OwlManAtt’s Blog

Yes, I am still alive. And yes, I did have the week off. Did I enjoy it? Yes, I did, thanks for asking.

Yep. This week was ‘WINTER BREAK’. Not a single person on IRC has understood the concept of winter break, but fuck them, they don’t get it and I do.

I did some serious vacationing. I slept. And I ate. And I IRC’d. And I slept more. And then I prodded the eC server some. And slept. Can’t forget slept.

However, the weekend was extremely busy. On Saturday, I began a remote Gentoo install on some box in kanadia. Stage1 on an AMD64 1.3ghz. And the guy wanted the whole shebang — X, KDE, GNOME, etc. Needless to say, I’m still working on this install over 30 hours later.

This was a pretty fun install, actually. There was a 120gb drive to partition, so 1gb was given to swap, 32mb given to /boot, and the remaining 118.99 GB were split between / and /home.

Now, that partition scheme is nothing special, right? Well, I guess. But there’s something I haven’t told you. /home is encrypted. <3 cryptoloop.

After going through all of the usual gentoo-woohoos and getting the base system all set, it was time to reboot under my custom kernel. I expected it to panic, but it came up, happy as could be.

There was also the KDE war. I stayed up seven hours later than I would have liked, watching KDE compile. I planned on starting gnome before I went to sleep.

With two packages remaning, I finally gave in. KDE defeated me. Bastard.

Additionaly, I had forgottens some vital usb module, so the mouse didn’t work until I built and loaded it. Oops?

Ah well. Everything is in a workable state, just afew things left to take care of, and I think uberuser will do them himself.

In other news, I started a webcomic. Woohoo. You lot, however, are not going to see said webcomic for a very long time, though. It is being published on the web, but it’s kinda secretive. Find it if you can, or ask me for the link. Or perhaps someday I shall post the address.

Or maybe not. Kay, school tomorrow, sleep now. G’nite, kids.

I just did an evaluation of Ubuntu Linux, which is a new ‘internationalized and free’ Linux distro. I downloaded the iso image from bittorrent, burned it to disk, added a 3gb drive to bell, and rebooted into the installer.

The installer, which was a boring-old ncurses-based interface, asked three or four questions, then went right on with the install, no bullshitting around. It detected all of my hardware without any problems, installed its base system, and then asked if it would be OK to put grub on the MBR. I told it no, since I didn’t want it fucking with my Debian kernels, so it finished the install and spit the CD out. No problems at all, so far. And it was easy, almost automatic.

I booted into Debian, modified my menu.lst to include Ubuntu, and booted into it.

Upon first boot, I was greeted by the firstboot script’s ncurses-driver interface. It told me that there would be no root user, and that if I ever needed root access, I could use sudo. The it helped me set up a user account. And then it went on its merry way selecting an apt mirror and downloading ~500 packages in 20 minutes.

Again, a bare minimum of questions asked, and nothing a newbie couldn’t handle.

After 27 minutes or so of downloading and installing, a graphical login prompt appeared along with a very loud sound effect. I almost had a heart attack, but I knew the sound was working.

I logged in, and by default, it started GNOME. It looked great, and the menus were clean. That’s more than I can say about a default Debian install.

So I started kicking around. I put in a music CD, and it played it automatically. I slapped in a data CD, and it mounted that all by itself. I plugged my USB drive in, and that was mounted for me, too.

However, it was unable to play a DVD–even a DVD without any CSS bullshit. I don’t know why, but totem lacked a vital plugin. There is no excuse for this, since Debian has support for DVDs without CSS, and the Debian people are so politically correct that it’s almost painful. After that, I tried an mp3. No luck, Ubuntu wouldn’t even consider playing it.

I took a look at the software it came with. There was a decent selection of stuff. gAIM, XChat, FireFox 0.9.3, Evolution, OpenOffice, 15 or so gnome games, multimedia applications, the gimp, xsane, and a few other things. Not bad at all. I started up FireFox and found my way to a site that used flash. No luck with that. The Ubuntu site says that the free flash player sucks, and the good one is pure evil. There was also a lack of java.

After screwing around for a few more minutes, I decided to return to my beloved Debian enviorment. Ubuntu was alright, but it wasn’t anything worth getting excited over. I initiated a shutdown and watched things die.

Something that surprised me were three deamons being stopped during shutdown. A RAID monitoring deamon of some sort, a LVM manager deamon, and the rsync deamon. Why would these be enabled by default? I’m obviously not making use of RAID/LVM, and I can’t think of a reason to have an rsync deamon running on a desktop box.

Ubuntu was OK, but it really isn’t anything special. It just acts like a slightly-more-crippled-but-pretty Debian. Easy to install, OK to use–until you want multimedia, that is. It lacked Synaptic (and a centeralized control panel), so newbies would have trouble figuring out how to install/update/configure their systems. Definitely not a distro for ma and pa.

Well, I played y game of 40k/LOTR crossover yesterday. I shan’t say much about it. Why?

I have pictures. Lots of pictures. And they speak for themselves.

The forces of Middle Earth put aside their differences to try and take down an Imperial speeder. They fail miserably.

More here. The images from the battle are 380-415.

Enjoy.

Meh, I was bored, so I took ten minutes and wrote a simple, yet amusing little game. You just get your friends to go to a link, and a grue eats them. It keeps track of how many people you’ve grue’d.

You can get eaten and sign up here.

More Monday, I think. I’ve got a game of Warhammer/LOTR (crossover) planned for tomorrow (expect pictures!), and then SCOSUG. Game night once again, w00t.

Updating today, as promised in my last entry. Woo, look at me, all responsible.

Right. Happy birthday to Liz, who probably won’t read this because she never checks my websites, but whatever. =X

Fear the tea.