I’ve been booting into my Ubuntu Linux installation on a daily basis so far. The USB appears to still be screwy even after installating the XP Serivce Pack 3, so the cause can be anything. It appears to be working fine in Linux, so it’s either a robust driver set in Linux, or windows is suddenly very picky.

After a quick search in the forums, I apparently found a way to fix the problem I had earlier, and boot into the GUI, which is a god-send. Without the GUI and a strong foundation of the terminal, a noob can easily be overwhelmed.

So, just booting into the recovery mode and fixing one of the configuration files, I got back to the old familar and in time, and a reboot later, everything was back to normal.

Looking back, the USB problem is probably the push I needed to start using Linux seriously. I still can’t get Warcraft 3 to work properly for network games though. That’s still what’s making me boot back into windows.

I’ve even installed Miro in Linux, which should be a good thing. ;p

Well, it happens, I suppose. No one is perfect.

I left a scratch on my dad’s car. Error while trying to reverse out, all because of a bad positioning right from the start as I tried to enter the parking lot. I guess this weekend will be a rather busy one, as we try to perform some DIY to touch up the missing paint.

Not only that, my Linux installation started to act up a little too. There’s been a mad load of updates to the system. It’s a whopping 134MB in size, and rather than update everything at one go, I decided to do it in batches. Not a good idea so it seems, as I guess due to a not-so-optimal selection of packages to update, it rendered others faulty. Now, I’m left with the terminal and having to update the entire 134MB altogether.

Something for tomorrow, I guess.

I think I like this one better!

Spotted it from /.

This is getting very tricky. So far, I’ve been able to get GAIM 2.0 beta6 working, but not Guifications. It’s good that GAIM is working fine, and I don’t get any of that pesky ICQ authorisation request spam, but somehow, I miss the pop-up user sign-on / sign-off alerts from Trillian.

Somehow, I can’t seem to compile the source which I’ve downloaded. Problem is, that’s the only thing that is available for download … so far. Will wait and see how it goes. Hopefully I won’t have to wait long. Else, I may be forced to downgrade to GAIM beta3 just to get the Guifications working.

I believe I can safely assume that at this point in time, Sony’s Playstation 3 is probably the most powerful gaming console available. There’s only three options available at this point in time, with Microsoft’s Xbox 360 and Nintendo’s Wii being the other two contenders. I don’t think the PC can be considered a console too, hardware and functionality wise. However, in the context of games, a PC is quite good at that too. In fact, I believe that, money not withstanding, if you dump all the best parts money can buy, you’ll end up with a very playable gaming system. Think Dual core CPUs. I don’t know if AMD’s 64-bit dual core is going to be better than Intel’s Core 2 Duo, or whatever they have lined up for purchase, but that’s not what I’m intending to put across right now. Still, add whatever CPU you want, with 2 GB of the fastest overclocked ram available, either an ATi or nVidia card in Crossfire / SLI configuration, I think it’ll be hard to beat. It’ll cost half a bomb too. The PS3 costs just as much too, I reckon.
Thing is, it’s all clearly on the internet that Sony is openly associating it’s PS3 console with Linux. There are numerous guides available out there, with instructions on how to go about installing and booting Linux on the PS3. Now, this is unlike the Xbox version which took quite some hacking just to get Linux inside the cranium. Linux is available for download, and so is the Linux boot CD for PS3.

One good thing about Linux is that there is WINE available for playing windows based PC. Now, Wine Is Not Emulator, hence the name. Well, I have already tested Wine on my Fedora Core 5 installation, and well, it holds water. Naturally too, since there are millions of Wine users out there. I’ve got Diablo 2 working in fullscreen. However, because there is an additional software running in the background, things are going to get noticably slower. Diablo 2 was barely playable on my computer. Of course, you have to bear in mind that I’m running an AMD Athlon 1.1Ghz PC with only 400+ MB RAM. Not stellar specifications, but enough for my needs … for now.

So, look at it this way. PS3 is probably the most powerful console system available. It can boot Linux. What does that mean? With Linux running inside, you can theoretically install Wine into the PS3. There-in, lies the beauty. With Wine installed, you can theoretically play any windows games, provided it has been tested and is working. What does this give you? A powerful and versatile gaming system, which can play not only PS3 games, but PC games as well. Now, I remember that there was talk on the net a rather long time ago about some Xbox emulator for the PC. I don’t think it really lifted off the ground, but just imagine the possibilities of that one happening! PS3, able to play games from 3 system, all in one machine! OMG, this is just insane.

The only problem now, would be the price. It’s just too painful a pinch to be able to manage. At half a thousand shy of two thousand at my last enquiry, that’s quite a lot of money to lay down for something which is still very new on the market. Well, only time will tell. Now what I need would be for some kind soul with a PS3 lying around to install Linux, install Wine or Cedega and then get onto the World of Warcraft. That will be the day!

Maybe it’s just me? Am I as jinxed as I think I am when it comes to computers? I really don’t know.

Just when I thought that Linux was working fine. Just when I thought that my progress was good. I thought wrong, apparently. I did some updates, which included a kernel update. Then came the new graphics driver, which I downloaded. After installing it, I realise that my Linux installation wasn’t as good as it was before. Well, somehow, the new kernel refused to start the X server, whereas the old kernel would detect that there was a problem with the X server and offered to attempt to start it with the default settings. Somehow, the new kernel didn’t do that.

Come to think of it, all this wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t downloaded and tried to install the new drivers. Then again, if I didn’t, I wouldn’t have been able to try the GL accelerated desktop in the first place. Not that it mattered anyway, since I’m now facing issues. One thing’s for sure, at least I am able to boot into the old kernel. I guess there will come to a point in time when I get really fed-up with the new graphics driver and just re-install the old one back again.

Strangely, my CD writer decided to fail on me too, for no reason at all! Seriously! This is such a bad time. Thing is, I haven’t really been utilizing it to it’s full potential yet, and this had to happen!

Guess there’s nothing much I can do, really. Except maybe do an autopsy on my CD writer. I think one of the motor is probably faulty and needs replacing. I wonder …

I think it’s almost a full week that I’ve been using Linux without any major problems so far. The only time I didn’t boot into Linux, was when I wanted to have a little hacking and slashing with my bro in Diablo 2. Yes, I know it’s an old game, but when you’ve got equally dated hardware, you just have to lower your expectations a little, right? I’ve heard the next phrase all too often already “Spend some money and upgrade your rig”. That would be ideal, but when it’s going to be used only for gaming, I’m still undecided on the justification as yet. I could probably have easily justified spending that amount of cash years back, but right now, when I seem to have noticeably lesser time on my hands for gaming purposes, it just doesn’t cut it. Unless my bro, of course, since he uses his rig for 3DS Max and Zbrush and what not, it certainly helps to have as fast a rig as money can buy.

So, after being told off by a friend that I’ve been saying that I wanted to switch to Linux for a good handful of years and I am still on windoze. Ha. I think I took that as a threat a little too seriously. I promptly downloaded Fedora Core 5, burned it onto a DVD and installed it. Now, I think I can safely say that Linux is now getting much easier to install and use. Either that, of I’ve gotten more affluent with using Linux, which shouldn’t be the case.

This has got to be the longest period of uninterrupted usage of Linux I’ve experienced. Yes, I did have a bit of hiccups here and there, like getting Macromedia Flash and Java working, but after a bit of forum browsing, I got it solved. I also re-installed FC5 once, but that was due to some video card driver issues. My horrendously dated ATi graphics card didn’t have a linux driver. I tried installing a hacked driver which obviously resulted in the re-install. I was missing some libraries of some sort. Anyway, I won’t be going that route ever again. Hopefully. Apart from that, the other causes of failure to adopt Linux previously were (sad to say) apparently my fault, somewhat. Somehow, I would do something to the system and caused it not to boot into the GUI. It essentially left me high and dry in the terminal prompt. If it were back in the good ol’ DOS days, it wouldn’t have been much of a problem. But I guess we have all been pampered a little too much with Graphical User Interfaces, so much so that we cringe at the thought of entering commands into the black box. Well, that almost happened just now. My bro upgraded his video card to a more powerful one, which was able to do Pixel Shading and all the pretty eye-candy stuff. Naturally, his unused video card found it’s way into my PC. In windows, it was easier. Booted in to uninstall the card drivers, shut down, replace card, reboot and install drivers. Simple. Not so for Linux. Because I didn’t install any Linux drivers for my ATi card, there wasn’t anything for me to uninstall. I had a mild shock when it refused to boot into the GUI, with some error of not being able to start the X Server. In normal circumstances, it would have caused me to do a complete re-install of Linux! Ha ha. And to think that I did a good 80% of the kernel updates already! Thankfully, that was not to be. The kernel realised immediately that the X Server couldn’t start properly, warned me about it, showed some error logs which I didn’t quite understand and very nicely proceeded to start with default settings again. Sweet. Once that was done, everything was back to normal. The desktop seemed a little sluggish compared to my Radeon card, but I’ve yet to install the GeForce drivers, so I’ll have to see how it goes.

With this over and done with, I guess Linux is almost ready for the mainstream public. Well, almost, since quite a lot of usage is still done in the terminal. One thing which I’m quite pleased too, is with the ease of software installation. At first, when I read about YUM, it just appeared totally weird to me. What a strange name. It turned out to be Yellowdog Updated, Modified. Whatever. All I know is that it works, and quite well too. I just tell it what I want to install, and it does it’s magic, downloading the relevant package from the server. The best part is that it even checks for missing dependencies and downloads those even! Sweet!

I still have yet to fully migrate to Linux. I think I’ll still maintain my windoze partition for games. Hey, once a gamer, always a gamer, right? Although not as hardcore …