2 editor reads this he’ll implement a few of what I consider to be missing figures into them. Until then I plan on switching from gkrellm2 as soon as the packages are unmasked. The ones I need are under review from the AMD64 port team, so I’m hoping they’ll be ready in a week or two. I’m also hoping the new 2.6.17 kernel will come out soon too. I really want my native drivers without having a pre-release kernel.

Enjoy the Penguins!

I’ve copied this in tact from a thread on TuxForums.org which I wrote. Enjoy the Penguins!

I know that many of us here are also members at other forums. There is nothing wrong with that, and I too am a member at other forums. What I’m getting at though is that the longer I’m on these other huge forums, the more the people seem to irriate me. Mad Does anyone else seem to notice that as forums tend to get bigger the ruder people tend to get? This forum is still small, we don’t have alot of members, and right now we don’t have that many posts either, but on forums with members numbering in the thousands and post in the millions I find myself constantly angry that people will rudely flame me and others for no good reason. I’m not a mean person, in real life, or on the forums. I’m from the old south where you still open car doors and such for ladies. Why is it that forums tend to become meaner as forums grow larger? I rant because I read a blog from a member of another Linux forum. He talked about this issue and how we staying away from larger forums alot these days and concentrating on the smaller ones because of this very issue. Is this a common trend on all forums? Do any of our other member have this complaint, or have atleast noticed it if not experienced it personally? Just to give a personal example. On another Linux forum a member with a considerable amount of posts under his belt asked a question about how to use a package manager. I didn’t know the exact answer but I did know where to look to find it. After giving this information, he rudely told me it wasn’t there (though at the time I was 99% sure it was) and then proceeded to post twice more, rudely asking if no one else would help him. Finally a senior member on the forum gave him a specific answer to which he gave a wonderful thank you as if I never said a word to him. This made me so mad, I looked through the online manual I had given him the link to, found the answer the senior member gave to him in that manual. Then reposted the link and the section that answer came from just to spite his rude treatment of my attempt to generously, without charge mind you, solve his problem. I have no reason outside of generosity to solve his problem. If his problem never gets solved it will be no sweat off of my back. I will still sleep at night. Yet I tried to help him anyway, only to be shot down because he (I assume its a “he”) is to lazy to help himself in the least amount. Sorry. Rant over.

Its late. Ok its only 10:30, which isn’t late for most people, but for me after only getting 4-6 hours for the past several nights I’m about to die.

So here’s my update. After manually editing a file for aDesklets, which is not recommended by the author. I’ve got all of my desklets working. So I suppose the only things I have left to fix are:

  • Set the clock the appropiate time
  • Fix my iDesk icons
  • Do something about my System.map missing

I think that’s it. That’s all I can remember at this point. I’ve configured my Thunderbird mail so its retrieved 800+ of my e-mails out of Gmail, I’m going to delete 800+ of those tomorrow though, so its not a big deal. Right now except for three things, I am certainly enjoying the penguins. So here’s hoping the rest of you do.

Enjoy the Penguins!

After my last several dreary posts I finally have some good news. No, sadly, I still don’t have any icons. through iDesk, but I’m still working on that. I did however emerge aDesklets, something I’ve complained about in the past, and I’ve got them partially working. I got the clock to work, but I’m not real sure what I did. Either way though I’m working on it, and just having one work is enough for me for now. I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it before or not but my clock isn’t set to the right time, and I don’t know how to reset it. This really bothers me because in Gnome or KDE this would be a simple task, much like it would be in Windows as the Administrator. In Fluxbox though everything is harder in the name of simplicity. I’m still enjoying Fluxbox right now. It definitely different, but once you get everything set up the way you want it, its really nice. Getting it setup the way you want it though, that’s a pain in the ass. I’m not joking, it really is a pain in the ass. I’ve been using Linux for about a year now I think and it still gets me. The longer I’m on these Linux forums on the internet the more I meet a lot of mean people. This really bothers me. I’m never intentionally mean to people, unless they start it, and even at that I keep it clean. Some people though get really nasty with you over stupid stuff, that make me mad. Back to the subject, sorry. So yes, things seem to be coming together really well.

I’ll be upgrading kernels as soon as the 2.6.17 comes out. Why? Because it will include native support for my wireless internet PCI card. Sexy? I think so. Stay tuned for that. I can’t wait to get my wireless working. In fact I found a thread on the Gentoo forums about my wireless card written by one of the developers working on it. He listed instructions for getting it to work with the current pre-release series of patches that are out. So I could have it now if I wanted, but I want to wait for 2.6.17 to become stable before I do it. I don’t honestly feel comfortable enough with Linux to run beta software on it yet. Running it on Windows doesn’t usually bother me after 10+ years of experience with it. My Linux experience is 1/10 that, so I’m a bit nervous about it at this point. Perhaps later.

Enjoy the Penguins!

I emerged another program or two to make K3B happy, and added “user” to my fstab for my CD and DVD drives. So I can now mount those without root permission. Something that is pretty darn important. I still haven’t figured out to give K3B root permissions yet, but I’m working on my troubles one at a time. That one is on the back burner for now while I work on things that are to me, more pertantant. I broke my background the other day. I somehow deleted an “f” from the front of the config line that creates my background. Took me two hours to figure that out! After that I found a howto for Fluxbox on the Gentoo Wiki, which by the way I’m becoming a fairly active member of, that describes how to set several nice programs up for your desktop. I got gkrellm2 working perfectly without a hitch. iDesk on the other hand is giving me a fit! I cannot for the life of me figure out what this “no background error” mean. OK, thats not the exact error, but its good enough for my blog. I’m learning Mplayer. i really hated it after i got it working. What was wrong with it? I was running the command “mplayer” instead of “gmplayer.” gmplayer is the GUI front end, mplayer is the CLI version. Anyway, its late, so thats all for now. Enjoy the Penguins!

Actually, Mplayer isn’t the only program that isn’t working correctly. I’ve noticed that when I boot up I get an error that my System.map file isn’t found. Not exactly sure what the effect that has on my computer, but I’m currently looking into it. Also, I need to figure out how to give K3B root permissions when it runs. I’m not sure this is totally necessary or not, but I want to do it anyway. My Mplayer won’t run. I keep getting funny errors. I’m posting about that on Tuxforums.org. I’ll probably get a response soon. They are good about responding quickly. Other than that, I can’t think of anything else that is broke. Slowly but surely my “dream” computer is coming together software wise. The hardware part was easy! Either way though, Enjoy the Penguins!

Well, after some help on the Gentoo forums on how to chroot, I finally went in and recompiled my kernel using the same Gentoo sources. After that I went in and did a lot of configuring to make things exactly the way I want them. I’ve installed several programs:

  • Gaim
  • Abiword
  • Ajunta
  • Mplayer
  • The GIMP
  • k3B

The list goes on, but not to much farther. I think you get the basic idea. The basic programs needed to run your average daily use computer. Referring to my computer as my “daily use” machine makes it sound like a car:). Anyway, I’ve run into a few small errors that I will get into more detail on later. Congrats to me on fixing my computer. Enjoy the Penguins!

I love my Gentoo, I really do. This time I have no one but myself for breaking it. Unsure of how to recompile my kernel the “Gentoo way” I tried the follow the guide. Somewhere in the process I overwrote my only working kernel and now my Gentoo install will not boot at all.

The only good thing that has come out of this is I’ve finally got around to re-installing Kubuntu so I’m now officially dual-booting. I really like it. I don’t really know what the point of it is, but it makes me feel good :-) . I’m currently in the process of compiling a new kernel for my Gentoo install. Instead of using the Gentoo sources, I’m just using a “vanilla” kernel from www.kernel.org. Excellent webpage. Well, just to show you how newbie-ish Kubuntu is, in order to get as far as I’ve gotten without trouble, I’ve had to go through several install through Apt. Not huge install, but the kind of stuff I consider basic for Linux users like the gcc compiler, make, etc. I’m on my way though. I’m currently getting help on TuxForums.org, which has been great so far.

While I fix my system, Enjoy the Penguins!