New Dell Laptop a winner

Unlike the HP AMD 64 bit laptop, everything is now working in the new DELL. I got a E1705 with the Intel Core 2 Duo T7400, 2 GB RAM, 160 GB HDD, 17"WUXGA screen, and Intel 3945 Pro Wireless card. I had to completely wipe the hard drive, but thanks to Dell's foresight in packaging a real Windows install DVD, and driver CD or DVD, I was able to install Vista on a 30 GB partition, and allocate the rest to Kubuntu Edgy (Linux distro I use most now). The only issue that remains is that with the Nvidia Video drivers loaded I get a lot of popping and crackling in the sound when I play a video intensive game. I can play DVD's with no ill affect, which makes me wonder what's going on.
I figured out how to get the Intel Wireless card to be up and running by login time. I put two lines in my rc.local file as follows:

ifdown eth1
ifup eth1

and now things work pretty good. I'd like to be able to take this out, but its working, so its not urgent. What I found surprising is that the drivers for the wireless card worked right off the bat in the live cd boot up! I didn't even have to wait for the full install.
Sound works, Video works, and to beat all hibernation works! (well for the most part, last night it never completely shut down for some reason). I'm really enjoying this thing, and I'm looking forward to Feisty going public, as long as I can still print to my brother printer. Brother's Linux support is horrible because its half hearted. They have a full blown CUPS driver for the Mac, but for some reason they are unwilling to put out a CUPS driver for Linux. What gives there?
My next attempt to make Linux really look good will be to install Beryl or Compiz and get the full 3D desktop I've been hearing so much about. I can't remember which works with KDE better at the moment, but I'll update the Blog here when I get that done.

Anyway, the son is enjoying his toy, and Dad is enjoying his, and the house is happy.

Drum Set pics

My Daughter has a FisherPrice Kid's digital camera, so this thing is grainy I know, but it'll give ya' an idea of the drum set. My son is sitting at it. He's taken some lessons at the Renaissance Center in Dickson, so he's not doing bad for a beginner. He has to concentrate, like his dad, too much right now, but he's picking it up. I hope that this helps him grow in his confidence.

Here's another one.
Can you tell I'm proud of my youngin's? :-D

No Church, Waiting on Laptop, and Drums

I hate sundays with no Church. Due to the snow and icy road conditions this morning, left over from last night, we canceled Church. I hate doing that, but I know the people well enough to know what that'll do to the crowd. I know what you may be thinking, but I don't want folks feeling less than "spiritual" because they can't get out on the snow or ice, its not their fault. I also don't want some to try, and wind up wrecking their car hitting some odd patch of ice. I have found myself much more cautious about the snow since I've learned what it means to care about others. You think you know when your single, or living in Mom or Dad's house, but you don't really. Its not until someone is completely dependent on the decisions you make that you realize how important it is to consider what you do, and its affect on them, before you do it. Anyway, I remember in my younger days I would have plowed ahead and had Church anyway, and praise God there are those who can do that now, but now, I'm more reserved. I guess the two kids, and wife have made me a softy.

On another note, I sent back the HP, and as I said they were aggravating, but they finally returned my money. So, I've returned the HP and ordered a DELL, E1705, with the Intel T7400, 17" WUXGA (some outrageous resolution), and 4 years of accidental coverage, instead of 2 and its cheaper than the HP anyway. I would have liked the hp Intel version, don't get me wrong. I liked the 2 hard drive idea. I also have NO problem with HP in general. I really think they have the best server line with IBM coming in VERY close to 2nd. However, I like Dell's Laptops and Desktops. I Like IBM's midrange hardware better than anyone's, and I don't know of a second best there that's close. AIX on RS/6000 boxes just can't be beat for midrange power. All that said, I think its fair to say I'm not really attached to any particular vendor,however, there's one I can't stand, and they generally produce an OS that you can look out of, but if you open their glass panes you'll let the bugs in if you know what I mean. So, I'm eagerly awaiting the arrival, it'll probably get here sometime around the first of next month. Some reviews site its not very pretty and the speakers in it aren't very exceptional, but that's ok. I can add speakers, or headphones for sound, and looks aren't involved in my purchase plans. (I did price an Alienware laptop, because they look cool, but they couldn't come close to the price point of Dell.

The other interesting goody to come into the house is my son's drum set. We bought him a low end DDrum D2 drum set for about 380 at a music store in Bellevue, TN. My son just started jumping up and down Saturday when he came home and found it in his room. Again, I'd like to have a Digital camera to show it to ya' but alas, that's low on the purchase priority list. They're nice enough for starting, and they came about right with all the used drum sets I found that were worth having. Not only that, but I have a 2 year warranty (1 year from the store doubled by the Ccard I used). I think he'll take to it fairly well, if he can ever get me off of it. It reminded me of how much I enjoyed playing when I was in High School. Its amazing what you can remember, BTW, when you sit down behind one. My daughter wasn't so happy, 'cause now he has one more thing to irritate her with, and because she doesn't have a real Piano. (not to mention the fact that her casio keyboard cost about that much when we bought it a few years ago, and that she's been able to play sports, take Piano lessons, and everything else he hasn't for quite some time, but that's another story). Well, generally speaking everyone's happy here now, and life is good. God is great folks, and why He's so nice to me I'll never understand. He's given me a good family, a great wife, and two good (well, for the most part anyway) kids, and a great job doing what I love (on both sides, the Church and Ardent).

That's all for now. God bless.

YEEHAW turned to NO WAY

Well, so much for my excitement. I'm back on the crapshiba now. I guess I should be nice to it, it at least, runs Linux. I thought I had everything working until it just started locking up again. I couldn't for the life of me figure it out. I went back to base code, I even compiled my own kernel in Debian, and it made no difference. I worked with that thing to the wee hours of mornings (yes more than one) trying to make it fly, and all I got were crashes.

So, I fell back to returning the thing to HP. wow, what a sad experience. I was told "if the laptop just doesn't work out for any reason, you have 21 days to return it." I had the thing for 6 days. That's 15 days shy of the cutoff! I was on the phone (off and on between getting hung up on) from 9 pm, to 12:00 am! That's right 3 hours trying to work out a way to just do a swap out. Guess what? HP does not allow exchanges. I told them the AMD was giving me problems, which it was, and that what I was running, or wanting to run, was not tolerant to the AMD 64bit chips, which is true. I went over that at least 3 times. I also explained that I'm trying to get my house refinanced (that's another story) and opening another credit line was not a wise idea at the moment. The reason I say that is because they wanted me to open an account so that they could charge me for the new Intel based version I wanted, until the old AMD version showed up at their shop. I kept saying, "if there's any way to just do an exchange where I ship this one to you and you just charge me the difference, (about 300 dollars) and then ship me the new laptop that would work out better". No dice. Not allowed to. Nada. At one point Customer Service assured me this was possible and that the person, Kacy in Rochester (sp?), would be able to handle the details. When I got to Kacy she had no clue what I was talking about, or why she got this call! Gotta love communication! So, to make a long story short, I wound up just canceling all the swap out and just made it a return. I haven't yet completely decided what I'm gonna do, but I can guarantee it wont be, and that's buy an AMD based Laptop!!

NEW Laptop is IN!

YEEEEHAAWWW ! I just had to say it. My new HP DV9000z came in Monday, which is why I haven't put anything on the site. Well, I have EVERYTHING working (well, the wireless works with linxant drivers). I tried every distro in the world, nearly, and some three times, but I finally got Debian testing installed on the thing. I still can't print to my Brother MFC-5840CN printer (if any of anyone who may read this knows how to overcome Brother's crappy Linux drivers I'd love to hear from ya').

Here's generally what I did:
1. I repartitioned the Drives deleting the partition from the second drive and shrinking the XP partition to 30 GB on the first drive. Whatever you do, DO NOT DELETE either the HP Rescue or the XP Embedded Partitions (that's the little hidden Partition at the end of the first drive). It took me 5 1/2 hours to restore everything to get the quickplay back.
2. I installed Debian etch with the Network install CD in text mode using the "noapic iommu=off" kernel switches. This got everything in place. To simplify things I just created an ext3 partition on the first drive filling the empty space for "/" or root, which turned out to be about 32 GB. I then created a 2.4 GB Swap partition (Don't ask about the .4 part I have no idea why I did that) and a /home partition on the second drive.
3. I installed just what the Debian presets were for Desktop, laptop etc. (they were the default selections) and I told it to use a mirror.
4. When all that was done I rebooted into recovery mode, or single user mode, brought up the Wired NIC, and adjusted my sources.list file to upgrade to Sid to get the 2.6.18 kernel (I'll post the link to the guys website who actually pioneered the setup later).
5. Then I did the usuall apt-get update, apt-get dist-upgrade stuff to get the latest and greatest. Hopefully you have better luck at this than I did initially. Make sure you get the 2.6.18 kernel. Once everything is finished updating, edit your /boot/grub/menu.lst file and remove the "noapic" from the load line for the new kernel, and reboot.
6. You should now get a shiney new Login screen GDM style (right now there's no KDE on it to speak of, you'll have to install that through synaptic).

From here you can do what you want. I installed the Nvidia driver using the installer from Nvidia's website to get the full 1680x1050 experience (AND IT IS SWEET!). Do some Googling for HP DV9000z linux and you should generally find all the same sites I did.
My MAJOR disappointments are that there are still NO 64bit versions of many apps. Adobe's Flash is still not available in a 64bit version. Google's toolbar will not install because of Debian's stupid renaming of Firefox to Iceweasel. Ndiswrapper doesn't work because only the 32bit windows driver is installed, if anyone knows how to get ndiswrapper working on this 64bit box, I'd be very happy to hear it, however the linuxant drivers work fairly well.

I'm not sure I'll leave Debian on there now that I know what it takes to install it on the machine. I'd really like to have Kubuntu running on the thing so that it matches all my other boxes, so I'll probably download the 64bit Edgy Alternate install CD, as the 32bit Live CD wouldn't even boot!

One thing I can say, this thing is Fast! So, anyway, I have 30 days on the Linuxant driver, so I'll have to do something quick. I'll keep this site posted.

SNOW! Yes

Hey, this is just to commemorate our fist (howbeit half decent) real snow. It wasn't much, maybe an inch of real powdery snow. We tried making a snowman, and throwing snowballs, but the snow just wasn't slushy enough. Oh well, Christine and I had fun anyway, we made snow angels, and did our best with the snow balls. I wish I had a digital camera so I could post images of it, but, alas that's yet to come.

Michael, my son, is sick with a stomach Virus of some kind, and can't go out. So, it wasn't as much fun thinking of him stuck in the bed. I'm working from home today so I could enjoy this as much as possible, its not like Snow comes very often around here any more. What's up with that anyway?

Oh, I got word that the new Laptop is in route! YEA! So it should be here sometime after the 7th or 8th. I got the free shipping, if you know what I mean. Well, enjoy the weather and may God bless you and yours.