Trying out my new Christmas hardware

So I got some new hard ware for Christmas, which I won’t review by the way for another day or too. Anyway, I was tired of my Gentoo install and didn’t want to go through the trouble of making it work with all of my hardware so I was like screw it. I’ll install something cheap, easy, and fast just to see how well this stuff works. What did I pick? Ubuntu naturally. I’ve never really been a Gnome fan, but KDE crashes so much when I use it I find myself forced into Gnome most of the time. I guess I could of went with Xubuntu, but that thought did not occur to me till just now. Which leads me to the true subject of the post. My Gentoo gripes.

1. Dated Software – Gentoo is full of dated software. Unless you run a totally unstable system, almost all of your major programs are going to be yesterday’s version. If it is a major program and it is update, then odds are its a Gentoo only program.
2. Stability after updates – What is it about source distributions that they break after large upgrades? I installed Ubuntu, updated 81 packages, and rebooted to a 100% stable system. Between the blocked packages and the breaking after updates I somehow find it hard to call Gentoo “rock solid.”
3. Time – Gentoo takes forever! I had Ubuntu installed, updated, configured, and running smoothly in less than 5 hours probably. I mean I’m sure there are a ton of picky things I have yet to do, but still. I’d like to see someone get a fully updated, and ready to roll Gentoo setup in that kind of time. I know I couldn’t do it. If you can then I figure you probably spend to much time re-installing Gentoo.

So okay. That’s only three complaints. To me though those are three major complaints that really need to be addressed. Portage for example. Every package manager on earth claims to be faster than Portage. What is up with that? Sadly I’ve tried several other package managers besides Portage, and most of them aren’t lying. Just look at McCreesh’s blog. Paludis tromps Portage (time wise) like David whipping Goliath. Anyway, I will probably end up putting Gentoo back on my AMD64 machine. I’m anxiously awaiting the day Paludis becomes “average user ready.” The fancy developer term for that escapes me at the moment. Either way though…

Enjoy the Penguins!

RubyRipper

RubyRipper! Sounds nice doesn’t it? It was actually recommended to me on the Gentoo Forums when I was having trouble using Ogg/Vorbis using Grip. Well before we get to far a long, lets just say Grip and RubyRipper are not even in the same category. Okay, yes they are, they are both rippers to get music off of CDs onto your hard disk drive. On the same hand though RubyRipper is for the enthusiast. In order to rip the excellent CD pictured with all 14 songs, it took roughly an hour. RubyRipper has this rip and check procedure it goes through. So it rips the song once, maps all of the “chunks” rips it again and then compares the rip’s “chunks.” You have to let it rip and compare a minimum of twice, which is annoying and time consuming but obviously results in a more accurate mp3 or ogg file because of the series of rips and checks it goes through. So while Grip will rip your audio for you, RubyRipper not only rips it, it rips it over and over again until it maxes out the number of rips you allow it or it gets the file correct. The naming convention RubyRipper uses is better as well. Grip ripped all of my CDs for me, retrieved all of their information off of CDDB, and even placed them in their own folders. Well that’s great but RubyRipper does that and more. RubyRipper can actually use capital letters. Something Grip never did for me. I do not remember right now, and Grip is no longer installed, but RubyRipper has a very easy system on how it lets your categorize your music. I didn’t care much for the default system, but after 5 minutes and a test rip I had everything exactly where I wanted it.

After its all said and done, RubyRipper is still in beta really and has a few features that people more into digital audio might miss but for the average Joe it goes beyond the call of duty. The only feature I really wished it had was the ability to quick dirty rips for you so you didn’t have to wait an hour a CD. Other than that though I have no other complaints with RubyRipper. I’ll definitely keep it over Grip. Now if only I could figure out which of those Gnome dependencies I no longer need!

Enjoy the Penguins!

The Wolvix Wiki and I

I do not currently possess a wealth of Linux knowledge but what I do have I like to share with the community. The knowledge was freely given to me thus I like to freely give it to others. So what really makes me mad is when I cannot do that for what ever reason. Like my blog suddenly won’t let me publish or something of that nature. (That has never happened by the way, though I have lost my feed before.) Anyway the Wolvix wiki is really giving me trouble. For example I cannot create new pages without forcing links through existing pages. Which is okay I suppose except I don’t always have a page with which I want to link it too. So that only really helps me in a select few situations. I guess I could go through and through in useless random links to pages just for the purpose of the creating, but that is slopping and a poor practice to say the least. What if I forget to remove the unneeded link? Then I’ve only created a mess. I hope my issues can be resolved quickly. I’d hate to think is going to be a permanent practice. Oh well….

And one other thing before I sign off. Has anyone else noticed that if you publish your post (at least from within Blogger) with the colored links from the Google Spell checker still highlighted throughout the text that it will be published with those in your post. Yeah, I found that out the hard way. I by no means saw that coming.

Enjoy the Penguins!

Background Art

I’ve never considered myself much of an artist. I drawed and colored as a child but I’d hardly consider that art. Lately though I’ve been trying my hand at creating some custom background art for the Wolvix distrobution of Linux. I’ve only really created one so far that I feel is background worthy, but still its more than I really thought I’d be able to do. It was fairly simple to create. I think I might look around the internet for howtos on backgrounds. I’ve cut-n-pasted some car pictures before to make them more desktop friendly as I call it, but I’ve never really made one from scratch until now. The GIMP has to be the greatest art program ever I guess. It does everything I want it to and more. You can check out the art I’m proud of so far here.

Enjoy the Penguins!

osdir.com is being sold

Well, if you haven’t heard the news yet, you have now. Osdir.com is being sold although to whom I do not know. This is good and bad for me personally. I was a moderator at the osdir.com forums, so now since their shutting down, I will go back to being a moderator at TuxForums.org. While I enjoyed being at osdir.com it wasn’t that special. Other than everyone recognizing the site title it provided no other excitement outside of that. So everyone fix your bookmarks if you haven’t already. For now the link to the forums there will redirect you to TuxForums.org but soon it will disappear all together. Time to update my Gentoo Wiki profile… which is always fun.

Enjoy the Penguins!

Lack of motivation…

So at the recommendation of a very attractive female whom I’ve never met, never got the name of, and will without a doubt never meet again I bought the book Wicked by Gregory Macguire. Yeah… not what was expecting. I wasn’t a huge Wizard of Oz fan before this book, but reading it makes me wish I would of never met that the attractive female back in Huntington, WV. It has distracted me totally from my computer.

Speaking of my computer; things have become very stable recently. I reinstalled a lot of programs I uninstalled to free up space. I deleted my Paludis chroot directory because I have given up again till 0.14. With a new installment in the series comes a new installation on my computer. Might as well keep trying. The speed charts alone on McCreesh’s website are enough to motivate me to switch when I can. Until then I will bitch about how it doesnt work for me. Which isn’t totally true. Sometimes it does, and when it does it is a beautiful thing. When it does though, it really stumps me.

Enjoy the Penguins!

Paludis and Portage

My Paludis overlay still won’t finish. I tried remerging it, of course making sure to use FEATURES=”test”, and it still did not help any. Paludis is a fickle beast. Every time I get something going with it, something else breaks for me. If I spent more time with it, I’m sure things would come along better, but I find it more like a every-now-and-then hobby. You only really want to play with it every now and then. This is true especially since I do not contribute to the project personally, other than being another notch on the users list.

I came home and ran a emerge –update –deep system. I had like 10 updates. After that I ran emerge –update –deep world. Yeah that kicked off over 50 some updates. Did not appreciate that any. I like being up-to-date, but I hate having to do half the computer at one time. I hate to spend to much time working on my computer at this point though. With the new hard drive will come a new install and we all know how painful that can be. As if 50 updates to download and compile aren’t enough. I have a blocked package. Why me? So I spent a few minutes goofing off, starting from from the bottom and updating one or two at a time hoping I would pull in a lot of the updates without pulling in the blockage. I did it once or twice then decided I might as well try and fix the blockage. As is always for me in these situations the answer has already been worked out for me on the Gentoo Forums. I must always be the last one to have these problems. Which, in this case, is always a good thing! Either way my pygtk package was blocking some other gnome related package which was easily solved. By emerge -C and then re-emerging.

All in all not a bad day so far. The other day I found out the hard way in order to burn DVDs you have to have a special DVD burning package. One would think that would be standard, or pulled in with your DVD burning program but it is not. I can understand why. I mean not everyone has a DVD burner. I’m lucky in this case. I would think that a warning message would appear at the end of the build message about needing an extra package to burn DVDs if that relates to you. Either way I got it fixed and I can now burn DVDs and CDs. Woo Hoo !

Enjoy the Penguins!

Paludis on AMD64

So yesterday I installed Paludis on my AMD64 machines downstairs. Everything went smoothly till I attempted to do the initial sync. I won’t lie. It failed. Ironically enough it failed attempting to sync the paludis package. Irony can be no sweeter than that really. I have a feeling it wasn’t a problem with my computer though, so I’m going to try to sync again today. It appeared to be more server error than anything, like the package should of been there but wasn’t for some reason. It really sucks that it failed there though because that means I can’t continue with the bootstrap. Without a full tree I can’t really install anything, much less find all of its dependencies. I will keep you well informed of my paludis adventures though, don’t worry. I also plan on writing my own bootstrap how to that includes a lot of the errors I have encountered in my many attempts. So for everyone out there don’t be afraid to try new software. Especially if there is a warning it will break your computer. I break mine all the time and I’m doing OK.

Enjoy the Penguins!

Paludis

Transparent Colors with aDesklets

That is not the best screenshot, I’m sorry, but right now its all got for an example. I have somehow managed to get transparent colors using my aDesklets. It happened while editing my config file to try to work better with my background. I was actually still in the process of finding a background so needless to say my config for my desklets and conky were changing fairly rapidly as well.

I was copying and pasting HTML color codes off of a website to use when I accidentally mispasted. Instead of “000000″ I pasted ” 000000″. Or instead of 6 zeros I accidentally pasted 6 zeros behind 6 spaces. I then saved the file and closed it right before I realized my mistake. Upon reopening the file gvim it had changed from ” 000000″ to ” /t000000″. What happened I do not know. I assume the /t stands for transparent, but I have yet to find someone who can explain this to me. I was told there are no transparent color codes, is this not true? Or does python have a special way of handling colors? Upon trying this in conky, which I think is written in C or C++, it only returned errors.

Anyone know whats going on?

Enjoy the Penguins!

A linux Christmas

The semester is finally over. I have finished all of my exams and I am now at home. Thus the semester is finally officially over. Whats that mean for me? A lot more time to tinker with Linux. Whats that mean for you? A lot more posts in my blog. I’m extremely excited about this Christmas so far. Just the thought of not having to carry around that 17″ CRT is enough to get me giddy. The more I think about it, the thought of a 320G hard drive also excites me a good deal.

Ciaran McCreesh personally replied to my blog post on Paludis. After reading that I am anxiously awaiting the 0.14 release. I never can seem to get a full base layout to tar ball up without errors. I have yet to try Paludis on my AMD64 system downstairs. I don’t know how well Paludis does on 64 bit systems, but tomorrow I will find out. I hope it does better than it does on my laptop. Though I love my laptop to death its starting to get on my nerves.

Did I mention the hard drive grind has returned? That’s a huge pet peeve of mine! I guess there is nothing I can do about it really, but it still bothers me. My school gets new computers every year. (Ahh… the benefits of having money) Within 3 to 4 months of getting them their hard drives already grind worse than my 5 year old laptops. Whats up with that? They use Norton Ghost, and I have a feeling they use it a lot. I also have no doubt that contributes a great deal to the problem. They should come up with a new strategy. I know for a fact we have a huge deal with DELL and Microsoft, we must have one with Symantec as well, because all of the schools hardware and software comes from one of those two companies. Well, we obviously have programs like Mathematica as well, but that doesn’t count in the current context.

Enjoy the Penguins!