Andrew the Hopeless Techie – Page 9 – A techie lost in the mesh of reality

Twitter Updates for 2010-09-27

September 27, 2010 0 Comments

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Fedora 14 – Alpha First Impression

September 26, 2010 4 Comments

As with many early releases of Fedora this one looks and feels very much likes its predicesor, however the majority of the work done on an alpha is generaly the framework and under the hood stuff. Yes there is generaly a new background and maybe a few new noticeable features, but for the most part it will feel very familar.

There are some noticeable features, Closer integration with empathy for one. This has gone one step further to make the Instant Messaging interface very streamlined. I personal still prefer Pidgin to empathy due to the numerous extensions for Pidgin that are out to allow it to connect to different account types.

Core Utilities such as Automatic Bug Reporting Tool(ABRT), and SELinux Troubleshooter have been updated and are now even easier to use. I also noticed the Troubleshooter loads much,much faster then it did in F13. Being this is the Alpha + Updates I am impressed and curious how it will improve come release time.

One feature I was dreading more then any other was the inclusion of Gnome 3.0! Luckily this was delayed due to upstream delaying it. I am not a fan of Gnome-shell and I am not sure I ever will be. In fact i am almost certain when Fedora starts shipping with Gnome 3 I am going to switch to KDE4 or possibly try to get the classic interface back, maybe even just run the last stable build of the 2.X branch.

Not really a new feature for Fedora 14 but the Packagekit terminal program seems to actually work without installing a seperate package, although i might have selected said package at install when selecting the tools i use not installed by default such as Yumex and filezilla. This tool/add-on to me is a god send it does alot of the work for you especialy when you get an oddly compiled package where the command to launch the program is rather different then the package name. An example of how this works is below,

I want to install Pidgin but it is not installed, I think it might be but do  not want to run an RPM query to find out. I can type in  a command line simply “pidgin” with out the ” of course and it will see the program is not installed and browse the repositories installed for that package or one similar to it and ask if you want to install what it finds.

Yes it would be just as easy to do a “yum install pidgin” command and if it was installed it would say so but still if you are on autopilot and type a command in the command line thinking it is installed you will be given the chance to do t his in-line. One issue I had here was after the package installs the CLI says Scanning Applications and just seems to hang there but the program clearly finished installation. This could be due to this package being a development version for the Alpha but would be nice to have that fixed prior to launch especially if this feature is installed by default.

Bottom line here is that I think when finished Fedora 14 will have alot to offer.

Fedora, Linux, Reviews

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Computers – Ram Compatibility, Motherboard, Graphics

September 16, 2010 0 Comments

Motherboard

I finally got confirmation that my replacement Motherboard has in-fact been shipped from ASUS. The fact that they sent a replacement instead of the repaired board shows me one of two things, Ethier they were not able to fix the board due to the issue being to great, or they broke the board trying to fix it and just decided to pawn it off as unfixable.

Ether way I would have been happy, some people get leery when they hear a refurbished part is being sent in place of what was a brand new part being fixed. I on the other hand feel if the factory is the one doing the Refurb which in this case it is then the board is as good as new. If not it would be free to get replaced.

Ram Compatibility

I got to thinking the other day how alot of companies seem to be terminating support for previous generations of products. I tend to agree with something like XP which has had a predecessor previous to Windows 7. However RAM it seems is never backwards compatible, why is this? I know they use different voltages and what not right?

Well I think that reason is crap, If we can make a freaking car that runs on 4 different types of Gas and Electricity should gas not be present, then why in the name of all that is can we not make a RAM slot that will detect and adjust voltages for the appropriate RAM.

Here is a case scenario where this would be beneficial:

You currently have a Motherboard with 16gb of DDR2 RAM, you want to upgrade the Motherboard to support newer technologies such as SATA 6gb/s, and USB 3.0 support. It however does not support DDR2 RAM that means you would need to purchase all new ram leaving your old RAM useless.

If you were able to use the DDR2 until you acquired enough cash to upgrade to the over priced DDR3 then you would have a much smoother computer upgrade.

Graphics Card

The graphics cards that I got to use with the computer at the time seemed very good but I am finding it to be less then adequate for the current demand by programs.

Sadly the cheapest upgrade I saw was $84 and that is a lower but more acceptable model. This is out of my price range but I am watching it and will most likely get it one day in the far off future

Components, Computers

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

September 16, 2010 4 Comments

Fedora 13 – 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 🙁

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 “work” 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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