Tag: linux

I’ve seen this meme in several different places. I finally decided to heck with it and that I’d do it myself. The items in bold are the ones I’ve done and the rest are viewable after the jump.

01. Bought everyone in the pub a drink
02. Swam with wild dolphins
03. Climbed a mountain
04. Taken a Ferrari for a test drive
05. Been inside the Great Pyramid
06. Held a tarantula.
07. Taken a candlelit bath with someone
08. Said “I love you” and meant it
09. Hugged a tree
10. Done a striptease
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As I’ve mentioned before I run SuSE Linux 9.0 Pro for my desktop OS. My PC is one that I home-built with a bit of help from my local hardware guru (Eric). For my video card, I’ve got a BFG GeForce 5600 SE (or was did they call it an Ultra? *shrug*) with 256MB of Video RAM. I’m subscribed to the SuSE-Linux-e mailing list and it seems that I frequently see messages coming into the list about people having all sorts of problems installing the NVidia video card drivers. Now, I know that you can supposedly get the newest drivers from SuSE via YOU and that NVidia has some special instructions for SuSE users on their linux driver download page but really what’s all the fuss about? The first time I installed the drivers the special instructions were out of date and YOU wasn’t showing the current driver; so this is what I did then and do everytime I need to install the NVIDIA drivers1:

  1. Hit Crtl-Alt-F1 to get a text console.
  2. Logged on to my system as root.
  3. Typed in init 3.
  4. Waited for my system to finish rebooting into text-only mode2
  5. Once I’m in text-only mode and logged in as root; if I haven’t downloaded the newest driver yet, I fire up lynx go to NVIDIA’s site and get the driver.
  6. Once I have the driver, I exit lynx (if necessary) and then type sh ./NIVIDA-Linux-x86-1.0-XXXX-pkg1.run, where XXXX is the version of the driver.
  7. This launches NVIDIA’s special driver installer and I follow all the prompts in it. Their installer will check to see if it can download some extra files that it might be able to use instead of compiling them on the fly, but those files have yet to be out there. Then it works its magic and drops me back to the prompt.3
  8. Back at the prompt, I type sax2. This launches SuSE’s utility for configuring your video card and monitor settings.
  9. I go into the monitor settings and confirm that it’s detecting my monitor correctly (it has every time so far).
  10. Then I go into the video card settings and reselect my card. sax2 always defaults my card to the nv driver and it needs to be the driver for my specific card.
  11. After reselecting my card, I setup my display settings (24-bit color at 1600×12004).
  12. Once I’m satisfied with all my settings; I click Finish.
  13. sax2 then prompts me to see if I want to test my settings before I accept them and I click Yes.
  14. I think it’s while I’m in this test mode that sax2 allows me to adjust the how big of an image that my video card throws onto the monitor. Not the resolution but the actual displayed image; a software version of the controls on the bottom of the monitor that allow you to adjust the image size, orientation and what not. I use sax2 to adjust my screen until the display is centered and fits completely on my monitor (no cut-off edges).
  15. Then I click Ok.
  16. This throws me back to the prompt where I type reboot -n.
  17. When my system comes back up; the new drivers are installed and I’m back in runlevel 5 (graphical, multi-user). Everything looks sharp and my 3D stuff works. End of story. It sounds more complicated than it actually is but from what I’ve been reading on the mailing list; this sure beats the stuffing out of how other people do it. 🙂

1 I’m writing these instructions up from memory so there’s no guarantee that they’re 100% accurate; however they should be close enough for most people to figure out what they’re doing.
2 For some reason my system always hangs at one point during this process; I think it’s while it’s trying to shut down a specific process but the name of that process currently is eluding my memory. When I get to that point, I just hit Crtl-C and my PC will skip past the bad process.
3 Newer versions of the Nvidia driver complain that my kernel was built with RIVAFB support and say that if the RIVAFB module gets loaded that it’ll cause me problems but I just ignore that because I know the module never gets loaded. One of these days, I’ll have to figure out how to reconfigure my kernel so that support isn’t in there. *shrug* That’s a project for another time.
4 Why yes, I do love having a 21″ monitor. *shameless grin*

Testing Meme Propagation In Blogspace: Add Your Blog!

This posting is a community experiment that tests how a meme, represented by this blog posting, spreads across blogspace, physical space and time. It will help to show how ideas travel across blogs in space and time and how blogs are connected. It may also help to show which blogs are most influential in the propagation of memes. The dataset from this experiment will be public, and can be located via Google (or Technorati) by doing a search for the GUID for this meme (below).
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Over the weekend, I started visiting some MP3 blogs and downloading some of the free tracks out there for extra listening material on my iPod. Today over lunch, I booted my home computer into Windows; so I could transfer those tracks to the iPod1. However it seems I’ve been biten by a bug in the iTunes/iPod software.

See, iTunes wouldn’t launch with the iPod connected; it would start in the background but wouldn’t display the GUI (at least it wouldn’t do it quick enough to satisfy me). If I disconnected the iPod, launched iTunes, reconnected the iPod then iTunes would continue to run but would fail to see the iPod. I tried dinking around with this for a while (rebooting, disconnecting, reconnecting, checking for updates and whatnot) but didn’t get any closer to having iTunes recognize the iPod. Though at one point an error message did pop-up telling me I needed to reformat the iPod.

I started searching Apple’s website, as I remembered hearing that there was an issue like this back in April when the last update for iTunes/iPod was released. The most info I could find basically told me to backup, reformat the iPod and try again. *sigh*

That’s not something I really wanted to hear. I guess tonight I’ll be booting back into Linux; backing up the data from the iPod to DVD-Rs and then trying some more drastic measures to get the iPod working right again.

Oh and the other reason I’m upset with iTunes; is that I forgot to go buy some songs from them over the weekend and hence had zero chance to win a free Powerbook. *double sigh*

1 For the record, I am familiar with gtkPod but it gives me errors everytime I try and get it just to read from my iPod which makes me disinclined to use it to write to the iPod.