A year and a half later

So here I am trying to breathe new life into my dormant blogger account. It's been a while since I've posted, and while I'm in a much better position to give advice now, not much has changed in the Ubuntu community.

For example, the same ati woes I last blogged about still exist. While ati now offers linux drivers through their site, the binary installers still do not set up the drivers properly. There are a few guides around, like here and here. It can still be quite tricky to uncompress the ati driver into usable binaries and then get the driver properly set up so that the mesa driver is no longer being used.

On the up side, the next ubuntu distro, Hardy Heron, should be coming out (or I like to say "dropping") on this Saturday, the 19th of April. You can always check distrowatch to see when new distros hit. I must admit it's one of my favorite sites to swing by every fews days just to see what's new. I've also found it very helpful in finding the differences between each distrobution and what's new in each release. They keep track of what packages are included in each distro, so you can see what window managers or media players that distro uses or if they have the latest drivers included. Quite a nifty little site.

I hope to actually try and keep up this time around. I've got the crazy idea I might be able to help others and maybe even myself with this. I'm not out to make money, just provide for my family.

Thank you for reading.

Installing the right ATi drivers

I was having problems with Ubuntu on the new box. I used the live-cd to shrink my windows NTFS partition the other day using the partition editor (gparted). I had made sure to defrag windows before I did this. After cutting the Hard Drive almost in half (19 and 18 gigs respectively) I was left with a NTFS and a blank partition. I created an ext3 partition (primary partition) and then a SWAP partition (of about 1200 megabytes). I then ran the installer and installed ubuntu rather flawlessly. I had to setup the network card, but everything ran, installed, and booted fine. I booted windows (XP professional) and chkdisk ran. After spending quite some time checking the disk, the system restarted again. Selecting windows through GRUB xp loaded and everything seems to be fine. Wahoo! A dual booter!

So now that I had my main box running both, I had to configure the ATi Radeon 9200 graphics card I had installed. I used easyubuntu to install the only driver I could find, but X kept crashing. The screen would just go black, and I would have to reboot. I even tried switching monitors to no avail. After some searching I found an exellent wiki that is just for setting up an ait card in ubuntu:

http://wiki.cchtml.com/index.php/Ubuntu_Dapper_Installation_Guide

I had found a post on the ubuntu forums and had to do more searching. It did lead me to sign up for those, so here's the thread for my first post:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=75378

Hope that info helps.

Computing, the Internet, and You

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Connection speed test

Yes I posted a bulletin with the same thing but this is for those who missed it. Just click on the pic there to go to the site and run the test. I want everyone who reads this to post their speed from the same mirror I did, in Los Angeles. Not only is that where Myspace's server is that location is also accross the country from me. Most big name sites' servers are in CA. You also get a more accurate reading of your ping doing it from as far as physically possible from you.

Blogged with Flock

Flock, a FireFox-esque web browser

This browser runs on Ubuntu and is compatable with photobucket and blogger accounts.  It's really nifty so far, with similar extensions to firefox, but no Yahoo toolbar.  Alas, perhaps i will do without for now.

Blogged with Flock