Anthony’s Ramblings

Alright. I officially HATE ATI. My brother has a Radeon 9700 Pro video card. It’s a very nice video card. The only problem is, the ATI Linux drivers suck ass. I spent a whole day tweaking with World of Warcraft and video driver settings just to get it to run correctly. It still doesn’t. Don’t try setting any graphics options in-game…it’ll crash. If you pick the wrong combo. of settings, you’ll get torn/broken/missing graphics. If you reset the graphics settings to default, you may still have torn/broken/missing graphics. Oh what a nightmare.

So, I decided to see if I’d encounter similar or any problems with my Inspiron, which has an nVidia GeForce FX5200 Go. I pop Ubuntu 5.10 on it, make sure the proper kernel (SMB support, it has a P4 with H/T tech.) and proper video driver installed, install Cedega, install World of Warcraft, and ohmygoditworksflawlessly. The only problems I encountered were…

1. The World of Warcraft installer would launch but quit immediately. Easy fix – Set X’s default color depth to 24 bits and you’re good!
2. The known mouse bug. It’s an easy fix, also. There are two ways to fix the bug, both seemed to work for me. You can find details on the fix here.

Otherwise, sheer bliss.

And yes, if you cannot tell, I’m a bit excited. Hehe. I’m pro Linux so much, that I may buy my brother a new video card just so he has no reason to go back to Windows. Well, more pro no-Windows. If I could afford it I’d buy him an iBook, but Ubuntu is the next best (and much cheaper) thing.

I just need to figure out what’s comparable to a 128MB ATI Radeon 9700 Pro AGP 8x. I wouldn’t want to buy him a less powerful video card (this card does kick a bit of ass in Windows). This website has the core specs that I need to match and/or surpass…hopefully without breaking the bank.

I fell in love with the Treo 650 back in June. I wanted one. Found a guy selling one on eBay, and he mentioned he had 8 more (but didn’t have them posted on the site). I e-mailed him about it. He told me to send him $400 (average eBay price for an unlocked Treo 650) and to confirm my mailing address. So, I did just that. Two weeks later and no Treo. Two and a half weeks later and my e-mails addressed to him started bouncing. I’d been screwed over. I filed a complaint with PayPal, but since I didn’t do my transaction through eBay, all they could do for now is put a hold on his PayPal account, forward me any funds depositied in that account, and do a light investigation. Of course, if I was him, I’d ditch the account.

I decided to check the balance of my PayPal account today. I noticed that the funds were a bit higher than I remembered. I was like…wha?! I GOT MY REFUND! Almost 6 months later…but I got it! Whoo fuck yeah!

Last night, my brother approached me and practically begged me to install “Linux” on his computer. I asked him several times if he was sure, and made sure he knew I didn’t want to waste my time setting it up if he was going to change his mind in the next 30 seconds. So far it’s been 24 hours and Ubuntu is working out quite well. The three main issues I was worried about were 1) ATI video card, 2) wireless support, and 3) Internet connection sharing so he can use his Xbox online.

So far all my worries have been crumpled. Wireless support has been flawless via ndiswrapper. I’ve got an ATI video driver installed, and have successfully ran small 3D apps like Chromium, TuxRacer, and screen savers. I need to get my hands on Cedega to really test it out. Enabling his computer to “share” the connection to the network was simple, too. Everything is pretty simple if you’re not afraid of a command line interface (the dreaded terminal). The new Cedega looks like it’ll be easy for my brother to install his favorite Windows games, too! What also helps is that my brother is willing to learn, and has been chanting “Windows is evil/the devil” for the past few days.

From the mouth of my brother: “Ubuntu is the next best thing to a PowerBook”. So hopefully that means this won’t be a fad.

Oh, and if you can, stay away from the Linux driver on ATI’s website. The configuration process can be more complicated than explaining quantum physics to a retard. Most of the big distros have a nicely packaged driver that (with a little butter) will slide right in.

Just in case you want to get me something for Christmas, or for any occasion, here’s my Amazon.com wish list.

My Wish List

Keep in mind that this list is composed up of anything I can think of that I’d possibly want. Prices aren’t even consitered (there’s something for every spending range!).

I’d completely forgot about my LiveJournal account that I used to use quite often. Seems that the death date was February 10th, 2004. Wow…almost 2 years. Hmm…I didn’t use it as often as I thought. Apparently I started it January 27th, 2004. Eh well. It’s all dumb stuff, anyway. hehe.

The blog formally known as me

Oh yes, I forgot to mention that I’d been having DNS issues….probably for a few weeks. The issue appared slowly. Things started getting a bit laggy. Eventually, it came to the point to where surfing the web was painful (especially sites that have conten liked from other sites/servers). Anywho…they’re fixed! It’s alost like getting broadband all over again.

Lucas downloaded the OS X Tiger Intel image. We decided to try it on my Dimension 8100 (P4 1.4 GHz, 512 MB RAMBUS RAM), and it ran pretty well. PowerPC emulation didn’t appear to be working (or wasn’t working well). Some apps (iTunes specifically) wouldn’t launch at all. We also tried OS X on his AMD box (Athlon 3200+). That didn’t work at all. OS X would kernel panic instantly…wouldn’t even attempt to boot…nothing! I’m not exactly sure why it didn’t run. I read that it should work on AMD systems, so it’s possible that another component in his system is incompatible, or they were wrong. Lucas gave it a shot on his Dimension 8400 (P4 3GHz /w HT, 1 GB 533MHz DDR2 RAM), and it works (minus sound). Apparently it crashes a bit less than it did on my 8100.

It’s not an impressive picture, I know (click it to enlarge). The screen shot function of OS X didn’t seem to work (or else I would’ve shown more). The image file that OS X would create would be blank. Eh well. It is beta, and also not supposed to run on any machine except the special x86 development workstation. In any case, I think it’s pretty cool. However, you don’t get the true Apple experience unless OS X is on a real Mac. *hugs his PowerBook*

I was at a friends house today. Her boyfriend came over and we hung out. It was cool. I began to notice all the small boyfriendy/girlfriendy things they’d do. I was thinking about it and I came to realize something. Companionship with a special someone of the opposite gender…aka…girlfriend, is something I’ve missed for a while. I’ve just shoved it aside and forgot about it. Well, no sense in hiding from it any more. I’ve gotta be honest with myself. I miss the whole relationship thing. I don’t have a heck of a lot of experience in the field, but from what I’ve experienced…I miss it.

Anywho…there’s my feelings overflow dump for the day.

Oh yeah, and if you noticed….no more ads .

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