Now that I have Kubuntu 6.06 running (more or less) how I want it, it's time to get Neverwinter Nights running. An installer has been put together, making things much simpler than the instructions at the BioWare web page.

I've read that I can also improve performance by running the game in its own Xserver. There's a walkthrough at the Ubuntu forums, as well as a Perl script called XGame that does the same thing. For the latest version of Xgame, you need the libgtk2-perl package installed.

I haven't gotten all the bugs of running the new Xserver worked out, though. I'll update this when I do.

This time I decided to use a couple of configuration tools to make setting up my box less painful. This included Easyubuntu for media configuration and Envy for my Nvidia card. Very nice!

Things were going pretty well with my Kubuntu 6.06 system. I installed all the media plugins, set up some file and printer sharing, and even got the Nvidia driver working the second time around. Not too shabby. but there was one little irritation: I never got my scanner working, even though SANE supports the Lexmark x1185.

I was looking at the 6.10 Kubuntu release, Edgy Eft, and thought maybe it would work better with the scanner. So I downloaded the CD-ROM iso and tried to upgrade via apt-get from the internet and CD. Unfortunately, several packages never upgraded, breaking X, so I just reinstalled from CD.

Edgy didn't seem too different from the previous version. I had Firefox 2.0 and a slightly different color scheme. My scanner still wouldn't work. Moreover, the splash screen was totally devoid of anything except a progress bar, and even when I turned off the splash screen, I didn't get much in the way of useful info.

Tonight I go back to 6.06. At least I have gotten better at reinstalling and setting up the system.

The electric acid grandma test: My mother has been wanting to get on the Internet and send emails for a while now. Since neither she nor I knew if she'd like having a computer, I wanted to get something cheap. And since she didn't have a lot of space to spread out, a laptop was preferable. Looking through the classifieds, I found someone selling an IBM Thinkpad 380XD computer for $100: PII 233 MHz, 95 MB RAM, CD-ROM and floppy drives, and a USB port. Not bad for a starter system where you just need to do a few basic things.

I first started out installing Vector Linux, based on all the glowing reviews of its speed. It did run quickly on the laptop, but I could never get the sound card working, so I ended up putting Windows 2000 on it.

As you can imagine, Win2K was a bit of a resource hog. With her running as a standard user, I skipped out on memory-resident anti-virus and anti-spyware programs, and just had a software firewall. I suppose I could have left it out and just used the hardware firewall on the wireless router, but she liked going to coffee shops with free WiFi. But even the Win2K+firewall combo used up all physical RAM. And when Windows Automatic Update decided it was time to download and install patches, the whole system ground to a halt.

After getting my feel for Linux back with my Kubuntu adventures, I tried Xubuntu on the laptop. The computer was a little underpowered for the live CD, so I had to use the alternate install CDs. Edgy Eft kept on giving me errors that the install files were corrupted, even though the checksums always said the downloaded ISO and burned CD matched the source. Fortunately, Dapper Drake worked.

I was very pleased that the installer recognized the D-Link WiFi PCMCIA card I had installed. Unfortunately, it didn't get the soundcard. ThinkWiki gave me a lot of necessary information about the sound card, namely the model (CS4237) and the proper DMA, IRQ, etc. settings. But I didn't know what to do with the info, though.

Fortunately, this thread on the Ubuntu forums walked me through it. LordRaiden's guide is long and involves similar problems as well as the one I had. In case I accidentally hose the system (like I've done before with Kubuntu), here are the salient parts:

• Download the necessary packages: sudo apt-get install build-essential linux-headers-$(uname -r) module-assistant alsa-source
• Configure: sudo dpkg-reconfigure alsa-source
• Select the applicable drivers. I have read that both CS4326 and CS4232 work, so I selected these.
• Compile: sudo module-assistant a-i alsa-source
• Module load: modprobe cs4236 io=0x530 irq=5 dma=1 dma2=0 mpuio=0x330 mpuirq=7 synthio=0x330 synthirq=7
• Test with alsamixer. Success!
• To make sure this module loads at start, type sudo vi /etc/modules . In this new file, type snd-CS4236 and save.
• Save the alsamixer settings: sudo alsactl store 0

I'm likeing Xubuntu and XFCE. Especially when it typically uses about half the physical RAM. Here are the other key programs for my mother:

• Web browser: Firefox. I was going to install the more lightweight Opera instead, but apparently the system needs some qt libraries, and I'm afraid having to load the extra libraries would consume too many extra resources. I could use Dillo, but it doesn't have enough functionality yet. And Firefox is reasonably responsive on this system.
• Email: Webmail through the browser can be tedious on a slow system, so I'm setting up an email client. The top contenders are Thunderbird and Sylpheed-Claws. Thunderbird is a lot more intuitive, but it also is slower, so I haven't come to a decision.
• Word processing: Abiword. It's come a long way since I last used it, and has no problems opening basic Microsoft Word .doc files. And it's a lot more lightweight than OpenOffice.org. I'm leaving OO.o on the computer in case it's needed, though.

Another thing I've done is to update the Thunar file manager, using instructions at the Xubuntu Tips and Tricks Blog. Thunar 0.5.0RC2 finally gives me a trash can! I seem to remember Xffm in VectorLinux's Xfce having one, but this is Thunar's first.

The last thing that needs to be set up is a printer. She has my old HP540 deskjet that I know works with Linux, but I've also acquired a more recent Lexmark printer that prints at a higher resolution and handles color better. We'll see who works better soon.

Well, I hosed my Linux setup when I was trying to install the drivers for my NVIDIA GeForce2 graphics card. Usually I download the drivers from NVIDIA directly, but this time I saw that there were some available through the Ubuntu repositories. I instialled them and restarted the X server, to be greeted with...nothing. I tried to manually edit my xorg.conf file and to generate a new xorg.conf file with the command "sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg," but nothing worked.

So now I'm formatting the hard disk and starting over. I'm glad I listed what I did here. Hopefully that'll make it easier to start over. Unfortunately, I'll have to re-download all 1.0+ GB of the Linux NWN client again. Oh well.

It's been a while since I had some spare time to keep on fleshing out my Kubuntu system. This time I began with the media options, listed at Ubuntu's Restricted Formats page. I won't go through all the details, since it's all listed there. But there are two exceptions:

DMA I noticed my DVD playback was jerky, so I followed the instructions and edited my /etc/hdparm.conf file. Things were still jerky, until I realized I had to start the hdaparm service. Then it was great! I've never used Linux to watch DVDs before. I guess I owe thanks to DVD Jon.

Flash I installed Flash through Adept and got it working in Konqueror easily using the Restricted Formats documentation. For Firefox, I just visited Homestar Runner and it installed automagically....very nice. Opera (my personal favorite) didn't automatically detect it, so I included the /home/x/.mozilla/plugins directory in my plugins list (tools->preferences->content->plug-in options) and that was that. (The opera program came from the Opera website. I thought I had read it was supposed to be in the repositories, but didn't see it with Adept.)

I also got printer sharing up and running. Last time I tried this, it took me hours to get the smb.conf file edited correctly. There's a howto at the Ubuntu forums for doing it that way, but after finding this O'Reilly guide online, I decided to use the SWAT tool. Here's what it entailed:

• Install Samba and SWAT packages: samba-common, samba-doc, samba-doc-pdf, swat, and komba2. The last is a KDE-specific network browser.
• You need to log in as root to use SWAT. So I had to go to the "users and groups" settings and put in a root password.
• Installing SWAT puts the proper lines in /etc/services and /etc/inet.conf files, but you also need inet.d running. It's not installed by default, so I also installed the inetutils-inetd package. Without this, you can't access the SWAT server.
• Next, I used my browser to go to http://localhost:901, logged in as root, and set up my printer.

The last thing I did was to tweak the desktop a bit. I like how the Mac OSX desktop works, so I decided to emulate it a bit with KSmoothDock. I had problems compiling from source, but I found a link to the .deb file on the Ubuntu forums. I think you have to be registered with the forums to access it, though.

So far so good. The only thing not working right now is the scanner, still. But this is the best time I've had using Linux in a decade.

Well, everything went well with the initial install of Kubuntu 6.06. Now it's time to add the rest of my hardware, starting with my printer/scanner.

I'd been lucky with Linux support before on my old HP 450 inkjet, but last year I finally bought a Lexmark X1185 printer/scanner. No out-of-the box drivers, but I did find a How-To on the Ubuntu forums [ubuntuforums.org]. For this, I needed to install the "alien" package via adept. Then I followed the instructions, and had a working printer driver. The only extra thing I had to do was change from a CMYK to CMY setup, because the blues were flaky under CMYK.

Next was the scanner. When running Kooka, the scanner would just scan an inch of the bed, then stop. A look at the forums found this was a common problem for the X1185, with no solutions. I downloaded some additional packages, including XSANE and some extra backends, but still no luck. (libsane-dev, libsane-extras, libsane-extras-dev, python-imaging-sane, python2.4-imaging-sane, xsane, and xsane-common packages.) A Google search yielded this interesting page [geocities.com] which suggested compiling drivers (SANE backends) from the most recent CVS.

To begin, I had to download the CVS package, and since I was compiling, I also needed some other packages.

• sudo apt-get install build-essential
• sudo apt-get install libqt3-mt-dev libqt3-compat-headers kdelibs4-dev kdebase-dev

Then I downloaded the most recent CVS. It's anonymous login, and you just press return for the password. I began compiling, and found I needed some libusb libraries, so I then installed the libusb++0.1-4c2, libusb++-dev, and libusb-dev packages. I recompiled and installed, and while XSANE shows a "Lexmark X1100 series driver," my scanner still isn't working.

Well, I'll keep trying. It's not like I do a lot of scanning anyway. Maybe Wine will work, or I can just boot to Windows for that.

Well, after 5 years or so I'm going back to Linux. I've been using it off and on since 1995 when I bought a slightly used computer that had a Slackware partition on it. I wasn't able to do much with it -- I couldn't even get X running -- and eventually formatted over the partition.

In college I met a few fellow enthusiasts and tried Linux again, this time from Red Hat. Now I had X and internet, and a few other programs, but still used Windows for just about everything. Towards the end of my studies, I needed to upgrade my OS (Windows 3.1) and word processor (MS Works), but didn't feel like shelling out a lot of money (or pirating alternatives), so I installed Caldera OpenLinux and StarOffice. I ended up using Linux as my only OS for about 2 years and enjoying the experience. Much better than Windows 3.1, and more stable than Windows 95.

In 2001 I finally bought a new computer, and got Windows 2000 for it. I was pretty satisfied with its stability, and performance gains in computer hardware outstripped OS bloat. But as time has worn on, the problems changed from stability to security, and soon Microsoft will stop supporting Windows 2000 altogether. Since my computer's still meeting my needs well, I decided to go back to Linux again. Of course, the landscape has changed since my last foray. Red Hat's focused on enterprise systems, and the Caldera I knew isn't around anymore. So I've decided to go with Ubuntu -- or, more specifically, Kubuntu, since I liked my experience with KDE from Caldera.

This little journal will be a record of what I'm doing and how it's working out. It'll help me in record keeping by keeping everything in one place, and off my computer in case I need to reformat and reinstall. Maybe I'll even get some advice from the community here. Wish me luck!