Slashdot

Ok, this kind of a lame journal entry, but what do I care... nobody reads my journal!

Perhaps the funniest slashdot thread ever, and it wasn't even April 1!

My nVidia 6600 graphics card (Asus, refurb) came in the mail from NewEgg a couple of weeks ago. Had it setup Dual Monitor, with Xinerama extensions, and full 3D in less than an hour. So much better than ATI.

However, I lost my world file last night, so that's a bit of a problem. Lesson learned: Gentoo users, back up your world file! If you don't, this might be of use

It's really strange, though, as it wasn't half empty or anything, it was just plain empty. I ran out of space running "emerge --update --deep --newuse world" so the compilation failed. I freed up some space, and then ran it again, whereby it finished the last 10 packages or so it needed. I then ran "emerge --depclean" which removes redundant packages (dependencies that are no longer in use).

Since my world file was gone, depclean noticed that I had no dependencies what-so-ever, since I no longer had any packages installed. It promptly began removing everything I've installed since initial setup. When gcalctool flew by the uninstall list, I perked up a bit. When Gaim was trying to uninstall, I stopped. So that's been fun.

All in all, I'm not really sure I can say Linux is more work than Windows, or vice versa. I just had a close one there and it's taken me a while to recover, but I've experienced the same in Windows. I can't update 99.5% of all software on my system with 1 command in windows, but then I also don't have to worry about it uninstalling everything automatically by mistake.

I reboot to Windows once or twice a week to run the Quartus II demo I need for class, but I'll be running that in KQemu soon. I figure I can get free Windows through the MSDN, so I may as well use it, even if I'm not going to use it as my primary OS.

Oh, and Widgets are cool ;)

Got my second monitor working. Perhaps the ATI drivers actually are good for something.

No, not really ;)

It still won't let me run 2 X servers for dual head, so I set it up for "1 Big Screen" which, I assume, is similar to xinerama. That works, but maximizing windows is no longer a function I can perform.

And I still don't have 3D support, prompting me to sign the petition. While I've always enjoyed the ATI AiW products (I have a couple) I haven't had cable since I moved off campus, plus I own a real TV, and nVidia actually supports linux as if they had customers using it...

Looks like it'll be nVidia now and a standalone TV Card (haupauge?) later on when I get cable again...

Now I just need to pick out a cheap nVidia card

For years I've used OSS (Various Mozilla builds, Netscape 6 briefly, Mozilla, Pheonix->Firefox, Thunderbird, Open Office, Azureus, edonkey, etc), but have long shyed away from switching to linux after I failed to catch on in 6th grade with Redhat 6.0, 7th grade with Mandrake 6.5, and then finally Gentoo (both stage 1 and 2 failed, I'm assuming because I later found I had a bad stick of memory) and stage 3 "word-for-word" left me with a windows partition half formatted with ext2. (/dev/hda1 != /dev/hdb1)

Now, obviously Gentoo left a bad taste in my mouth, but one of the big reasons was poor font support. I always had a number of Knoppix builds laying around my desk/dorm, but the fonts sucked much and KDE sucked more. My only experience with Gnome was on Redhat 6 and Mandrake 6.5, and that was in the early days and it too sucked.

I hadn't tried linux, other than knoppix live, since.

Until last week when I saw the article about Xandros on Slashdot while I relently realized the only way I could regain 16-bit app support and the existance of my "Compatibility Tab" in XP was a format--seriously, it's just gone... it's like the WoW service was disabled, but it reported perfect operation--I thought, "Fuck.. I should switch to linux".

So I popped in the Xandros Open Dist cd, had it resize my windows partition, and installed Xandros.

It sucked.

I couldn't get it to use my SBLive 5.1 instead of the secondary Ensoniq $0.50 card I use for Skype-chat cord calls and I could tell the package management was for n00bs. Where I was expecting to see a plethera of interconnected packages, I so less than 20, and most everything was installed in the "System Package". No wonder installation was a breeze... there's just one package!

So I didn't even spend a full hour with that. I immediately downloaded a Gentoo minimal and a Ubuntu live cd and rebooted.

"Ah, shit. I need the ubuntu install cd!

So I installed Gentoo from Stage 1. That was on Thursday. It's now Monday at almost 10pm and I just finished making gnome look a little prettier:
( De-Uglify Gnome, End User Gnome, Make Fonts Less Suck, Installing Gnome, Make Numlock ON)

And now I fire up Firefox and everything looks great! Gnome is fast and sleek, I have all of my extensions and grease monkey scripts, I just watched a DVD last night and I swear it looked about 50% sharper than it ever did in windows and so I head over to firefox and BAM: Suck Fonts!

WTF?!? I spent almost 2 hours emerging font packs per the instructions last night, while I simultaneously spent an hour in profuse going through all of my use variables so that I could "emerge --deep --update --newuse world" for the 3rd time in 3 days only to find that slashdot still looks terrible!

I followed all the steps in the "Fonts Less Suck" guide and everything looks great everywhere on the web I've been except for slashdot... I don't get it. They're so huge and weirdly shaped. Obviosuly AA is working, but they don't look like what I'm used to on Windows and OSX...

So, I guess I've got some more work to do...

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I set my proportional to Sans-Serif 15 instead of Serif 16 and things look a little better... Did I only have 2 choices for proportional fonts in Windows, I wonder? I still don't really like it...

I've earlier complained that signatures weren't allowed long enough, since slashcode automatically adds in tags to any link you enter, etc.

Whoever(TM) at Snop.com wrote a userscript that takes care of this. You can hardcode your signature (or a list of signatures) into Slashdot Random Sig and it will randomly pit from the sigs you entered.

Nice, since it adds the sig the the text box when you submit, making it body text. This means your sig displays even if people disable sigs, but more importantly allows for longer sigs.

You'll need both FireFox and the GreaseMonkey extension.