Home-2002

Wednesday, 02-Oct-2002

Been too busy with school lately (or just too lazy ;)) to update the page. Lots of things are going on lately. The Mandrake Linux 9.0 release last week and RedHat Linux 8.0 on the 30^th. Mandrake has always surprised me with troubles but not this time and I have exactly the opposite impression from Redhat.

I did install Mandrake and everything went smoothly and it kinda works faster and better than previous releases. I also installed in on a friend's machine and it worked fine as well except a printer problem. It keeped looking for a network connection even though we told it not to look for one and we couldn't configure the printer during the install. After that we tried to configure it through Mandrake Control Center but we still had trouble with it - either not printing at all or printing garbage. Everything else worked fine and supermount is nice thing too (especially for beginners). So I'll give 9.5/10 to the new Mandrake.

I tried the new RedHat yesterday. Did an upgrade of 7.3, which I backed up before the upgrade. The install crashed on me 2 times giving out some anaconda errors. Worked ok the 3^rd time, even though it took ages to upgrade. Everything was kinda ok till I logged into gnome and all my stuff was messed up. I was kinda ok with that but then I saw the stupid red hat they put in place of the gnome foot and I couldn't get rid of it for a minute. I could live with that too... But then started up xchat and none of the scripts worked! Also tried to start xawtv to see if that works and guess what...nothing appeared. I was kinda mad already and started up Gv4l but it wouldn't show nothing but a green background in the transcode preview window. Mad enough I left it and went to eat. When I got back xawtv was up and running....LOL. That was more than enough and just put back 7.3. So RedHat 8.0 will be awarded 2/10.

I'm definately about to switch to Gentoo when I have time for it. I'm also gonna work a bit on the projects section right now and I'll try to finish up the new release of Gv4l which is most likely gonna be the last Gtk1 one.

Tuesday, 27-Aug-2002

Got the right mood to write couple of lines again ;) Not gonna lie there's not much new stuff going on or lots of it going on cause I'm not really sure what I'm gonna remember about while I write...

First... the OS experience news... Haven't tried new OS recently (either too lazy or no time for it). But as for Gentoo Linux, I figured it out :D Well actually it was working properly and apparently I didn't do anything wrong. The problem was that I couldn't connect to IRC using an IRC client (and I tried quite a few...). The problem turned out to be tcp_sack cause it worked after I did "echo 0 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/tcp_sack". Still to lazy to put gentoo on my main box but I put it on my laptop and it works nice. Took more than 4 days to build the stuff I need from stage1 though :P Taking in account that it's only a P150 with 64MB ram and 2GB HDD...but it's worth it cause you get the stuff you want/need and it really works lots faster.

Other than that I put new png buttons instead of the old jpg ones on the site today. Changed the "logo" as well mainly because I'm converting everything to png format. Also cleaned up dead links, fixed the windows section and added new rpms of ProFTPd 1.2.6rc2 since 1.2.5rc1 is quite outdated now :P

Oh, and I almost forgot... Started a project called Gv4l. What it does is record stuff off a v4l tuner in either encoded or non-encoded format. If you have a tuner and want to try or just to see what it looks like, take a look at the projects section.

Monday, 08-Jul-2002

Finally got few extra minutes to write few lines. Decided it's finally time for some refreshment for the title page (at least) after I moved and the new ISP gave me some headaches. Added few enhancements to the page as you can see (if you saw it before), most of which i like the search thingy sitting there and waiting for u to hit it ;) Other than that got many problems the last 2 months, one of which being me left without a car after i got hit on the freeway... I'm ok without any injuries but cannot say the same about the car...

Besides all the other problems which I won't discuss and bother you with, life's still going kinda normal. Still haven't given up on Linux as you can guess :P Spent some of my spare time trying different operating systems. Had Solaris 8 for x86 sitting on CDs since I downloaded it when Sun offered it for free a while ago and decided to play with it for a while. I still wonder why there was no "cc" even though I thought I did a full installation and I was forced to go with gcc :) Then I got sick of CDE and put gnome. Now that felt like home but gnome was giving some headaches...it is a beta for solaris after all.... Basically that was my experience with Solaris. Well learned some stuff off it and found differences from linux but can't remember specific details right now. In conclusion, I wouldn't recommend Solaris 8 for the desktop. Personally I'm not sure if I will ever use it for server either unless I got a SPARC but that's not certain either ;)

Next I tried few things with Freedos, Windows 3.11 (remembered the good old 386 times), Lindows SPX,QNX and finally Gentoo Linux. Nothing interesting about the first two. Lindows is basically a stripped debian with wine. I wouldn't buy it. QNX is another story. It's interesting *NIX OS. One of the things I liked about it was that it loads up really fast. You can install X, Gnome, gcc, etc. on it just like in Solaris but I never got to the part of gnome simply because photon looks nice [Screenshot 1 Screenshot 2] or at least hella better than CDE. Another thing about QNX is that it's really easy configurable, with good help included, which is nice thing if you never used the system before and/or you're lazy as I am :P However there are two major disadvantages. One being that there aren't lots of drivers which makes it difficult or impossible for some peripherals to work. The other is the lack of applications and diversity of choice even though some stuff was successfully ported (like mozilla for example), as you can see from the screenshots, and it's not that hard to port stuff to (at least it looks lots simpler than porting stuff to Solaris).

Gentoo Linux is nice. It's LFS but gives you the BSD like portage. You can also choose what stage you want to start from or use prebuilt packages. Even though I messed it up a bit and couldn't get it quite working properly, I still liked it and I'll go back to it when I got time for it.

That was my OS experience for the few months since the page was last updated. I'll add a summary of any other experiments of mine after I do them. I'll also post withdrawals of Linux if ever find something better. Until then I'll keep linuxing ;) Well that's all the time I got for the moment... And...Enjoy the site... Whenever you like or dislike something about it, just visit the contact section and let me know.