Animus Wisdom

New year, new theme for my titles…. Any guesses ?

\brief KDE Release Event

I would like to thank everybody involved in the KDE 4 Release Event, It was a pleasure to meet fellow KDE gear heads, talk to media people, get drunk at google, make new friends, get drunk at the hotel, sneak in the backdoor of the oasis pub ( I think it was called oasis ) and sing karaoke till they kicked us out.

\brief Distro Hooping

While at the event I decided to try out Kubuntu since the great Mr. Riddell was so kind as to leave a few install cd’s for anybody who was interested, sadly my POS laptop didn’t like the idea; My Compaq V3010US is one of the worst laptops I have had the pleasure to buy. It has a horrible ACPI implementation, 30 minute battery life, it uses that damn broadcom wireless chipset and a nasty nvidia video chipset that burned out the original LCD display and has already killed a pixel or two in the new display. Sadly Kubuntu lowered the battery life down to 15 minutes and the video drivers didn’t work at all. I have been a hard-core Gentoo user for quite some time and I was a bit worried trying out a binary based distribution but I gave it the old collage try for the duration of my trip yet it didn’t stick, I reinstalled Gentoo as soon as I got home. I love to try distros but I have noticed I keep coming back to good old Gentoo.

\brief Closure

A little under a year ago one of my cars got stolen breaking my stolen car recovery streak; I have recovered every single car that has been stolen from me or one of my family members in a day or even minutes. — I found the damn thing last week in a impound lot!!! The car was stolen on the 14th of Feburary 2007 and was impounded the day after. So it has been waiting for me for almost a year. On the up side my streak has not been broken but on the down side it got stripped by thieves. Que sera sera.

\brief Wrap-up

Well after taking care of most of my backlogged work I can finally get back to some fun and interesting matters! A few photos from ( outside ) the KDE Event and my stripped out car can be found at http://photos.guillermoamaral.com/.

Cheers!

I hope everybody had a great weekend, specially the Yankees among you. I also got to eat some delicious turkey since my girlfriend loves to cook.

On a sad note, I screwed up a few minutes ago while playing with Weblogger in GNU Emacs, who knew that C-c C-k deleted posts! *woops* :-). Now my last post has gone A.W.O.L. and I find my self filling in the void.

But I do have some good news, I was added to the Planeta Linux Mexico planet, so I invite you all to go and check it out.

Just bought a brand spanking used “Intel Pro/Wireless 3945ABG Mini PCI-E Express 3945 ABG” for my compaq laptop, So I don’t have to use that bloody broadcom card.

Guess what…..

It doesn’t work T_T and I had everything ready to patch the bios… but nothing… does not even recognize the darn thing.

-20 USD

Half a year ago I found my self in dire need for a laptop, the main reason being an upcoming business trip that required me to have a laptop or risk madness.

I decided to go get one that same day to replace my old deceased vaio laptop, checked out a few bargain places in my local area ( all rubbish ) and by the end of the day I decided to go to Fry’s Electronics, picked the first laptop I found that was all black, dual core and AMD. This Compaq v3010us came to as an open box special and had everything I wanted!

Well after getting it home and killing off the existing HD data y noticed a few things… no Infrared or Bluetooth as promoted at the store and on the laptop it self, no biggie since I don’t really use them, but there it was… it has a BROADCOM wifi card :(

First thing I did was take the bloody thing out of the bottom of the laptop and release the IRQ, I went to eBay and bought a mighty Ralink USB adapter ( I try to keep everything as Free as possible on my systems ). In a little over a week I had my wifi usb adapter and that was when the trouble began…
The driver did not support SMP, that means if I wanted to use the ralink adapter I needed to turn off one of my CPU cores… That was not going to happen so I risked it and used it anyways on my SMP kernel with many many lockups along the way…

I decided to bin the buggy thing and get a new one ( it might be just that adapter right? Nop ) I had the same problems with my new adapter.. so I decided to break my clean Gentoo system and build the drivers straight from the driver site since the newer drivers do not warn about SMP ( that must mean it kinda works right? Nop again ) I had the same problems if not more with the new drivers, lockups on plugin or removal on random usage or it might just stop working all together.

After the 3rd time I lost important data because of a lockup caused by that bloody adapter I installed extra cabling all over my house and left the wifi unused… A week ago I decided to dig out that darn BROADCOM card and give it a try. After a few minutes it was working quite well… I just binned the new ralink usb adapter and I plan on using the BROADCOM wifi until I find a PCI-MINI wifi card that can replace it on this laptop.

I’ve had trouble with the Dreamhost service for a year now… I manage a few servers myself so I understand
most of the troubles that hit high traffic servers and how clients can be arse holes sometimes, but a year was long enough.

Read the rest of this entry »