Ok, so I was without regular Net access for a few months, in the middle of moving overseas and stuff, so I didn't spend much time on Slashdot.
Now that I've started looking in every day, I seem to get Meta-mod every day (sometimes twice - I'll do the M2, go back to the main page, reload an hour later and I'll get M2 again !), and I'm getting mod points about once a week.
It seems really weird, since I hardly ever post any comments, and so many people complain bitterly about how they never get mod points or M2 ...
Ok, weirdness over.

Well, the time finally came, Windows 98 was becoming more and more of a pain to run (regularly freezing, and reboots taking forever because of disk checking an 80 Gb disk). I've upgraded my games machine to Windows XP (my previous journal entry about Redhat 8 was for my Linux machine, which is firewall, mail host, main web browsing host, also connected to the scanner, tape drive, and CD burner).

It took a bit of fiddling. I searched around for sites giving advice on the correct installation order of DirectX and video drivers, and came across sites recommending one order or the other. Eventually I installed first the chipset drivers, then DirectX, then the latest NVidia drivers. Unfortunately, this didn't seem to work too well, the system froze (requiring the Reset button) a few times. I did two things after that - found drivers for my sound card and installed them, then installed DirectX 9 again (without uninstalling anything else). That seems to have fixed the problem, and I've managed to install and run a number of games without problems.

Finally, yesterday, I found instructions on getting System Shock (the original - DOS game !) installed and working on XP, and ... it worked ! Ah, that catchy boppy tune that plays in the first area ... takes me way back :)

Many games still to install, of course, but if it can handle SS 1, SS 2, Q3A, RoN, Civ2 ToT and SMAX (acronym soup !), then it can probably handle the rest too ...

First entry ! W00t !

Ahem, now that I've got that out of my system ...

Until recently, I've been running RedHat 6.1, with very few upgrades. This means XFree 3.3, older versions of things like RPM (I have a rant about this, maybe in another entry), and so on. The only kernel upgrades I did were to get USB working, since I have a USB cordless optical mouse (oooooh), and to get a suitable module compiled to support the ISA SCSI card that goes with my scanner.

On top of being out of date with upgrades, I've been relatively stubborn in sticking with my old window manager - no GNOME or KDE with me, I was quite happy with my fvwm2, and the setup I'd used for 6 or more years (at first, under SunOS 4.1.x on a SPARCstation SLC, then later under a couple of different Linux versions).

In recent times, though, there have been a number of programs that I've wanted to install, compile or otherwise play with, and various aspects of my system made that hard to impossible. For example, I wanted to install MPlayer, but RH 6.1 has the "not so good" version of gcc, 2.96, and it simply wouldn't compile. Finally, I decided it was time to reorganise my hard disks (since there were three in my machine, and, for various historical reasons, each had a different version of Linux on it - RH 6.1, RH 5.x, and SuSE 7.3), and upgrade to something more modern, so I downloaded and burned CDs of RH 8.0.

The installation went quite easily, my hardware was all happily picked up (nothing too exotic, TNT2, ISA Soundblaster card, SCSI card, two NICs), and there I was with RH 8.0.

I decided to see how far GNOME & KDE have improved since I last looked at them, and whether they'd work as I wanted them to.

Well, I intended to check out KDE, but as yet haven't stopped using GNOME. Now, I'll be the first to say that it's not yet the perfect window manager / desktop, but it's definitely a good enough desktop, at least for my uses so far.

I also downloaded the latest Linux version of Opera (my preferred browser). Unfortunately, somewhere between 6.01 and 6.11, it started to use a lot more memory and CPU time, and takes a very long time to start up (ok, I normally have 20 - 50 tabs open in my saved configuration, but I had that before, too, and it didn't take as long to start up). Maybe it's time to add more RAM (but 384 Mb should be enough for anyone :-> ).

Anyway, so far, RH 8.0 is, like GNOME, not perfect, but good enough for my uses. I still have the vague idea that I might like a source-based distribution more (e.g. Gentoo), and in a way that would be like a step back in time for me - once upon a time I was sysadminning, and got given a basic Solaris 2.n (2.4 ? 2.5 ? Can't rememeber) system to deal with. I downloaded a set of gcc binaries, compiled gcc, then emacs, elm, sendmail, gdb, and various other useful GNU utilities, just to make my life happier when using that system. I'm certainly not averse to wrestling with compiling software from time to time (after all, I used to admin a Pyramid system, running their own Unix variant, called OS/X (no relation to the current Mac one :-> ), and even it wasn't sure if it was SysV or BSD, so a lot of software needed to be tweaked and nudged into compiling there). Perhaps next time they decided to upgrade the RPM version I'll be sufficiently disgusted to shift.