What's really wrong with Fedora 9?

I like Fedora, but there's always some crazy voodoo I have to learn or figure out, or learn from someone els who has figured it out already to get my stuff working.

Recently, with Fedora 9. I'm using two 8800 GS video cards in SLI on a dual opteron workstation board, and I can't get into the GUI when I install the kmod-nvidia driver. My issue seems to be described by this post:

http://fedoraforum.org/forum/showthread.php?t=190393

Basically, I get the text login prompt, flashing like 30 times. I can log in, but I can't start X. Apparently, I need to read the log file to find out that I have two video cards, and that X can't start because it doesn't know which one to use. Then I need to specify one card.

That pretty much seems like a functionality regression to me, since it worked fine before. Then again, it worked fine *until* I installed the proprietary NVIDIA driver... Hmm...

So, is the evil closed-source driver at fault, or is the bad choice of Fedora to launch with the new X server at fault? I don't know. I guess I'll be happy if I can go home today (I read this on my lunch break at work) and get my box up and running with Linux again.

The real question is, "why should I have to use my google-fu to solve this problem?" It either needs to not happen, or there needs to be some kind of "safe mode" gui with a VESA driver so I can at least look at a FAQ distributed with the software, or get online to look up the solution to the problem. I'm lucky enough to have another computer to get on line and search for the answer, but lots of people aren't.

I didn't even try, I just switched to another Operating System, on a different machine. Maybe that's what's wrong with this whole Linux thing. It doesn't seem like there's any incentive to identify and solve "hard" problems. Just incrementally (though rapidly) improving with small easy problems until the hard ones become easy or go away. I suppose it is a different development model, but I think I'd actually pay for a Mac, just to get rid of these insane quirks.

Now to find a portable media player I can live with in Linux, and ditch this Mac, LOL.

BloGTK, Fedora 9, Mac OS X and an iPod.

Hello. Posting from BloGTK on Fedora 9... How did I end up here... long story, but this is my blog, so I guess I have time:

I got a broken update on Fedora 9, and I kind of gave up. I tried openSUSE, and liked KDE 4, but still missed a few things being on Linux in general, I also read awful things about KDE 4 missing critical functionality...

So, I tried KDE 4 on Fedora, and then futzed around and killed my GUI with an update. I got tired of living on the bleeding edge and unstable distros and not having what I wanted, and went back to...

Mac OS X. A friend of mine had a 1.25 GHz G4 Powerbook he had long been wanting to get rid of. I couldn't justify the cost, but I did come into some hardware he wanted by way of trade, and was able to get the PowerBook from him. It has a gig of RAM and OS X 10.4 Tiger, and it was everything I remembered. I like OS X, and I'd like to upgrade the machine to Leopard and 2 GB. However, I'm really living on the low end of the Mac experience.

I've got too many other priorites to get that MacBook Pro or Mac Pro that I really want, and I've also got all my PC hardware and my Windows Gaming habits to think about. I have a quad-core box that runs Windows quite well. I think I may just have to live heterogenously for a while.

We started working out at a gym, so I've got to figure out how to come up with an extra $80.00 a month. And, I'd really like an iPod. I can rip my CDs for the Powerbook and take that to work, but I can't really carry the laptop from machine to machine at the gym. There's the iPod Touch, and then the whole iPhone dilemma... ugh... my buddy has an old PowerMac and an iPhone that I could get from him, but I don't really want an iPhone. I'm *not* going back to AT&T, and I'm content to keep my phone and media player seperate.

Ripping CDs on a G4 Powerbook is too slow. One drive, a single-core processor... I installed Windows, and iTunes on my big box with 4 cores and 4 drives, and put in 4 CDs... thinking, I'll just put the PowerBook in FireWire Target mode after I mow through these CDs, and plop the tunes on there from my big box. However, iTunes wants to rip one CD at a time, even though I've got the whole 4x4x4 setup going... grrr... Windows Media Player might do it, but I want to rip to AAC, not MP3 or WMA... or do I really want a Zune? Focus... focus... iTunes ecosystem... Mac experience... okay.

So, I whip out a Fedora 9 install, and go with Banshee, which has treated me well in my short series of experiements on ripping CDs. Why didn't I just go back to openSUSE, since the lead developer of Banshee works for Novell? I don't know. Why did I use Fedora 9, when I know I'll have to use the bad/ugly plugins from livna to do AAC? I don't know. Why didn't I just settle for .mp3 files? I really don't know. I know Banshee won't work with an iPod Touch, so perhaps I really just haven't thought this through.

Oh well, I did the $10 upgrade at the wordpress.com site, so now http://blog.mvpittman.com is official. I guess I should e-mail a few people and let them know what's up.

Back to WordPress

I'm not doing self-hosting for a blog... life is too short for that. However, I don't want to pay to be on a social networking site that has a blogging component, and that's really what LiveJournal was. I don't do any of the social networking on there.

WordPress offered me a blog for free, and I left it because all the cool Fedora people were using LiveJournal... should have known. Fedora is cool, the community is cool, but for me, LiveJournal wasn't the right fit. If I learned anything from observing that community, it is that open, solutions are good and people should be able to use whatever they want. I'll probably just pay the $10 to get mvpittman.com to point here, and move all my files and random junk here, and pay for an upgrade to get rid of ads...

Not sure why I didn't use TypePad/Movable Type... maybe I will. I don't think WordPress will try to trap me. The export/import functions are pretty good. I'm glad I wasn't on LJ more than a few months, since I can only export one month worth of posts at a time.

I'll have to e-mail people who weren't looking at my blog through a redirect like http://blog.mvpittman.com and make sure they know about my new headquarters for world domination... all three of them. I guess I had better get my domain name stuff in order too. I switched from FastMail to TuffMail on a trial, but I'm pretty sure I'm going to end up keeping TuffMail. It's cheaper for what I do and FastMail does lots of things well, but I only need them to do e-mail. I guess that's another blog post... I've been taking notes for that one.

Windows Vista, World of Warcraft? Back to Mac

I quit Fedora, LOL. I installed, updated, and a yum install kmod-nvidia brought me to a terminal after a reboot.

openSUSE had this ridiculousness with not having a flash plugin with Mozilla Firefox on 64-bit arch... and... well that's not openSUSE's fault.

I installed my ill-gotten copy of Vista, and will probably have to pony up for some legit copies for my Media Center and gaming addiciton... speaking of which, I logged in to my WoW account management page, and noticed my account expires... tonight. Canceled... I'm not re-upping for another six months... even though I pretty much re-installed Vista just to play.

I might be ready to go back to Mac. I'll never be able to justify that Mac Pro machine though, and ugh... I dunno. I think I'll just trade and sell some hardware and snag an old PowerBook from my buddy Triikan. Then it's the iPod... and then a Mac Pro anyway, probably... LOL.

Back on Fedora

openSUSE was a pretty positive experience. during the past week, I installed from the KDE4 Live CD and DVD. I never used GNOME, and I think I could get along in KDE 4. However, I'm not really reading as many positive stories as I'd like about it.

I'm back on Fedora as I type this, having just installed from the DVD. That out of sync error on startup went a way when I switched from a crappy old eMachines CRT to an old crappy Hewlet Packard Pavilion M90 CRT. Go figure. I'm still running GNOME, and I'll probably keep doing that, unless something fabulous or catastrophic happens that requires me to switch desktops.

It is good to be back with a familiar desktop.

Oh, I did try Ubuntu a couple of times during this weekend too... not bad... I think I just don't want to be a lemming. Is *that* bad?

Router Resurrected

The power supply in my Smoothwall router failed. Fortunately, I had a few extra ones laying around. I guess I should have figured it'd happen with a power supply that must have been at least 10 years old. The machine is a Pentium III 450 MHz with two 10 Mbit 3com cards. It works great as a firewall/router.

I just need some thing smaller, and quieter, and that my kids can't just walk up and turn off randomly.

Catching up... Facebook is okay.

I've really got to get my addressbook in order. Since I've made this committment to staying in touch with relatives and friends, and then I got this T-Mobile Sidekick (and couldn't call my brother back because I lost his new number) and switched e-mail accounts and stuff, keeping up is hard.

Facebook has really turned out to be a boost to my self esteem. I keep getting notes from people who knew me from my "rockstar" days. It's a relative term... I pretty much went into hiding after college, and only a few people even knew what happened to me. Now all my friends from growing up are sending me little messages with the obligatory "hope all is well" statement. It is really okay.

The extra social stuff on Facebook is a bit of a distraction, but since I really just respond to the e-mail requests that I get, it isn't bad. I'm not going to complain too much about the invite I got.