Last night I headed down to the Fabulous Commodore Ballroom™ to check out the guitar orgy that is Dragonforce.
While I don’t normally plunk down $40 for a single ticket (well, $32.50 plus extortion charges from Ticketmaster. Do NOT get me started), I felt this was a special case. I go to a lot of live shows, but I’m more the $10-at-the-shittiest-dump-in-the-city-and-get-beer-of-questionable-origin kinda guy.
With the addition of the lovely Mac a few weeks ago from my good friend (congrats on the new job! Like you read this!), I have the trinity of operating systems running: Kubuntu, my primary OS, the Mac running Tiger, and XP in a virtual machine for when the other two machines are simply not crashing fast enough.The other day, a friend from work asked if I was on the Mac primarily now. Not likely, seeing as its a 433MHz and I can get most things done quicker with a hamster and a hammer. But, it did make me start thinking about the specific roles these machines play in my life. I came to some very startling conclusions in my deep introspection. And by startling I mean stupid. (more…)
Or a girl. Or possibly a hermaphrodite. Its really hard to tell on these things, though I am leaning more towards female now that I think about it. The VGA, DVI and ethernet all appear to be “innie” connections. For arguments sake, we’ll say my G4 Powermac is a girl then. Happy? Great.
So I bought Guitar Hero II a couple months back. Once I learned it, it didn’t take long to finish it off. It was ultra-addictive, but after finishing it on Hard, I needed…..more. Sure, theres Expert level, but after playing non-stop for a month, the same songs get a little tiresome. So, I bought Guitar Hero I. And finished that on Hard in two days. Ho hum.
Then a friend of mine showed me Frets On Fire and I instantly thought it was awesome. It’s essentially a FLOSS version of the Guitar Hero franchise, with the ability to add songs on your own (or from others at the great forum site) which really is the reason I bought GHI. Not to finish another game, but becuase playing the songs is fun (though, it must be said, if you know how to play even a little bit of real guitar, starting with the controller is a little cumbersome and just, well, wrong).
The big problem with FoF is that you need either to play on a keyboard, or get one of the mods (I like the RF-Mod, which seems to be about the only one compiled for Linux). You can also use a joystick using joy2key to emulate keystrokes. But, the holy grail, obviously, is to play on the guitar. I already had one for my PS2, so I went about finding an adapter to USB. (more…)
I used to have really bad insomnia. Like ten years ago, before I met my wife, I would regularly pull all-nighters simply becaase I could just not pass out. But my wife has a very soothing and calming demeanor in dealing with this. While in bed she would say things like “Sssshhhhh….just relax and stop moving the bed, put your head on the pillow and rest or I’ll cave your skull in with a hammer”. Just like mom used to do.
But, now that she’s been gone for close to a month on a tour of duty in Alaska, I have been in a steady decline back to primitive-man state, which includes not sleeping overly well, and using only a single frying pan for every meal (eg: spaghetti. Figure that out). (more…)
UPDATE: After a couple months of fighting tooth and nail with my video card, I gave up and bought a super cheap PCI-E nVidia-based card. The problem with the onboard is it just refused to be probed properly. Which meant every time the resolution changed, or the screensaver came on, or the monitor was turned off, it would come back on with two inched of black space on the left and an inch on the right. To remedy this every friggin’ time the monitor was turned back on, I would have to go in to the KDE control panel, change the reoslution to something smaller, save it, then change back to 1680×1050, then, while saving, hold in the “Auto” button on the LCD, and about 60% of the time, the resolution would change properly. The other 40% of the time, I would repeat the process for 10- or 15-minutes. With the 7200GS and the help of Envy, the card was auto-probed and I have yet to have this problem come back. Long story short: If you’re using Linux with this mobo and a widescreen LCD, save yourself the headache and don’t bother with the onboard video and just get a PCI-E card.
My last post was about A-Power and the great power-supply adventure. Turns out, the power supply was not the problem. Turns out, theres something motherboard-related that was toasting these things. So after three power supplies, it was time for a change.
Its been literally 5-years since I had a brand new machine. I have parts up the wazoo from building new machines for clients and cobbling myself a machine from their older parts (building a new 2.4GHz dual-core because the old 2.2GHz single-core is “too slow”), and finally I had run out of enough parts. I had parts, but needed small things like RAM DIMMs, but the old old nature of most of the junk means that not only were parts hard to find, they were expensive. So, despite not having the funds, I decided to build a new one.
Off to A-Power and bought the parts, put it all together and started installing Kubuntu 7.0.4. All went well….except for minor things like the LAN, on-board video card and sound. Other than that all was well.
The motherboard is a P5GC-MX and has a 7.1 sound chip, an Intel 82945G/GZ graphics processor and a gigabit ethernet. ALL of which does not work with the stock install of Ubuntu/Kubuntu 7 (Feisty). After three hours or so of googling, I finally got everything working so I thought I would post everything here if someone stumbles across this (or, more likely, I have to re-do everything and forgot what I did).
First and foremost….DO NOT USE THE CD. It sucks. It breaks a LOT of stuff (like ALSA and Xorg). There is a nice folder called “LinuxDrivers” on the CD. Make a coaster from this, its useless.
LAN
Different versions of this motherboard apparently use different Attansic chipsets. The most recent is the Attansic L2 chipset, which is what mine had. ASUS has released a static driver for it, but have said they will not patch against the kernel, so you’re stuck with this. There is, of course, a FOSS implementation for L1 that has been put into the kernel tree for 2.6.19, but the L2 remains elusive.
Without a LAN, any updates and such were a no-go. Luckily, I found this thread where the guy puts in the compiled driver. I hate signing up for crap, so I used BugMeNot to get it, and assuming you hate it too, here it is: AttansicL2 Kernel Module
Simply put it in /lib/modules/`uname -r` then insert it with insmod /lib/modules/`uname -r` all as root
To have this restart at boot-time, first backup your rc.local in /etc. Then add the insmod line above “exit 0″ and save.
You should now see the little LAN indicator in the KDE tray whir to life and get online. One down, two to go.
Sound
This was a major pain, mostly becuase I used the CD, which broke libasound.so.2 (actually, it removed it completely) so ALSA would not start at all. Yours may actually work out of the box, but I screwed with the CD before trying, so try your sound first and make sure it works. Take a look at the first reply here (yes its for a laptop, but its the same chipset) and add options snd-hda-intel model=ref to /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.
Worked great for me (one I re-built libasound2, alsa-base, alsa-utils and alsa-oss for added flavour). Restart ALSA and check the levels in alsamixer or the KDE mixer sound app thinger.
Video
Another MASSIVE pain. I have gorgeous HP w2207 LCD screens, but for whatever reason, something does not probe these things properly. I am not even remotely Linux-savvy enough to know which part, but this Intel chip, and older nVidia (from the box that blew up), or X all will see only 640×480. Even after manually editing my xorg.conf file, it just refused to go any higher (or caused X to tank completely). Even if your video is working, it may not be using GL (which it can do, quite well as I found out) using the MesaGL package.
Mine was using the i810 driver, but wasn’t reporting the card properly. Some more googling around, and I installed xserver-xorg-video-intel
Restarted X, and bingo, I could change the video modes properly, though I still had to ram through the resolution manually in the xorg.conf file (though, I am told xorg seems to give precidence to whatever it probes over manual entries, which seems kind of….dumb frankly. If I put them in there, I must have a reason. But anyway, I certainly am not going to question the xorg guys/gals)
So there you go. Save yourself some time. After you get everything going, I made sure MesaGL was installed (it wasn’t) and tried out Urban Terror. Worked great. Its no where near as fast as the nVidia was at 1680×105, but what do you want for onboard?
Okay, I don’t want to do an advertisement here (well, until I get legions of fans and start with Google AdWords or something), but I DO want to point out a fantastic local business here in the lower mainland named A-Power Computer Systems if for no other reason that they get more volume and lower prices more. (more…)