Well, the chickens are finally coming home to roost. It appears that my nvidia cards that I am using are too old for Nvidia to update their linux drivers to work with the latest Xorg. This is effecting not only my System76 machine but now my main workstation running Slackware-current. Oh this is killler.

I briefly thought to myself, well I could drop back to slackware 12.0, but hells no. I have two other choices: 1) Buy a new video card or 2) Use the open nv driver. Right now I have settled upon choice 2. The open nv driver works pretty well and does provide some 3d support. The downside is that the 3d support is not as good as the binary nvidia driver. Some of the games I tried to play were very, very slow. Alas, we shall see if I get a new video card in the near future that uses the newer nvidia drivers.

Bums me out there a bit, but what can you do? I will tell you what, throw support behind open drivers. So maybe I will look at intel or ati. But I wonder how their support is for 3d games?

The beer that made Milwaukee famous is back! Kick back a six pack and relive the good old days. Well, those good old days were not for me, I was much too young then. Maybe you old folks can remember more than me.

Anyway, it was a nice Christmas Eve present the wife brought me. That’s one more notch on my belt on the tour of good old American beers. What will be next?

Well, we made it through the weekend and lugged all our big stuff over here on Saturday with the help of some friends with pickup trucks. Man, moving our stack-able washer and dryer was hell. We had to take off the front door to the house and the door to my office to get it in. Yeah, it’s in my man cave. Not too manly is it?

So we get everything in and start setting up. I plug in the TV and my myth box and no cable. They were supposed to have it hooked up on Friday. So I test out other cable drops in the house and no go. I call the cable company and here they decided they would not come out because of an outstanding phone bill from when we canceled our phone service back in May. Neither the wife nor myself were aware of this charge and they never contacted us. Instead, they just did not show up. So I paid the bill and they said they would be out next Friday. A week without the babysitter! The horror.

To top it off, my internet service was not going to be transferred until Monday, so that meant two more days with online service. My plan was to move my server over here late Sunday night for when the guy showed up on Monday. That did not work out so well. I ended up knocking the power out Sunday afternoon and it would not boot up without a keyboard plugged in. I had moved all my stuff the day before so no keyboard. Alas, that meant my domain and email were down for 24 hours. Well a bit more.

I took Monday off for the internet hookup and they guy did not show until 5:00. But, the good news was that he had to hook up the cable service to get the internet working. The bad news was that they gave him the wrong ip addresses which I found out after a call to their support about 15 minutes after he left when nothing I was doing would work.

Anyway, I hope to have some pics of the man cave up soon, I just have to do some more unpacking.

Well, Saturday we move the big stuff. The apartment is pretty empty. I look forward to setting up the new office the wife and I will be sharing.

As I clean out the office here I note that my systems are very dirty again. I need to get some canned air and blow them out before I move them. Why mess the new place up?

Today we got the keys to the house. It’s a bit after 8 and I want to get things rolling. So I figure it’s a good idea, and so does the wife, to start moving my comic books. I just lugged 12 long boxes down to my car. I now have to transport them 10 miles or so and unload them into the house. Man-oh-man, those things are heavy. This is the karmic payback for collecting these past 25 years.

Well, less jibber-jabbing and more moving.

About three weeks ago I won an ebay bid on the Dungeon Board Game. Man I was psyched! I played the crap out of this game with my friends back in the day. It must have been 20 years at least since I last played the game. It’s very difficult to find and even more difficult to win on ebay. Alas, it arrived on a Friday and that night the kids and I played a few games. We’ve been playing off and on now and tonight was the first night Erin was able to play. Man, it’s good stuff. The kids picked the rules up no problem and have been taking turns winning.

Seeing how they have taken to Dungeon excites me because this year I got the family the Dungeons and Dragons 4th Edition game. Now the wife insists that it’s more a present for me (I’ve acquired the Starter Set, Players Handbook, Monster Manual, and a few Tile Sets already) but I steadfastly hold, it’s gonna be a family game.

I started playing Dungeons and Dragons right before I entered Middle School (6th grade). I received the Basic Edition for my birthday and I remember the day I opened that box set up and pulled out the dragon dice and B2 - The Keep on the Borderlands. I spent hours reading the rules and that modules and then even more mapping out my own dungeons on graph paper.

I must say while I find playing Druids and Rangers fun, I think I much prefer to DM (Dungeon Master). That’s just me I guess. D&D not only piqued my interest in fantasy but it paved the way for other role playing games like Marvel Superheroes, Call of Cthulhu, and Star Frontiers. In fact, I could say that D&D was directly related to getting me into my comic book addiction.

Back when I started playing D&D the game was receiving some negative press by various groups declaring it was Satanic and that kids were killing themselves acting out the game. Sounds like the complaints against video games today, huh? Anyway, more so than being a game D&D was also an incredible tool for me in ways very un-satanic. You see, I was never the best at English and writing and infact I recall being in a remedial English class in 5th grade. I did not know it was remedial at the time, but looking back, yeah it was. But getting in to D&D helped increase my writing and communication skills to a point that, not realizing at the time, pulled me out of the remedial classes and into a life long love of literature and writing. I went from the lowest reading groups to the higer ones. I went from C’s and D’s to all A’s. I moved on to college working towards a minor in English (why I did not major in that I don’t know). I graduated and continue to enjoy reading and writing mostly poems and short stories. I had some work published, which was a thrill, and continue to rely on these skills as an asset.

Yeah, D&D really helped me out in ways unexpected at the time. I look forward to playing with the kids and further expanding their imaginations. A bit of time with the family away from the television lost in a fantasy world where we communicate in different ways, problem solve and hone both sides of our brains. Good stuff.

There has been a lot of flak these past few weeks over the supposed failure of Linux on netbooks. Articles claiming returns are 4 times higher than those running windows, some vendors recalling netbooks to replace linux with windows, etc. But what I notice is there are a lot of inconsistencies with the “facts” with one article contradicting another. It’s almost as if someone is feeding fud into this environment. But that could not be right, could it?

Hmmm…. A year ago Asus dropped the eeePC on the market and the netbook exploded hailing the “demise of the desktop/laptop” as oem’s made a mad dash to the bottom of the hardware stack. What was scoffed at by MS resulted in them, in conjunction with the failings of Vista, to revive XP after they attempted to end the life of this way out dated os a few scant months earlier. Apple has gone record calling these netbooks “crap.” And that we will never see such shoddy products from Coopertino. Yet, they are lowering the prices and functionality of their low end laptops to compete.

When I first heard the claim that Linux based netbooks were being returned 4 times more than windows based netbooks my first response was: “How many Linux netbooks were sold compared to those running XP?” Those statistics have not come out yet. But why is it that I consistently see Linux based netbooks sold out on Amazon and NewEgg? Why is it I see such glowing reviews of these Linux based netbooks? And why have I heard not to stellar reviews of XP on these things claiming they are sluggish and stripped of features?

I agree with the sentiment that many people don’t understand what a netbook is. It’s not a replacement for a desktop or laptop but an adjunct. They are ultra-portable systems you can take to the can, the classroom and on the go for simple tasks that make up 90% of what people do with their systems. They are not really suited for gaming or video editing or even graphic design, even though I can do all these with my eeePC if I wanted. It seems those people who want to nail them down to replacing their laptop or desktop are the ones crying foul the loudest.

As for carphone recalling their linux netbooks, it appears that is not the case at all
, even though they may have stopped selling the linux based systems.

I have heard it commented that this is a new market not only for consumers and Linux, but for consumers and netbooks. A market I suspect will come into it’s own shortly as consumers begin to understand what a netbook actually is and they get more comfortable with Linux. Some have posited that it is incumbent upon the manufacturers to better educate the consumer on these products and while I can agree that better instruction cannot hurt, I thought that the documentation and the configured home page all about the eeepc was a great start.

We shall see what the future holds, but I still see more success for both netbooks and Linux. Both have worked to change computing as we know it.

During a bit of my lunch today I set to checking out e16 and awesome at the behest of a comment to my previous post on the type of dual display behavior I wanted. I did not pull down e17 because that was not in the standard Ibex respositories. Anyway, I bounced into e16 first. It was just as I remembered it. Going on what? 10 years now. There have been some changes though. There was compositing effects and nice little touches to the interface. On the dual display it was slick and fast but I was not able to achieve the effect I desired. Again, that is dual displays operating independently that I can pass windows between. Now granted i did not dig too deeply into any documentation. I tried both the twinview and Xinerama, but no success.

I spent some time playing around though. E16 is nice, but not enough to replace Xfce on my workstation at work. Oh well.

Awesome fared even less time. I’m not sure whether it would achieve the results I wanted because I did not spend any time playing around with it. Awesome is a very minimalistic window manager that presents you with multiple desktop, 9 I believe by default, from which you launch applications via an xterm. I’m not going to say Awesome is not awesome, but I don’t think it is for me. While I prefer lighter weight desktops, I like a little pizazz.

Oh well, the quest is still on. I blame Linc of course for this failing.

At the beginning of last week I posted to our identica that I was bummed over the Nvidia twin view in that I could not drag windows between the different screens. Fab from linuxoutlaws recommended Xinerama. So I eventually got around to that. It was a painless configuration and I did get the ability to move windows between the screens. The only downside was that now I cannot switch virtual desktops between the screens independently. That does not work for me.

It would be nice if there was a way to have independent screens between which I could pass windows back and forth. When I switch to the second virtual desktop of the first screen, the second remains on the first virtual desktop.

I also noticed that with twin view, if I attempt to open a link from the second screen, it will not hit the firefox on the first screen. Instead, it will complain that there is already another instance of firefox running. I wonder if there is a fix for that?

Two problems there I will have to investigate. Anyone have any ideas?

If you’re in the US, today is the day! Enjoy your civic duty and vote.