xabbott.blg

The first boot of the systems takes me to the BIOS. I disable the following: Legacy Diskette A:, HDD SMART monitoring (doesn’t work for this configuration). I then find the two menus I’m not totally familiar with. Under advance there is a menu JumperFree Configuration and CPU Configuration. They both mostly listed things as enabled or auto. I’ll get back to those two later.

I save changes and exit, booting in Vista 64 Ultimate now. Within a few minutes BSOD! The BSOD mentions STOP 0×0000000A, IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL, and something about updating my bios. After some searching I found the following on Microsoft’s support page: Error message when you try to install Windows Vista on a computer that uses more than 3 GB of RAM: “STOP 0×0000000A”

Annoyed, I removed two sticks of ram.  I now have 2 GB and I am able to boot into Windows. I apply the update, along with a few others. Shut down, reinstall ram, boot up. No more blue screens since then.

I start installing drivers and included software now. The most notable of the bunch here is the ASUS software, ASUS AI Suite. It is an interface to the various power saving functions of the motherboard. You can also “easily” over clock and monitor your system temperatures. I did not like the UI for this software at all.

You get this gear shifter and you shift it high or low depending on your needs. High being performance and low being maximum power savings. I didn’t want or need this functionality. I wanted my clock speed to stay constant. No option at all to do this. As far as the easy over clocking, I did over clock using it to 20%. It booted and worked but I didn’t like how it made the changes. I ended up uninstalling all the ASUS software.

I thought that would stop my clock speed from changing on it’s own but it didn’t. I had to go back into the BIOS, into the advance menu. I set JumperFree Configuration to “Standard” and everything under CPU configuration was disabled. 

After that everything I almost had everything running how I wanted it to. The last issue was the way Vista was detecting my SATA hard drive. It was showing up as a removable SCSI drive. Apparently there are/were a lot of issues with the Nvidia chipset drivers. I downloaded the latest 750i nForce driver for Vista 64 and it solved my problems. I would later read I should never use the nforce drivers…but so far they’ve been fine.

Tupac is a front end to the Arch Linux package manager, Pacman. It’s very similar to Yaourt in that it has colored output and searches the AUR but does this all much faster. The speed is due to it’s cached implementation. All actual package installations are done with Yaourt. It was created by Pajaro and written in PHP.

Aside from the speed increase, search functionality was also improved. For instance if I search “city sim game” in Tupac I get the following results: lincity, lincity-ng, and opencity. If I do the same search in Yaourt or Pacman I will get many more unrelated results. For example I get back packages related to audacity and metacity.

Tupac is also written with other frontends in mind. As a proof of concept Pajaro has also more recently released Qupac. While still a new project it is very functional.

The only downside I could possible see with tupac is the fact that it is written in PHP and so depends on it being installed. Yaourt is a bash script and tupac it depends on it as well.

Both tupac and qupac can be found on the AUR.

I recently read a blog post that brought up some neat features of VirtualBox. It is a kinda how-to on getting VirtualBox+Windows to integrate into an Ubuntu desktop. I personally don’t have a need for virtualization but have used VMWare, Qemu, and VirtualBox to load up different distros.

Out of all of those mentioned above the only one I currently had installed was VirtualBox. I even had Windows XP on a virtual drive. There really wasn’t much to do with my setup to get seamless windows going. I hit Right CTRL+L and that was pretty much it. I even had Compiz going and didn’t run into any problems.

Since I didn’t really need Windows for anything this was more of a tinkering expedition. I loaded up some Silverlight sites. Most of the sites ran fine, which was to be expected. I tried watching Bill Gate’s keynote video, the audio was fine but the frame rate of the video was low. I’m sure this was just more of a hardware and/or configuration issue on my part though.

I am writing this post from Midori. Currently described as a lightweight web browser. Which I don’t even get at this point, hasn’t every browser since Internet Explorer been a “lightweight.”

In any case, what I feel really makes this different is the fact that unlike most GTK2 browsers, Midori uses Webkit to render web pages. Firefox and Epiphany, the default Gnome browser among many others use the Gecko engine.

Webkit is a fork of KHTML, which powers KDE’s default web browser Konqueror. Webkit itself is probably most well known for powering the default Mac OSX browser Safari.

As far as Gecko vs Webkit. I haven’t used Webkit/KHTML based browsers enough to really say what makes them different. On both Windows and Linux I use Firefox, on OS X I use Camino. Using Midori I didn’t really run into any noticeable rendering issues. Things like GMail and Google reader worked fine. I checked various sites I visit and it rendered them all without any snags. I did notice however that pages with text entry dialogs are a little buggy. Oh and for those that care, it does render the acid test correctly. Although I did noticed when I scrolled up or down it distorted it. Normally the page in question doesn’t allow you to scroll. So that could be an issue with Midori not Webkit.

I should mention before I get into the more Midori specific aspects of this post. I am using version 0.0.17, a self described “early alpha.” At this point it’s far from daily use ready.

Working right now is the basics. You can bring up pages, search from the search entry box, reload pages, move back for forth, go to a homepage, create new windows and tabs. You can create bookmarks but you create them from scratch. Then they are only accessible in the panel not from the bookmarks menu.

What isn’t working yet? Unable to tab through fields on a page, no support for secure http, no font configuration, the preferences in general is mostly a place holder at the moment, unable to save files, binary files just open in a page, no controls/menus for tabs aside from close, bookmarks very limited.

It’s an interesting project that I’ll have my eye on. While I really like Firefox, I love choices so hopefully this florishes. I also have my eye on Kazehakase, which also plans on letting you choose between Gecko and Webkit.

Of all my Arch packages, the one that seems to run into the most problems when upgrading is VLC. I’ve gotten used to rebuilding it but reading the forums you can see this is still a challenge for many. The latest fix involves rebuilding ffmpeg without swscaler. Then applying this patch to VLC and rebuilding it.

Instructions and tips were posted but for some new to Arch and/or ABS they were still hard to follow. In comes bangkok_manouel to the rescue with this post. A very nice how-to style breakdown of what needs to be done.

I’ve personally switched to MPlayer, I’ve also recently discovered a very VLC-esque front end for it. It’s called SMplayer. All available in the Arch ‘extras’ repo.

You download a movie and the audio is out of sync with what you see. That is something you can easily fix with VLC.

If you need to adjust your audio because you hear things before you see them press Ctrl L. You need to do this while playing so you can see how much you need to adjust it. It slows it at 50ms at a time.

To speed it up press Ctrl K which will increase at 50ms a time.

Mugshot isn’t new but it’s still small and I believe invite only. I clicked a link to it on someone’s blog and got an invite via email. So not sure what happen there. Anyway I really dig this service, it ties up all of your “weblife” into one hub. In one spot my friends would be able to see what I’ve dugg recently, pictures added to my flickr account, my recent bookmarks , blog posts, etc. It doesn’t support everything yet but it’s growing.

Best of all you can share and view activies via RSS feeds or it’s desktop application. The desktop app has a version for every OS too.

For Arch users the package in the community repo is out of date and orphaned. Check out this thread to find out what you need to do to compile it.

Yaourt is a Pacman wrapper for Archlinux. I’ve been using it for a week or so and now wouldn’t want to be without it.

It offers colorized output, easy AUR package management, orphan clean up, and uses all the same commands as Pacman. One of the little things I like is your package search results tell you what’s installed. Here is a screenshot comparison.

The Yaourt website is in French but has screenshots. However there is a detailed post on the Archlinux forums with installation and usage documented. Or simply get it from AUR here.

None of this is new but interesting if you haven’t seen it before. A forum post today reminded me of them and I thought I’d share. BumpTop and Lowfat have proposed interfaces that are 3D. Unlike current 3D desktop interfaces, they are not converting what we already use.

They both use 3D to try for organic file management, similar to how you deal with papers or photos around you. I find them both very interesting but I don’t think this is the future of desktop file management. I believe they would work very well for tablet PCs or possibly some kind of photo album appliance. If you just want to see them in action, here are the videos both in Flash. Other formats available on the respective websites.
BumpTop 3D Desktop Prototype
Lowfat Preview

Ok so my last Metisse post was really just a Mandriva rant. I compiled and installed it on Arch today. The website’s build documentation is good and easy to follow. Basically just configure, make, install. I did use -enable-glx-x86 and –enable-mmx on the Metisse configure.

Once it was all installed you have a few ways to start it, which are explained here. I did it the “easy” way. I already boot into runlevel 3 and run startx. So I just created a new .xinitrc for Metisse with the following in it.

Xmetisse -ac -depth 24 -geometry 1280x1024 :1 >& .Xmetisse-log &
metisse-start-fvwm >& .compositor-log &
urxvt # this will allow you to terminate this session by typing "exit" and to
# restart the compositor using metisse-start-fvwm if it ever crashes
killall Xmetisse

Pretty much ripped from the official instructions with the terminal, resolution, and color depth changed.

I immediatly noticed two things my fonts and cursor. My fonts looked very very small, I assume it had something to do with a dpi setting. The cursor and the area around it was covered by a large flickering black box. I opened up Firefox and started reading how to do all the cool stuff I’ve seen in the videos.

I move some windows around, zoom them, spin them, etc. You can do all of this with hotkeys or mouse clicks on certain areas. I try to take a screen shot with Scrot but it only captured the background. Reading further I see you need to use a capture hotkey that outputs to jpg.

I then start to open up many windows and attempt use the multiple desktops. This whole process is very slow and clumsy.

You can’t drag the window to another desktop. You can’t grab the little window representations in the pager. I right clicked the window border itself hoping for a menu, nope. You have to right click the menu icon in the window title bar, this gives you a copy of the pager which is same size as the one already on the screen.

The navigation was just as bad, moving to another desktop makes the windows appear to slide away or into view but slowly. Also zooming out to view all nine desktops didn’t make navigation any better. When you click on a desktop while zoomed out you have to watch the background image slowly move from one desktop to your destination, then you can zoom back in.

It wasn’t all bad though, one feature that is unique to Metisse is the ability to cut and paste parts from an application. This worked surprisingly well and unlike many of the other features was fairly intuitive. I was able to cut out the file explorer from Rox, my Gmail status and Google search bar from Firefox, then paste them into one window. I don’t have any personal uses for this but just seeing it in action was nice. It functions in such a way that it is still affecting and being affected by the original. If you resize the original windows or close them your “custom” window will not look right anymore.

The only other note worthy thing was the quasi radial menu. If you held and dragged the corner of the window this nice menu would appear around your cursor. I’ve always wondered why this type of a menu wasn’t used more often.

Recalling the Metisse videos I can’t help but be reminded of a subpar movie with all the good parts in the trailer. It’s not ready for prime time (yet) and I have no idea why Mandriva is shipping it with thier live disc.