Finally Fedora Core 3 is out. Core 2 was good, but on 64-bit, it was unstable. My d4x wasn't working well and apart from that, I got nothing against FC2. Now, FC3 is really cool but very heavy I'd say. Installation remains same except that now you can choose XFCE seperately where as in previous versions, it came only with full-install. Firefox 1.0PR, Thunderbird 0.8, bzflag, Xcdroast and Helix Player now come bundled together.

GNOME 2.8 is too damn good. Although it has been floating around since months, I was too lazy to attempt an upgrade from the sources. Finally, I'm using Gnome 2.8. First things first - the sound events works perfectly. Nautilus is a bit improved - shows the time left when copying/moving stuff around. Improved MIME features like "open with..." in the right-click menu. The old system of choosing panel applets from a hierarchial menu has been replaced with an eye-candy applet chooser. The new theme Glider looks good - atleast on my system.

After all the usual addons like mplayer, xmms-mp3 and other stuff, I finally downloaded the drivers from nVidia GeForce FX 5200. Installation was easy..just switch to run-level 3 and run the .run file. Modify the xorg.conf to use the driver "nvidia" instead of "nv", the generic driver. Modprobe nvidia manually the first time and remove rivafb. Add the line "rivafb" to /etc/hotplug/blacklist. This didn't make much sense to me. Well, that could be because I don't know much about frame buffers and X in general.

The good thing about Quake and Doom is, they use the same files over various platforms. All I had to do was to drop the linux binary in my windows games folder and bingo, it runs. But I'm still having problems with sound in Quake and Doom - it wouldn't just work. I guess the workaround is to recompile the kernel without ALSA and then get the ALSA sources and to build it. Sounds too boring. Still exploring for something easier.

Doom 3 deserves a special note. It is amazing!!! I played it for like 3 hours in a dark room - sitting all alone. Man, that game scared the shit out of me. Zombies popping out from dark corners when I'm toggling between my flashlight and shotgun. It's good...it's really good. People said that Farcry is as good as Doom. But I guess I'll finish Doom first before moving on to others. Adios.

Having 20GB for a windows partition is a real waste. Suddenly felt that I could put that space to a better use. So, I take a deep drag of my Marlboro and delete the whole partition. Copied all my music over there, thus freeing up around 15GB for movies. Not that I'm getting any new stuff these days. God bless Azazel for those movies. I've been looking for Unforgiven, Once Upon a Time in West and Last Tempatation of Jesus Christ for quite sometime now. And after finishing Unforgiven and Once Upon a Time in West back-to-back, I'm not really sure if I still want to watch those Terence Hill westerns. What's about to follow is highly biased. Don't go any further if you don't really like Clint and/or Sergio Leone.

The first thing I got to say is that the quality of the movies Azazel gave me is not as good as I expected. The clarity of the film is good, but poor resolution - it could be better. Sorry bro, I'm a bit fussy when it comes to the quality of movies. It's just not good enough for me. Anyway, after Nipun and Naresh told me that they've already finished Unforgiven and OUTW (don't worry, it's for Once Upon a Time in West), I suddenly found myself the lone Westerns fan to miss those two movies. Being a huge Clint fan than a Leone fan, I start with Unforgiven. The one thing you got to admire about Eastwood's direction is his want for originality. Unlike the Dollars Trilogy where the hero (villain???) is super-dynamic. The lead actor of Unforgiven is this out-of-touch, out-of-luck, aged cowboy Clint really is. The scenes where he falls down unable to climb his horse and that really awesome scene where Clint dreams of dying are the proofs for what I'm saying. Rest of the movie is a typical Eastwood western except for some quality action from Gene Hackman and Morgan Freeman. I still can't image both of them dressed up in cowboy gear. When you are watching out for cowboys, you are watching out for Clint Eastwood. Not even John "Duke" Wayne is a match for Clint in cowboy gear. Back to topic, if you've watched Hang 'em High, Josey Wales and High Plains Drifter, you can tell what's going to happen next in Unforgiven. "Yeah. When you kill a man, you take away all he has and all he's ever gonna have".

After a boring hour writing the end-sem of "Philosophical Discussions on Human Desires", I really desired for a good ol' spaghetti western. Let's kick-in Henry Fonda and Charles Bronson. One thing about Bronson - he's no Clint Eastwood. He's short, not a good build, no squinty look and damn, this guy doesn't even smoke a cigarillo. Stetson, spurs, poncho and a cigarillo - that's MY version of *basic* gear must for a Cowboy. A typical Sergio Leone film - music by Ennio Morricone. Man, Morricone is really a great composer. Do you know that Metallica plays his "Ecstasy of Gold" from The Good, The Bad and They Ugly, before most of their live concerts? Bronson's introduction is too damn good. Three gunmen wait for him to get off a train. One of them says "Looks like we are short of one horse". Bronson gives his wide grin and says "You brought two too many". What follows is naturally expected - Bronson shooting the bad guys. Now, hold on. Bronson takes a shot. THAT never happened to Clint. He always shoots all the dudes before they can pull out their Colts. May be Clint is faster than Harmonica. There are some good dialogues in the movie like "Can you sing or you can cut too?". I think I had too many expectations about Fonda and Bronson. Surely, this movie didn't live upto it. But the bottom-line is, when it comes to Westerns, Leone is the man.

I've read a comment for an anonymous reader on IMDB that Clint Eastwood in Unforgiven "blurs the line between heroism and villainy; between man and myth". Absolutely.