5.14.2009

Ubuntu on pIII


If any of you keep up to tabs on my twitter, almost a week ago I installed Ubuntu 9.04 (jaunty jackalope) on an old pIII donated to me by my father in law. It's got under 400mb of memory, a painfully slow proccessor, and I'm sure would crumble under the pressure of any windows distro.

With ubuntu though, it's practically a speed demon. I mean I've noticed a few slow-downs with Multi-tabbed browsing & multi-desktop stuff running at the same time, but this computer was about to be taking up a landfill.

I've been wanting to have another dev environment for some time now, and my collection of "broken" computers are far too broken to run period let alone install an OS. They've got BIOS problems, drives missing/broken, so I'm quite happy to have this new member of my network.

I've never really used a 'nix distro actually installed on a machine. I've played with pureDyne, Damn Small Linux, and Knoppix Live CD distro's and they're all great in their own way. The problem I've had with Live CDs is that they're hogging my CD drive, you can't install or change anything, and on some of them it's really confusing to mount an USB key, or even the hard drive.

The installation proccess with ubuntu was really easy (expecially on a machine I planned on making ubuntu-only.) I popped in the disk, filled out some forms, and let it chug away.

Mounting drives is now as easy as plugging them in.

My only issue now is that my internet connection is shite and upgrading, or installing anything is daunting (because if it fails, you have to start again.) But perserverence is key, and I'm sure someday I'll get a good connection.

I've been trying to install Pd-extended (the one ubuntu serves through apt-get is vanilla) But it's got 8 files that need to be upgraded & sure enough my connection craps out half-way through. so hopefully soon I'll have some fun playing with the linux-only capabilities in pureData.

Until then, I'll just enjoy the pre-installed games (they're crazy-fun) and keep trying.

update:
Ok. i figured out how to get a list of packages Pd needs installed, and now I'm only missing one.
It was pretty easy to find the list, just click the details button... the smaller files were easily downloaded & installed, the only one giving me headaches now is libflite1, it's like 14.1mb, and keeps failing on me. I downloaded it & some other attachments on a flash drive so hopefully this will get me on my way to actually installing Pd-extended.

Template Issues: RESOLVED

Oh yes... this is nice. I fixed my template issues up real good, now all I have is to style the prev/next/home & atom feed buttons on the bottom of this page and it'll be %100.

To resolve my issue I had to host my javascript remotely, which let me play with code.google.com, which I was hoping to do soon anyhow.


5.13.2009

agh !!

Major technical difficulties ... I wonder is wordpress has these issues and if I can port over there seamlessly... hrm... but I have been working on this site & it's SEO for a while now, so I dunno... I might have to look into it, although I've had issues with wordpress before.

5.07.2009

Throbbing Gristle: Boing Boing Interview



Check out all the lovely Korg & DIY gear in this. They've got almost all the Korg Nano controllers, DS-10, Kaossilator & miniKP... Theremin, DIY Modular Synths... two words: Ruff Grawr.

5.01.2009

Politricks Funny



OK, so again... not a politics blog BUT I just love the "Renaissance" going on in 'Merica right now... It entertains me to think that millions of people thing a politician will keep his word, after being shown time & time again that campaign promises, are empty promises... of course this video was produced by the National Republican Senatorial Committee, so take it with a grain of salt. For better (impartial) information try out http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/