Kasperian Moving Parts

kinda like batman, but with a wife and 3 kids

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Category Archives: Linux

I have a 13″ MacBook Pro that I use for my personal and non-work shtuff. I resized OS X down, installed Linux (Kubuntu), and set up a shared partition so that I can keep files there that I want to access from both OS X and Linux. Things like my music and video collection, Snooker [...]

I recently blogged about Desktop Linux possibly having some core/fundamental problems that might be keeping it from enjoying mainstream adoption and 3rd party developer attention as compared to, say, OS X. To my immediate defense, I’ll say that it was actually more of a brain dump and rant (True Story!) than a well-thought-out dissertation on all [...]

It’s a shame that my first blog post in months is something so antithetical to my normal posts as this, but 1) I haven’t blogged in forever (darned Twitter/Identi.ca/Facebook!!!) and 2) I just bought a MacBook Pro and am really happy with it thus far. So bear with me. Or don’t. I don’t care. If you’re [...]

I’m excited. I love learning stuff, I really do. I just did  a 12-minute screencast for work, and I think I’ve finally figured out how to get everything to fit together nicely. I’d never done a screencast before–not on any platform–but being that I needed to showcase some development work that I’ve done for the [...]

Stark contrast to my last post, I know, but I felt it was only fair to blog about the wonders of OpenSUSE 11.1, even/especially with my little nVidia chip. First off, I still think there’s something wonky going on with X and/or nVidia’s driver in taking so long to start that kdm ends up giving [...]

So, first off, OpenSUSE 11.1 has to be the sweetest, best put together distro, like ever. Really amazing, quality stuff.  The new installer has some excellent improvements, and package management has never felt zippier (zyppier??) However, there are a few problems that I’ve hit that I’m still trying to figure out after 2 days of [...]

I installed OpenSUSE 11.1 yesterday and there’s some… challenges… that have kept me busy for the last 2 days. But I’ll cover those in a different post…
Most relevant to the title is this: OpenSUSE 11.1 doesn’t come with blackbox or bbkeys, so I set about compiling them myself and hit some problems. Blackbox, of course, [...]

I just read Alexander Dymo (adymo)’s blog post “KDE4 performance on NVidia 8600GT: problem solved by bying ATI” and am quite sad because I’m pretty sure that it’s impossible to rip out the nVidia Quadro NVS 140M that’s crammed into the motherboard on my laptop and replace it with an ATI (or Intel?) chip. I [...]

My work laptop and main computing device is a Thinkpad T61 with an nVidia Corporation Quadro NVS 140M (rev a1) card. It’s been a frustrating last year in trying to run a KDE4 desktop as my main work and development environment because of the problems with the proprietary nVidia drivers that show up in KDE4. [...]

That’s a big title, eh? I blogged previously about setting up a multi-head X environment for development and testing, even though I’m working on a laptop with only one card. My previous attempt used Xdmx and multiple Xephyr displays, and there were some problems with it. Thankfully, Lubos commented about his nifty little fakexinerama library [...]

Finally!! I’ve been trying to figure out how to do this for a while now. Namely, I need to be able to test multiple display stuff out in Linux and being that I use my laptop pretty much exclusively for development, and I don’t have mulitple physical monitors handy at home (and certainly not whilst [...]

So, I’m trying to think positively about the 3-hour battle I just had with X. I learned 2 new things today, which I didn’t really want to learn but yay nonetheless.
First, Xinerama. I’m going to be doing multiple monitor stuff for work, which should be really interesting if I can keep my self-imposed stress level [...]

I got bored with my Ubuntu Hardy install last week and decided to have a look at what some of the other guys are up to these days. Mind you, there wasn’t anything horribly wrong with my Ubuntu host. I still ♥ apt; IMHO, there’s still nothing faster (although the new package management in OpenSUSE [...]

sudo zypper update:
2 Problems:Problem: No valid solution found with just resolvables of best architecture.Problem: Cannot install java-1_5_0-sun-plugin, because it is conflicting with java-1_6_0-sun-plugin
Problem: No valid solution found with just resolvables of best architecture. With this run only resolvables with the best architecture have been regarded.Regarding all possible resolvables takes time, but can come to [...]

Holy crap. The time between iterations of testing video encoding is prohibitive to quick progress as well as a (several) good night’s sleep.
After much pain and gnashing of teeth, I present you with the result of the last 3 hours of my life.
time nice mencoder dvd://1 -sws 9 \
-aid 128 -af volume=15:0 \
-vf [...]

So… first off, I Googled for Amarok, hoping to find some new sweet pixels and instead I find this. Um… so not the Amarok that I know and love.
Anyway, a couple of years ago, I won a PSP from the LinuxWorld convention. Being that I’m a geek, it was love at first boot [...]

I did a small performance test yesterday and was very surprised by the results. I wanted to see which encrypted filesystem was faster betweeen Truecrypt and LUKS. I created 2 20-gig files, one with Truecrypt and the other with LUKS encryption. Then I mounted the encrypted files and copied a 180 meg [...]

Technology had several glorious victories at my desk today. First, I was fortunate enough to get a very nice dual-head GeForce Nvidia card installed on my 4-way AMD 64-bit cpu server at work. It goes very nicely with the two beautiful 1600×1280 monitors that are now hooked up via twinview. This is [...]

Today was my last day with my (before today) current employer. It has been a really, really, really bizarre and surreal day. 2 weeks for that matter. I caught myself several times shocked that I wasn’t more overwhelmed by the huge transition that we’re now embarking on again. And I think [...]

Blame it on Seb, but I’ve been using Gmail’s web interface lately. This is partly because I’m in the middle of another life-changing job transition (but this one I’m really excited about, aside from the great white sharks and the triangle of death), partly because I like change (and after having used nothing but [...]

I’ve been trying to help a KPilot user (Hi Ronny!!) track down a really annoying and fatal bug for more than a year now.  The bug is triggered by trying to sync a Visor handheld with KPilot, and what happens is that KPilot begins to connect to the Visor during a HotSync, but then it [...]

In an effort to catch up reading through the last 2 months of eWeek magazines that I have stacked on my dresser yet never find time to pick up, I read through the May 28 issue this morning and found this very insightful statement by Jason Brooks. The article is called “Free software shines [...]

Really, really good article and interview with an awesome and amazingly bright guy. Con, I had no idea that you were such a complex guy. I wish you the best of the future, seriously.

I do NOT understand why this is a true thing, but I do know that it is a true thing. Namely, unless I use this xorg.conf, I get weird hangs during suspend/resume, and my docking station/external monitor thingey doesn’t work right. At some point, when I have all the time in the world, [...]

Here’s hoping….
I really do look good in red and white, guys!! =:)