10 Jul 2004
Yay. I’m about to go and get some sleep, but just quickly posting to say that the changeover was relatively painless and all is well-ish.
I now have full Exchange functionality within Ximian Evolution, which was a major factor behind my decision to move to SuSE (i.e. because of their close ties to Novell) over any other platform. ALSA audio is now happening as well, although it took a wee spot of hax0ring before it got over the fact that I had two soundcards, one of which doesn’t really work – it was clipping and stuttering all over the place… well. No. It wasn’t *solely* having two soundcards. It was incidental that the problem went away when I deleted the dodgy one from the system (YaST2 is lovely) – but it recurred later, even though the card was theoretically disabled.
The fix? I had to disable “IEC958 Mix Analog” using KMix, and suddenly all was golden again. No, I have no idea what that is meant to do. Seeing it was clipping all over the place, “IEC958 +5V” would seem a more probable choice, but hey, trial and error works miracles. For the purpose of people Googling this problem, my soundcard is a C-Media PCI CMI8738 and my onboard audio was (before I cooked it several months ago – it still detects, because I haven’t disabled it in the BIOS yet) recognised by SuSE 9.1 as a Gigabyte GA-7VAX Onboard Audio (Realtek ALC650) device.
It’s not blatant hit-generation techniques, I was just unable to find anything about my soundcard and clipping with ALSA/SuSE9.1 when I was looking before.
Anyway. That was one of several problems of significance I had… other weird ones are to do with printers! My goodness! Okay, so I have this behemoth HP OfficeJet MFD thingo which scans and prints (and faxes, but I haven’t risked setting up the computer to interface with THAT yet). Detects fine. Doesn’t do ANYTHING until I download and re-compile the hpoj drivers – once that happens, at least CUPS will detect the printer (previously, only YaST2 and all its specialness could see that it was attached)!
Twenty minutes later, I’ve installed the printer (again, this time without the “assistance” of YaST), and XSane is working its marvels. Just because it was handy, I grabbed a nice scan of the cover of “The DaVinci Code” – full colour, 300dpi, nothing had any problems. Okay, so at least ONE direction of our USB is working great. For the first time since installing SuSE, I actually did the obligatory poke-around-the-startbar-equivalent-menu thing… and uncovered this: System → Monitor → HP Office Jet.
Which shows what the two-line LCD on the printer is currently displaying. And that, of course, worked perfectly. YET I STILL CANNOT PRINT!!!!
Doh!
If anyone knows whether hpoj would affect scanning ability, please say something – if it is completely unrelated, then I can safely assume that hpoj is borked and needs to be poked with sticks. If it *does* have a connection with scanning, then the plot has thickened!
Hmm. So much for quickly posting. Meh!
09 Jul 2004
Hmm. Spent the last few days doing miscellaneous things, like watching movies with cool people and paying out Playschool with other cool people ;-) Oh, and randomly carrying popcorn-making machines around the place, whilst dodging terror… erm… tourists photo-taking skillz.
So yeah. Just before embarking on that particular stint of randomness, I discovered I was an alien, and finished downloading SuSE (or is it SUSE now? I can’t remember) 9.1 – an aliens prospective OS of choice, it would seem. In addition to distributing the ISO to various other alien-types, I also burnt myself a copy to CD… and now prepare to abandon the earthlings Fedora, moving instead to the Prussians preferred distribution (no, that’s not Knoppix, sorry).
Whilst installing SuSE, which will commence immediately after making this post and installing a second graphics card, I *will* be using Knoppix for my temporary platform, however.
Praying nothing goes too horribly wrong…
04 Jul 2004
The following was posted on Whirlpool several minutes ago:
Well, I’m on 512 Lite, and have finally resigned myself to the fact that there is no hope (in the near future) of getting a speed upgrade at the same pricepoint, even if it meant getting less quota than I have now (note, it is still pre-July 12).
As shocking as it may seem, I struggle to use even four GB (not four GB on/off peak, four GB altogether) a month. I’m now faced with the wonderous prospect of being able to download SO MUCH MORE! Wow! 24GB of quota to burn!!!
The only thing is, well… I’m at a bit of a loss as to how to use it. So, with this in mind, I turn to the Whirlpool iiNet community for help! My ambition for the next month is to GET CAPPED! Yes, that’s right. I want to be capped. Not because I’ll enjoy the sensation of slightly > dialup speeds, but simply because I’m a stubborn prick who desires to prove a point.
In order to achieve this, I need lots of NON-BLIINKZONE content to download! I don’t do pirated stuff, or pr0n, but all other content will be DOWNLOADED!
I invite other iiNet users who are similarly confused as to how to use this amazing new product improvement to join me in bringing the iiNetwork to a grinding halt… or, at least putting a dent in iiNet’s bandwidth bill. Sure, it is probably insignificant to an organisation of their size, especially seeing iiNet’s customer base is far broader than the couple of hundred who read/post on Whirlpool, but it brings a feeling of slight satisfaction.
One other thing – if you’re going to list links, make them links to places that won’t be hurt by people leeching gigabytes off them… for example, LinuxISO.org (yes, I know it’s supported by advertisers… so far as I can see, that’s just banner ads – I’d rather not add to their bandwidth bill unless it is neccesary) and other websites like it.
Cheers,
J.
If you agree with me, please show your support here: http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum-replies.cfm?t=213957
Here’s hoping a mod doesn’t take it down — we could get an interesting list of content happening.
Later:
Yay! Recognition! My thread was deleted by MM himself! Hmm. Perhaps it did have potential to cause problems! Wahoo!
I’m feeling elated. The few posts I did see before it was taken down were largely supportive, with the exception of a few by Pythonisman… he described it as “silly” – which I fully acknowledged – it is perhaps a little ironic that MM listed “Silly thread” as the reason for deletion.
The following was sent in a Whim to MM in response to the locking:
Deleted and not locked? Ooooh. Potential to cause damage, perhaps…
Teeheehee. Of course it was silly. I just think your changes are silly also… yup, I don’t have the numbers, but I have internet resources which have been paid for to use as I please, which, unfortunately for you guys, extends to include pointlessly downloading gigabytes of anything just because I can.
J.
04 Jul 2004
And lots of stuff like that! Woo. Hope you had a great day :)
I spent last night @ the Cat’s residence (a.k.a. the Cat-man) watching a movie called “The Whole Nine Yards”. Hehe, I watched TV! Wow!
Also been spending time burning up the bandwidth as much as possible streaming stuff, especially off TheBasement. Any particular reason? Nope. I’ve decided that, just like the rest of iiNet apparently sees a need to, I must download as much as possible just beacuse I’m allocated ridiculous amounts of quota by my… generous ISP. Who, just for the record, currently have a distinct lack of functioning international links, whilst WestNet, Pacific, Telstra (who is being blamed for the outage) and miscellaneous other ISP’s are functioning perfectly (how do I know this? Hmm. I’m listening to streaming music live from the US via a Pacific relay, surfing the internet using a Telstra proxy, resolving hosts using a TPG DNS server (iiNets went out, again), and Whirlpool reports WestNet as working fine.)
To be fair, iiNet have been decent for the last month or three, but still… UNCOOL.
02 Jul 2004
I may or may not have accidentally sent a 61MB email of my spam from the last several months to Michael today. Just as he may or may not have accidentally admitted to liking spam this afternoon. Got to love no incoming or outgoing email size restrictions!
J.
;)