Life at the CLI

I couldn’t wait any longer so I decided to do a clean install of slack current. The only problem I really had was that gcc gave an error durring setup, but installed fine using installpkg later. I was thrilled to find out that my troublesome i915 graphics card worked pretty much out of the box! (including widescreen and 3d acceleration) Despite this exciting news I started having issues with just about every other peice of hardware on my machine. When I’d power down or reboot I’d get a segmentation fault and an error complaining about nothing left at this runlevel. I also found out I couldn’t use my flash drives and my network cards. (wired and wireless)

It’s getting late, so I’ll have to debug the problems tomorrow. I imagine the problem lies somewhere with a bad install medium or hotplug. I’ll start by googling and see what info I can find, then hit up LQ or IRC if I can’t get anywhere.

Slackware has made great strides in hardware since 10.2, but my laptop has never really taken a shine to Linux.

… and just in case anyone’s wondering…

I’m using the huge26 kernel (which I gathered was the same as test26) with the modules installed from /extra.

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This Has been solved. Turns out it was a problem with the IRQs getting set. If you’re having this same problem add “acpi=noirq” to the “append=” line in lilo.conf

I’ve been looking at different web hosts and domain registrars looking for something in the $0 price range. As expected I found nothing.but overall, pricing wasn’t too bad. Domains can cost as little as $2 to more than $30. The average price was around 10 bucks a year for domains and $10 a month for an actual host. I was looking mainly for something to get my feet wet and that also provided an easy way to backup and move to a full blown host once the need arises.

I’ll probably end  up paying the $120 for a real host once I find a domain name I like.

It looks like Google is finally starting to take control of Writely. Today I got an email notifying me that my account will be moved to a new Google account. For more info see the Writely FAQ

I’ve finally convinced myself that I needed to learn UML. I’ve always had trouble sorting through the connections between the different parts of my programs (not necessarily objects) after they’d reach a certain length. It’s amazing how much a simple use case diagram can clear things up!

I finally made it through the vimtutor tutorial. It does a very good job of introducing you to basic editing. Using HJK and L instead of the arrow keys still feels weird and is going to be a tough habit to break.

I’m also looking for the right port of vim for The XP machine. Hopefully I can find one that doesn’t require cygwin or make changes to the registry so I can use my favorite editor no matter what computer I use.

For all your vi interests check out http://thomer.com/vi/vi.html It even has stuff about the emacs/vi debate if you’re interested.

I’ve decided that I can’t stand SUSE any longer. I’ve decided I’m finally ready to get Slackware really working for me. After the install I’ll get the 2.6 kernel compiled with the hardware I actually know the drivers for, then fix whatever’s not working as it comes along. Then I’m going to finally make myself at home on my computer. (Something I rarely do because I reformat so often)

I’ll also do something I’ve needed to do for a long time: go through a bunch of backups and finally restore them, and start a backup system/schedule for my new permanent home.

Today I spent all day writing a shell script to take 42 bzip compressed .wav files and encode them to mp3, ogg, and flac. Not only does it convert the files, but it also set the tags for the files too. My favorite part is being able to set the file names, title and track number tags based on splicing a config file.

If anyone’s interested in something like this let me know. It would be great if someone else can get some use out of it too.

I checked the Slackware change log today and I saw something exciting! Pat has added libmtp and libnjb to the list of libraries in the upcoming Slack 11. He has even linked some of Amarok with it! This means I may be able to use my Creative Zen Sleek Photo out of the box, or at the very least I’ll have the libs availiable to build other programs to use it.

Now I’m really excited about this release!

Every time I try to use sed, I still can’t make it do what I want. I know the basic syntax, but I still haven’t learned to see a file the same way sed does. I may just have a problem with regex in general, but wherever the problem lies after several sessions of trial and error I eventually get what I need done.

At least there’s several good references to help