My Random Thoughts

The Fedora experiment failed although I have to say it wasn’t Fedoras fault.
Fedora core 5 is a really nice distro that I wouldn’t have a problem recommending for a new Linux user. The install went very easy for me. It took about 45 mins total and about the only thing that I couldn’t get working was the NVidia driver. I tried the RPM way first using information from the unofficial fedora faq. This said it was successful but after the reboot it was unable to load the driver. I also tried getting the driver from the NVidia site and manually installing it but that also didn’t work.
Other then this issue which wasn’t a show stopper, everything else seemed to work fine. It just wasn’t right for me and Saturday evening out came the Slackware 10.2 disks. 30 mins later I was logged in and all felt well in the computer room again. Yes there were some additional programs I needed to get but I don’t mind compiling stuff for myself.
I think one of these days I’ll buy one of those bays that you can swap a hard drive in and out of your computer without having to tear it apart so that I can experiment with some of the newer distros that are out there. It was fun but I always seem to go back to Slack.

Over the weekend I bought a new hard drive. It’s a 250G puppy that will end up as a storage drive for my myth box. Since I have to update my desktop box to Slack 10.2 before I do this I decided to give a couple of different distros a try.
First up was knopmyth which is a live cd which will turn your computer into a working myth tv box. It’s a very easy install and takes all the pain (and fun ) out of setting up a myth tv box. Drop the disk in and 30 min. later you have a myth box, except that for me it didn’t want to work correctly. During the setup i gave the machine a static ip address and after it was finished installing it would only assign a dynamic address which meant that the mythbackend wouldn’t start correctly because it didn’t have the right address. I was able to give it the correct address but upon restart I’d get the dynamic address again and myth would not start the backend. I know that there was a config file f’ing with me but it was Sun. evening and I didn’t feel like fighting with it, so bye,bye knopmyth. I will tackle this distro again because I’m pretty sure it was operator error.

Stay tuned for Fedora day…

Finally posting to this blog after having Dann setit up for me 2 weeks ago.

Today I went to a pinball convention at the Allentown fairgrounds. The entry price was a bit steep but once I got inside it was money well spent. There must have been 75+ pinball machines all working and set to free play. I think that I played at least half of them today. There were models from the late 50’s thru to recent years. I had the most fun playing the games from the 70’s era, you really had to use the flippers to control the ball as compared to the newer machines were it seemed you just hit the ball with the flippers. When i finally left 3 hours later, the $15 i spent to get in was well worth it.