PCLinuxOS – 30 Days to #1

PCLinuxOS has continued its upward climb on the distrowatch page hit meter. It is #1 over the span of 30 days…most likely due to the recent release of 2007 Final. Is it really that good? I think it is. It’s powerful enough to satisfy my nerdiest inclination to program and yet soft enough to pad my wife’s computing needs as well. I’ve found it suitable for all my computing needs. Does this mean I’m done looking for the perfect desktop? Far from it! I’ll continue that hunt until I can’t continue it at all.

For now, PCLinuxOS is my #1 desktop choice for my main computer…with other computers in my household rotating distros at quite a good pace. This blog often focuses on items of interest to the desktop Linux user…and it’s updated quite infrequently. This should change after June as I’ll begin a new job in a new city working with Linux on a daily basis 😀

Look for more frequent updates and more robust content. I’m also going to be moving away from a KDE Centric blog and experimenting around quite a bit with the Gnome desktop as well by way of Foresight Linux. Quite a bit on the horizon so please stay tuned.

Dell E521 and PCLinuxOS 2007 Final

It’s been a process of elimination to get my Dell E521 working. Previous workarounds with boot options didn’t work…so I had to use a combination of boot options to get things working nice and stable.

I powered up the PCLinuxOS 2007 Final LiveCD and began the installation to disk. During the bootloader configuration I appended the following text to the end of my linux, failsafe, and framebuffer entry:

noacpi irqpoll pci=routeirq

From there, I saved, closed all programs and rebooted. Upon first boot I opened Synaptic and installed the PCLinuxOS .a64 Kernel which is optimized for 64 bit processors. I then opened up the PCLinuxOS Control Center yet again, went to the boot section and altered my grub bootloader again with the same information in the code above. I rebooted to make sure my changes worked.

When logging in this time, I opened Synaptic and installed the Nvidia 97xx drivers for my graphics card (Fata1ity 7600GT). After this installs you’re prompted to restart X and upon login…you should be presented with quite a stable and quick desktop.

Hopefully this works well for those of you out there that are using E521’s or E520’s as I believe they have the same mainboard (not sure though).

YALB – A Look Back after Three Years

Quietly and without fanfare, Yet Another Linux Blog has reached the ripe old age of 3 years. I started it small and hosted at home during May of 2004. Back then it was hosted on a domain called fatalfame.org (since expired). In December 2004, I switched domains to linuxblog.sytes.net and switched to Serendipity for blogging (hence, lost data from May 2004 – Dec 2004) and it is that month that houses my first and oldest post on the s9y platform…and it’s also the month I discovered Technorati and pingbacks 😀 which gives rise to being indexed for the first time then. The oldest snapshot the internet archive has is December 2004…take a look at how the blog looked then (warning, slow loading).

Back then, it was all about trying new Linux desktops and finding things that worked for my wife and I. Today, it’s still all about the Linux Desktop. YALB hasn’t changed its focus and has made some weak minded enemies along the way, but still is managing just fine.

Today, I’d like to take the time to reflect a little bit and post some links of my favorite posts, as well as share some statistical information about YALB.

Continue reading “YALB – A Look Back after Three Years”

PCLinuxOS 2007, USR5411 MaxG Wireless Primer

So you’ve just installed PCLinuxOS 2007 TR4 on your laptop and your wireless card is detected! Finally, a distro gets it right! However, you’re not too sure how to proceed next…do you manage the device through the PCLinuxOS Control Center? Do you start another program and work that way? Do you use KDE’s built in applet to monitor things? What’s next?

This is something that is often expressed in the forums at pclinuxos.com and something anyone associated with this fine distribution is glad to see…that is working wireless. However, as noted above, people often wonder how to control their wireless device and how to move in and out of various different environments. I’d like to share how I do wireless on my Thinkpad a22m.

I have a US Robotics 5411 MaxG PCMCIA card for my laptop. PCLinuxOS 2007 detects it out of the box but doesn’t install it by default. The reason for this is that PCLinuxOS doesn’t assume to know how you want to install it…either using the built into the kernel support for the broadcom wireless chip or ndiswrapper…which is a program that allows Windows drivers for wireless to be used in Linux. I elected to go with Ndiswrapper since I had some problems with the broadcom driver in PCLinuxOS. Ndiswrapper is installed by default in PCLinuxOS which makes this process even easier…but the process still requires some forethought and I’ll share with you what I did to make this process go smoothly and easily.

Continue reading “PCLinuxOS 2007, USR5411 MaxG Wireless Primer”

How to Become a Cool Blogger and/or Hip Journalist

First…get yourself a blog and get it running. It doesn’t matter if it is from wordpress, google, or the media company you work for…just get a blog up and running.

To get maximum exposure in the past, you had to use keywords. Now is no different. The keyword we’ll focus the most on is one that can get you thousands of hits in a few minutes if submitted to the right news outlet. That keyword is Ubuntu. Add this keyword to EVERY post you make. Name your blog with Ubuntu in the title to make sure that it is vaulted up the rankings. Just remember, you must use the word Ubuntu in everything you post.

For your first post, announce that you’re going to stop using Windows XP and use Ubuntu instead. Do a lousy job of documenting your installation procedure and make sure you don’t talk about anything of worth to someone who might be making the same change…just talk about how cool it is to be running Ubuntu and go over all the pluses. Don’t focus on anything negative…afterall, you don’t want any of the fanbois to come in and flame you now do you? Best to avoid confrontation…you know that someone else will fix that nasty problem you ran across during install right? Why should you report it? You’re just a blogger trying to amass hits and/or a journalist trying to become hip right?

Ok, so now that you’ve announced to the world that you’re switching and you’ve blogged about installing and setting things up…you have to follow it up with a “this is the best thing since sliced bread” post. Make sure you talk about how Ubuntu has completely replaced everything you’ve ever done…talk ferverently about how it does your laundry, makes you breakfast, and changes the linen on your bed.

Make sure that you make claims about how Ubuntu is THE best Linux available despite not trying another distribution of Linux or having anything other than Windows XP to compare it to. Remember, always use the word Ubuntu!! When you go to install and compile a program that can install and compile on ANY DISTRIBUTION, make sure that you title it “Installing SoftwareX on Ubuntu” so that everyone will know that you are cool and hip by using Ubuntu…plus, it’s good to confuse people into thinking that SoftwareX can only be installed on Ubuntu and no other distributions out there.

Finally, always speak as though you are a complete subject matter expert on Ubuntu. Don’t worry! You won’t have to be. Countless people will flock to your aid in comments on your blog. You won’t have to defend yourself at all…even when people bring up actual problems or maybe discuss the shortcomings of Ubuntu there will be many people that will completely thwart these idiotic attempts to actually improve Ubuntu. And how dare people even think they can improve Ubuntu! They don’t work for Canonical and everyone knows that the best distros out there are from companies and people who get paid to develop for said company.

Follow this how-to and you’ll be raking in the readers! Plus you’ll be considered one of the coolest and hippest bloggers/journalists around! You don’t need talent…you don’t need knowledge…you don’t even need experience…you just need to remember the magic word Say it with me now…Ubuntu!

This blog post has been brought to you by the letter U and our word of the year Ubuntu. Remember, Ubuntu is not a four letter word…it has 6 letters in it. Claims of this bloultg about Ubuntu doing laundry may not work for you as results may vary.  If you start to believe that this post is from someone who is ignorant and that it is a serious blog post, hit yourself on the head numerous times with a tack hammer and point into the sky shouting “airpane!! airpane!!”.  Someone will get you the help you need 🙂

Tux500 YouTube Video

Some of you may know that my friend Helios (aka Ken Starks of Lobby4linux.com and Blog of Helios) has been working on the Tux500 project which is geared at getting Linux on a car in the Indy500. Take a look at this video made by Tux500.com that explains a bit about the Indy500 and why it is important for Linux to be there.

Very professional. Make sure you Digg the video as well!

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