2010 – Page 7 – Andrew the Hopeless Techie

Yearly Archive: 2010

Andrew the Hopeless Techie > 2010

Linux – Fedora 13 on my laptop and Ubuntu Help needed.

September 16, 2010 4 Comments

Fedora 13 โ€“ Installed on my laptop

When I had the issues with my desktop Motherboard and had to install Fedora 13 on my laptop i was generally happy with the change until, i decided to stupidly update to the Fedora 14 alpha. I know that Alpha releases can be buggy and are discouraged from upgrading an existing install, however for what ever reason I decided to ignore this and do it anyway ๐Ÿ™

Well when my machine locked up on me and I failed to be able to get it to be bootable again I decided to re-install, however something happened that caused the Fedora 13 disc to not install. Now being that my desktop was down and I did not have a bootable OS I had no choice but to fall back to Vista Buisness. I had issues with this but you can read more about that in the Windows post later on.

I now have Fedora 13 running under VirtualBox in Windows as I just did not feel like erasing windows and re-installing Fedora again.

Doing this got me thinking that I could try to Install Ubuntu 10.04 as well which on the desktop seems to hate the VM environment.

Ubuntu

While I like the feel of Ubuntu, I do not know my way around it at all with regards to .deb packaging and repository creation.

Yes I tried to make a Debian version of the RPM Repo i have. This proved to be 10000000 times more frustrating then anything i had attempted on Fedora and I quickly began to realize why I had not done this sooner.

While the Repository idea is not looking good right now for Ubuntu I would love to be able to compile an .deb file if for nothing more then to say I figured out how to do it.

What I ask you guys i if any of you happened to also use Ubuntu and can possible point me to a guide that is easy to use toward .deb packaging.

I realize most of the people reading this are Fedora users but I know there are some of you out there like myself that use more then one Distro.

Fedora, Linux, Ubuntu

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Motherboard issues – Leads me to use Fedora 13 on the Laptop

September 4, 2010 0 Comments

Well I had an issue with my motherboard Recently which caused me to have to get it repaired/replaced.

ASUS M4A78 PLUS Motherboard

The computer was experiencing some odd behavior with the board so I began to try and trouble shoot it using just about every possible way I could think of to narrow down and eliminate the errors. This proved to not have any change on the state of things, Several things still continued to go wrong and so I was forced to send the Motherboard in and use my laptop.

Well my laptop had Windows vista on in which proved to be a lot more trouble then it was worth, not having an extra windows 7 license (I use my laptop rarely and most of the time when I do I need to access windows specific features such as a domain) I was ether forced to re-install Vista or get rid of it all together.

I chose to get rid of it and put Fedora 13 in its place, this proved to speed things up a great deal as I figured it would. I did run into some issues with the computer getting bogged down at times, however this was more a result of my laptop not having a whole lot of ram Even with this slow down at times the computer still ran faster at full load when compared directly to Windows Vista Business.

Aside from this good news with the laptop running more smoothly, my over all mood is rather annoyed, I did after all have to send in the motherboard for my desktop to be repaired or possible replaced depending on what ASUS decides it wants to do.

Just when I thought it could not get worse, My 2 yr  old Daughter found out where I had the CPU (thought it out of her reach I was wrong) and had thrown it down pretty hard on the kitchen floor. Now it being AMD it has lots of pin on the bottom and as far as I can tell no pins are damaged and it appears no physical damage exists. The real test will be when I try to use it in my desktop one the motherboard returns

Gaming

As well as the laptop runs on Fedora it still can not run my games, I am a rather active gamer at times on StarCraft 2 and World of Warcraft however neither of this seem to work well on Fedora. I can get WoW working on the desktop under Linux just fine but even though WINE claims SC2 will work I have yet to get it to work.

Fedora, Games, Linux, Starcraft & Starcraft 2, World of Warcraft

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ATI/AMD – Catalyst Driver with Fedora 13

August 21, 2010 0 Comments

I recently decided to test the new ATI drivers with Fedora 13 and for the most part them seem to work fairly well, however there are a few things that seem to be a bit of an annoyance.

For starters it seems that using this driver causes Firefox to have frequent black spots when scrolling down the page. This also seems to be in connection with how Metacity interacts with Catalyst, changing the window manager to Compiz for example reduces but not eliminates this issue.

This coupled with the fact that my monitor was acting up in an unrelated way was not a good mix. I think for now using the default drivers is probably best until Catalyst 10.8 is released to see if this fixes the issue.

In addition it seems that the 10.7 version of the driver slows my computer down significantly and with my computers specs this should not happen less i have a whole lot of stuff running. Out of fairness I am using Fedora 64bit so not sure if this issue is present or not on the 32bit version.

It should come as no surprise however ATI lately seems to be favoring Debian based Distributions over RPM based ones in terms of quality. Ubuntu always seems to get drivers from ATI that are sleek and work very well while Fedora and other RPM distributions that might utilize newer X.org versions tend to get left behind even when the drivers โ€œworkโ€ for the Distro.

Now to clarify I am not bashing Ubuntu as I use that distribution as well, nor am I trashing AMD, I am merely stating that it seems AMD does not really actively work with other distros to make things as flawless.

Aside from the issue i mentioned above I have not really seen much in the way of disadvantages. The metacity issue however could be due to a numerous amount of factors so pinning the blame completely on ATI/AMD would not be fair.

The views here are expressed solely by myself and do not represent any other view point weather it be company or individual. If you do not agree with these opinions note they are solely expressive of my views.

Fedora, Linux, Non-Specific, Reviews

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Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-08-15

August 15, 2010 0 Comments

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Twitter Updates for 2010-08-11

August 11, 2010 1 Comment

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Starcraft 2 – World of Warcraft – RealID

August 7, 2010 0 Comments

Starcraft 2

Well I recently got a chance to play this game in single player mode, I must say this game is truly amazing. While the Multi-Player looks very similar to the way the old SC did the single player game play is very very different.

The key elements are there, you build a base, gather resources, deploy forces. Where the game differs is in how the cut scenes look and the overall game play in between missions. You are usually in a room where you can navigate to different sections and do things like upgrade units, research new technology and so on.

The video below shows some of the new game play mechanics. That video is a bit dated and a few things have changed, for example the Thor is smaller and made at the factory and no longer built in the field as it was in this video

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For example if you find enough Protoss research points you can easily buy an upgrade that lets your Vespian Gas refinery automatically harvest without needing a SCV to do it, this leaves them for more important things like building supply depots and harvesting minerals. Another cool one on the Zerg research side is the ability to have your buildings and metal units (Thor, Vulture and so on) heal themselves SLOWLY over time.

There is a small spurt in the game where you can play as the Protoss for a short time but I am not going to say just where so it is not spoiled for you ๐Ÿ™‚

World of Warcraft and RealID

Recently a few major patches back Blizzard introduced a feature called RealID which until recently surved no real purpose other then to prepare for Starcract 2 (it also supports it). Now you can add a user using their RealID and you can then talk to them from ethier game and also from Diablo3 when it is released.

I tested this feature out and it proves to be a very reliable feature, there are a few issues for example if someone sends you a message right before you trigger a cut scene in SC2 then it stays up on the screen the entire Cut Scene unless it is one of the few cut scenes that require separate loading. You can not chat during a cut scene so there is no way to get rid of it.

This of course can work in reverse with people you meet on SC2 being able to talk o them inside WoW, I am assuming this will have similar function in Diablo 3

Games, Starcraft & Starcraft 2, World of Warcraft

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