Vista’s not all bad

Before you freak out and leave a million comments about how terrible it is, I’m here to tell you that while it does seem to have its shortcomings it does appear to be a lot better than its predecessors. My girlfriend recently bought a Gateway laptop (it was what she wanted) and it of course came Vista. Home Premium Edition. So at first it was the buggiest OS I’ve ever used. The factory installation of Vista was screwed up beyond repair. The worst part was even though it only had two accounts, both of which were administrator accounts, while logged in I could not install nor uninstall programs because it told me I need admin rights. Yeah explain that one to me? So she took to the Geek Squad at Best Buy who told her they couldn’t fix it, though the “Geek” told her off the record he would just reinstall the OS from scratch. Well that was what I had suggested to begin with so with a second opinion she let me do it.

Now that I’ve got that completed all the kinks that were there seem to be gone. I haven’t got to use it a lot so far but it feels stable. Secure? I don’t know. Its hard to “feel” secure. But she doesn’t have any viruses yet that I’m aware of. I’m actually writing this from within Vista.

On the hardware side I must say I actually like this Gateway laptop. Its a … okay apparently Gateway didn’t think it was necessary to write the model name on the laptop anywhere. Never-mind. Anyway it has a 15″ wide-screen LCD display, a Core2 Duo Intel Processor, and 2G of RAM. Her mother didn’t want to pay extra for that second gig but she did at my insisting. Now have another friend with an HP laptop with only a single gig of RAM and it lags bad. My girlfriends Gateway runs very smooth though with the the 2gigs so if you have to get Vista, much like other sites I’ve read, you don’t want that 2 gigs of RAM, you need that 2 gigs of RAM.

I will, finaly, admit, even after being slightly impressed with Vista, after getting its kinks worked out, I still don’t want it. And probably won’t buy it. I’m sorry but its to late for me. I want a Mac. I’m tired of MS right now. Linux has spoiled me. I’m hoping that Linux hasn’t spoiled me so bad that I won’t be able to use OS X either. We’ll see though.

Enjoy the Penguins!

Nimbus Theme = Sexy

So I was reading Planet Larry, which still hasn’t updated my feed, and I saw a post by Mr. Flameeyes. In it he talked about the default Gnome theme for Solaris called Nimbus. Having never used Solaris I had never seen what Nimbus looked either. First things first I found a screenshot or two of Solaris. Well, the screenshots I found didn’t really do it justice. Sometimes appearances are deceiving so I decided to try it for myself. I created a new repository in Paludis, downloaded the ebuild from Mr. Flameeyes’ GIT repository, and installed it. After a quick change of themes through Gnome’s handy menu I am now in love. It reminds of me of the MacOS X theme only better. I have naturally taken a few screenshots so you can see what I’m talking about. If anyone needs help setting up your own local repository with Paludis just check #paludis on IRC or leave a comment. I’ll post a howto of sorts (against McCreesh’s wishes, shhh!).

Enjoy the Penguins!

GDM Themes: The Easy Way

As requested by a commenter in my last post I’m going to give a run down on how I created my GDM theme with the Mercedes-Benz picture. First things first, this is really easy to do. You don’t have to know how to read XML ( that would help:-) ) and all you really need to do is find a picture that you want to use. I, personally, am a car guy. So I choose a picture of a car I will probably never own. So lets get started then:

1. The larger the picture the better off you will be because larger pictures scale well obviously, so shoot for at least 1024×780, and 1600×1200 if at all possible.
2. After picking your picture pick a theme off of a website like Gnome-look.org and download and unpack it.
3. Open up the folder and replace your picture with the picture you’ve chosen. All you need to do is simply rename your picture the name of the picture that came with the theme.
4. Repack the theme so you install it
tar -zcf My_Theme.tar.gz My\ Theme/
5. Finally, goto System -> Administration -> Login Window, enter your root password and install your theme.
6. Now logout and log back in to see how it looks.

Now obviously I’ve skipped a lot of steps. This all assumes that your picture will fit perfectly with the rest of theme. The hardest part, for me anyway, was actually taking a screenshot of the login window. I simply ran this command as user

echo "chvt 7 ; sleep 5 ; XAUTHORITY=/var/gdm/:0.Xauth DISPLAY=:0.0 import -window root /tmp/gdm-shot.png" > /tmp/capture

logged out, pressed Ctrl-Alt-F1, ran sh /tmp/capture from the terminal as root, and then logged back in. The picture is then in your tmp folder.

It can obviously get a lot more complicated than that, and you might end up borrowing to or three different XML style sheets before it works with your picture. Its all GPL’d though so don’t worry about it. Just give credit where credit is due.

Finally, as you can imagine, this can a lot more complicated. I haven’t tried writing my own theme from scratch but I don’t imagine I should have much trouble with it. All you really end up doing is copy n’ paste coding. That is the whole idea behind GPL’d software anyway. You download the source of something you like, and then you take from it what you like, and finally give credit to those you borrowed from (if you actually republish anyway).

Enjoy the Penguins!

Sources:
http://julian.coccia.com/article-29.html
http://julian.coccia.com/article-51.html

A GPL Lesson

Okay, so I’m not a lawyer, and I don’t pretend to be. So when it comes to licenses I tend to do what everyone else appears to do and hope I don’t get a nasty e-mail one day because I’ve done something wrong. My guess is a majority of the open-source world probably borrows, writes, and publishes under a similar system. So, as I was perusing KernelTrap tonight I found an interesting article about Torvald’s thoughts on GPLv3. Personally I don’t know enough about the GPLv2 vs. GPLv3 to comment, but I did learn something.

They distribute the kernel source – as they recieved it – in compliance with the GPL. Their additions – whether they be “modules” or just the UI – do not, necessarily, fall under the GPL. (Yes, there have been discussions about whether a kernel module is a derived work, but most of the time those discussions ended “Legally they aren’t, even though I feel they should be”) –Quoth the Linus nevermore

Did not know that. I thought if you added to it you had to give out your added source code too. Torvald’s, as I read it, says that isn’t true. You only have to redistribute the code you borrowed, not the code you added. Which according to him, makes TiVo legal. Not that I care about TiVo, but thats what started the argument.

Enjoy the Penguins!

My first GDM Theme

The screenshot above is of my first GDM theme. You won’t see it for download anywhere though because I don’t own that picture and I don’t want any copyright issues. Although I do see screenshots on websites like Gnome-Look.org that I’m sure people don’t own the right to using but they do anyway. I will have none of that either way. If anyone shows interest in the theme though I’ll hand out the addresses of where and how I made it. Making it was a lot easier than I thought it would be. In fact through making that theme I am now an official “copy n’ paste developer.” If you’ve never heard of that before it shouldn’t take you long to figure out what that means. If you have any comments or suggestions about the theme comment, please.

Enjoy the Penguins!

Broken Laptop (with pic)

There you have it. That’s my broken laptop. I semi-promised I would post pictures of it and there she is. In all her broken glory. Again the whole in which you screw the screw into on the back of the case is gone. So if its like plugging in a light, the screw goes straight in and pulls right back out without a problem. No screwing needed. If my only problem were stripping then I could just upgrade to a bigger screw, creating my own stripping. But I don’t have that option so I get to upgrade to a new a mac. But not till August or even later . Oh well…

Enjoy the Penguins!

Sabayon Package Manager

This isn’t entirely Gentoo related but close enough. It would appear that like so many actual Gentoo users, Sabayon Linux is also giving up on Portage. According to this update on their forums they plan on it doing double duty installing source and binary packages. Something even my favorite, Paludis, can’t do… yet. At the moment though it would appear as if nothing is ready for use outside of testing so no need to get your panties in a bunch. I would like to see and use it once they’ve got it ready though. I do suppose that this day was a long time coming. One-offs, from what I have seen, don’t generally stay as one-offs very long. Sabayon, by my book, is only following the natural way of things. We’ll see where this “Entropy” goes…

Enjoy the Penguins!

Its offical

I have changed my blogs address on all the places I could remember it being listed. That is all the forums and wikis I know its posted on. Not that I expect anyone to go looking but if you run across one that still links to Blogger drop me a line and I’ll change it.

I submitted the change to Planet Larry so I assume this blog should start showing up with the week instead of Blogger. I will keep the same avatar so that shouldn’t be a problem.

Having only used WordPress now for about 2 days my first impressions are good. As far as options go it definitely gives you more than Blogger. I suppose my only gripe about WordPress is that you have to pay to edit your theme by hand. “Custom CSS” as they call it is $15 a year. That was one thing that Blogger let you have for free. Despite all its bad qualities I have to props to Blogger for that. It did allow me to have Sitemeter and Google Ads. To WordPress’s credit though they do give you site statistics built in, so that will be nice. On the same hand though I totally loose the Google Ads. I say that like they generated money! In the several years I had them on my blog I only ever got $26 out of them. Remember you have a earn $100 to get a check so I haven’t seen a dime. Perhaps if I get a spare dollar one day I’ll buy for some custom CSS. Until then I’ll live without Google Ads.

Other than that I suppose everything is dandy. I have taken some photos of my broken laptop and I plan on posting them on here soon enough (possibly tonight).

Enjoy the Penguins!

The most dreaded install error

* To use g15daemon, you need to compile your kernel with uinput support.
* Please enable uinput support in your kernel config, found at:
*
* Device Drivers -> Input Device ... -> Miscellaneous devices -> User level driver support.
*
* Once enabled, you should have the /dev/input/uinput device.
* g15daemon will not work without the uinput device.
Of all of the messages to get while installing new software this is my most feared. On a rare day I enjoy compiling a new kernel, but after you compile one three or fours times in a row just to get something to work you would generally like to think you won’t have to do it again for quite sometime. I see now I no longer have that luxury. Oh well, I guess this makes revision 5? of my current kernel.

Enjoy the Penguins!

Safari on Windows

I am ashamed to admit I didn’t think of this first because the idea seems brilliant to me. Last I read the number one piece of software used on Mac was MS Office. Why then, if your Apple, not put your best software on Windows. It only seems to make sense to me. If Windows users see how much better life with a Mac could be then that would only entice them into switching. I’m only afraid at this point that it may be to late for something like this to take off. The switch to Firefox already swayed thousands of users who may not be willing to switch again. Those who didn’t switch are either hardcore IE fans or are too afraid to do so. But I must admit when all the kinks get worked out I will be one of the first try it on my Dad’s computer with XP on it downstairs. Now, I can only hope to see Safari on Linux. I suppose that will be the day though…

Enjoy the Penguins!

Safari on Windows