Chrisus zlog

... is my mother! Today I brought her the brandnew PC we installed at the DIP 2 weeks ago. I told her, that she has to put the parts together by herself and she managed it perfect. She missed nothing and failed never. Then she started Linux for the (her) first time and had no problem to insert username and password. She had a short look were she can find programs, clicked on "German environment" and rearranged xfce into german menues by answering questions in the bash, typing Y or N with my help what the questions mean. Nice. Mam at the console. Then she started Abiword and wrote the first sentences, inserted a table and said that it's ok. Had a look at gnumeric and found it not difficult. And then she wanted to know, were she can see the directories and were the files are stored in. (youbel!). I then installed her printer, a HP 520, with no problems and printed a test page. Perfect. Last challenge: turn off the PC. But she found the button, noticed "Herunterfahren", klicked on it and that's it. The only thing she didn't know was that "modern" PCs turn the power off too. She wanted to press the start button again. Maybe I can move her to make a presentation at the next CUG-meeting. The goal of the next future will be the internet. Well, let's go!

Last night we had a nice debian install party although I was the only one that installed Debian in fact. But first things first:
We met to install different (k)(x)(edu)buntus on PC and Apple. I was there with an Celeron 333 with 96 MB RAM and 3,4 GB HDD to try to make him walk. The first try was xubuntu. It failed definitly. After hours of configuring "anthy" and finaly installing GNOME without "menu", there was nothing at all there to use. It should have installed xfce. Thanks to Philipp, he invited Martin, a Debian developer, to bring in "Schweinsbraten". He helped me to install... pardon, I watched him installing Debian with xfce. I think it was the fastest install at the event. We put abiword, gnumeric, firefox, icedove, xmms, k3b, gwenview, xpdf and some minor programs on the PC. We installed a new soundcard, a new CD-drive and a new flatscreen. The little thing works very very fine and so fast that it is unbeleaveable. I heard voices like "I also want an old PC!" in the audience. The PC is now not walking, it is running!
I learned a lot at the event, that finished at 3 a.m. with a final beer.

I'm on the run for new programs. Found TeXmacs, a TeX UI that uses emacs as editor. Great, I liked it from the first time, because it feels like my preferred editor (surprise!). The next program I explore is inkscape. And I am astonished what is possible with it. Third is tuxguitar. Strange, but I think, I could handle it if I want. Let it grow...

Im writing an article for my study in OpenOffice.writer. Finaly I finished the text and begun to insert *.jpg pictures. After the fifth picture the program crashed down. After a restart it startet the recreation of the article and crashed down while doing it. Restarted Linux and restarted OpenOffice.writer. Again the recreation of the article started. And finished, so I had the article back again. But after clicking on a picture it crashed down again. Again and again. Now I fixed it by saving the article as *.txt, so the images are gone. Puh! But what now? I was very angry aout this! It seems that I will have to make a different file for the pictures and add them after printing out without page-numbers? Or make place in the file and add them by glueing them after printing out? Is that what I want? No! Any ideas?

Started to figure out TeX. On my system teTeX. And as I tested, I read the homepage of Thomas Esser. There he wrote, that he will not develop tetex anymore. I should join tex live. So I will have to change my installation. Tried out some tex-commands. I think I will change my preparation of the lessons for school to tex. Mostly to learn how to use the system. I created an article that is usefull for me. But then I started searching howtos in the internet, and it seems that TeX is not as easy as I thought. But I will take it as challenge for the next year. It is a combined challenge for TeX and emacs. Wonder what I will tell you in one year.

With Alberts help I found out that my ATI graphics card is not supported by ATI because its too old. So I will not have the possibility to play flightgear. Unfortunately.

Yesterday I tried to install a new kernel, 2.6.16_2. That endet up after a reboot with "kernel panic". There was no ramdisk for the new kernel. Today I installed 2.6.15(!) and the tool encountered a missing ramdisk from the 2.6.16-kernel, tried to repair it, was successful and so it works with the 2.6.16_2-kernel. On the other hand cups told me that the printer is not connected anymore. The next challenge. Wonder what the reason is.

I took the other network card, installed the driver I had and all was good. Internet connection from the first second on. Then I installed Openoffice.org, Pegasus mail, Irfan View and Antivir. So the PC is working for its purposes and fast enough. All in all 16 times reboot. Well.

This is the story of Claudias new PC:
The old one died, so i got a "new" one, mounted all parts (hdd, fdd, network device, graphic card and RAM). After some reboots I knew, the motherboard was damaged in the RAM section.
Then I got another "new" PC, 333 MHz, 97 MB RAM, ATI Rage 3D graphic card and a guillemont soundcard. I installed Ubuntu and had the following effects:
Very very slow, but now I know, minimum should be 500 MHz and 256 MB RAM.
No sound, the card was not recognized.
No printer, the printer was not recognized too.
A screen resolution of 862 x 680. I dont know the vertical and horizontal frequencies.
All in all, it was not usable.

So I decided to kill Ubuntu: I erased the HDD and installed my Win98II.
13 reboots untill printer and graphic is installed. What a feeling. Only the network card is not working. I have no drivers. So I will use my other card tomorrow where I have drivers. I always thought Win autodetects this devices? Win98II was made for PC's like this. It is running very "fluid".

I detected, that my mobile has the possibilities to act as an email client. So we tried, sitting in the Weli, to check my emails and write one with my mobile. It works fine. But what is authenticated login? Anyway, now I can check my mails anywhere I am. ;-)

Started my computer, tried to run licq... nothing. In the evening I did another update of my system. Nothing with qt, nothing with licq. But after synaptic finished, I tried to start licq and it is runnig. Strange. Any hints?

Since the last update to kde 3.5 there are some heavy problems: After logging in, while kde starts, I get the message: "Could not start kdeinit, check your installation". Clicking it away starts kde anyway. Huh? Apparently this blocks some services from kde (I do not use). libqcad0.dev causes problems while installing. No reason. So Qcad doesn't work. Since the last update licq doesn't work. All I know is, that the reason is a QT library. And all I know is not enough to solve the problem. So there is no ICQ contact with me. Pardon: when I start "licq -d console" i have licq on the console. :-) But until right now I couldn't get any information how to use it.

Yesterday I made my usual update with synaptic. 370 MB had to be loaded down. And after a long time I had a new KDE: 3.5, well. First I noticed k3b is working again after 2 months of absence. Then today I started OpenOffice. It froze down. After starting synaptic again, there were 75 MB to download. Most of all OpenOffice. Now it works. But: KDE 3.5 looks fine. It would be better to have a new hardware. It is slower than before. Now it is difficult to recognize the difference between starting an application and a computer froze-down.

For the first time i did it by myself without asking anybody else. ./configure make make install. And *surprise* it worked. To export files as mp3 out of audacity I have to use lame. I found a hint that told me: get the tar and compile it on your own computer, otherwise it wont work. And I managed it. A small step for mankind but a big step for me.

After some weeks of doing nothing I made an update. 477 MB to download. I got a full new system. kde 3.4 mostly. But I lost some beloved programs: k3b and gwenview. Maybe in the next days?
After the first update I had no access to the Internet, but after a full restart with no energy to all devices it worked. I lost some programs as k3b and gwenview, as I saw in the first moments. Wonder, what the future will bring. For burning CDs I use now xcdroast. Burnt the first CD with it. So it works.