Technical Reviews and Geek Toys

It has been awhile since I have had the time to write something. A lot has happened... Ubuntu 9.10 was released as well as Windows 7. I have installed Edubuntu 9.10 and was impressed at the bootup as well as shutdown time. The look is clean and Edubuntu has the additional software for kids.

But this article is about Windows 7 Pro. I received a Vista Business to Windows 7 Pro upgrade CD and found the time to install it. Well, there wasn't much to it. I booted up on the CD and told it I want a fresh install, and selected the partition that I wanted to install to. It put my existing Windows XP installation as well as the old Documents and Settings into a folder titled Windows.old. That was pretty much it. I must have missed the part where I could repartition the hard drive... The system rebooted a couple of times and prompted me to enter my Key Code. It didn't even ask for my Vista CD.

I opened up the Windows.OLD folder and found my profile and copied my files into my new Documents and Pictures folders.

Whoa.... my display just went wacko... oh a little popup saying an update was just performed, on my display chipset. odd....

Pretty uneventful... For now it will be the only OS on this machine.

As I mentioned in Sharing My New 3G Internet Connection With The Rest Of The Office I have a new Alltel 3G air card. In that article I configured my workstation to share the connection and having used it this way for a couple of days it isn't really working as well as I would like it. The air card does not stay connected all of the time and it is a bit of a pain to get it to reconnect if I am using my netbook in the other room. So I decided to scrap the connection on my workstation and move it to the server.

The steps to set this up is actually pretty much the same as the above referenced article with some of the article before it thrown in. I am using wvdial to actually discover the air card and dial into the Alltel network. The DHCP server can live anywhere on the network. For me it makes sense to put everything on the server.

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Today dawns a new chapter in my Internet connectivity.... well maybe not so drastic. In my my last article I mentioned my purchasing an Alltel 3G wireless internet card to replace my Wildblue Satellite Internet service. I have been using the air card for a couple of days now and am pleased enough with it that I canceled my Wildblue account. Now comes the fun part.... sharing the Internet connection with the rest of the machines in my office.

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I live in Rural America.... just far enough out that I have not been able to get DSL or Cable Internet. Therefore I have been using WildBlue Internet for several years now and have been very happy with it's performance. Ok, it uses satellite communications so there are a couple of things that takes some getting use to. First of all there is the latency issue.... It takes around 3 seconds for the signal to get to the satellite and then back to earth so when I click on a link it is going to take around 6 seconds before anything happens. Next is a matter of Fair Use. There is only so much bandwidth and because of the plan I was paying for, I was able to download 17GB and upload 5GB of data over a 30 day period. That seems like a lot but it gets used up fast.

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It is no longer news that KDE 4.3.0 was released on the 4th of August. I followed instructions on how to install KDE 4.3 on Kubuntu and after a short time my KDE had been upgraded. A lot of really cool new features.

Well, when Ubuntu 9.04 was released, I decided to do a upgrade instead of a new install. The upgrade seemed to work fine... everything seemed to work OK. But I then noticed some upgrades were being held back. After some research I discovered I could get these upgrades installed by doing a apt-get upgrade-dist. After installing KDE 4.3 I started experiencing system freezes. It wasn't KDE as everything locked up. The only way out was a hard reboot. Sorry, I don't have patience for that.

I have been playing with Linux Mint and have been pleased with it so I decided to install it on my main machine. The Linux Mint download page suggests using the i386 version instead of the 64 bit version as it is "usually more stable" so that is what I installed.

The install went fine... no problems and I have been using it for a couple of weeks now. I have noticed on my Acer that very often I will be working with an application and it will kind of fade to black apparently because it is not responding. I figured it was due to the power of the A1 but it is also doing the same thing on my PC. My PC just doesn't seem to have the pep I think it should have so I'm thinking about trying something else. Any suggestions? I have been running Ubuntu for years and there is really no reason to change other than to improve performance. If I can find a big pipe maybe I'll download SUSE.

UPDATE: I had forgotten about the questionable arrangement between Microsoft and Novell. So I won't be trying out SUSE. Still looking for ideas.

UPDATE: There has been quite a few patches over the last couple of weeks and it seemed to have fixed something. I experience applications fade occasionally but not as often as when I first installed Mint.