FergyTech

Technically, my immediate family is a linux-family; meaning that we run some form of linux on our main computers as our full-time operating system. My wife made the switch this weekend and she was pretty excited about it. We all know it’s going to be a rough ride until we fully understand how things work, but this is very cool news. I’m running Fedora 8 and she’s running openSUSE 10.3.

We wanted her to run Ubuntu 8.04, but had a very tough time getting it to install on ANY computer we have in the house. It keeps freezing up on the boot menu. So; until we figure out what the deal is we looked distros that are backed by major companies.

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Since I have tons of financial responsibilities, I cannot buy a next-gen console. I’m itchin’ for GTA IV, Grand Turismo 5, etc… I did get a chance to play GTA IV at my neighbor’s house the other day and I fell in love with it. Aw, it’s sool cool and he has a big screen TV too so it looked really nice. With touching GTA, it’s hard to go back home and NOT play it. I downloaded GTA San Andreas for my linuxbox and everything ran without a hitch via Wine.

I played some World of Warcraft last night (dinged to 46 on my priest) and was pretty tired - so I said my “gnite” to the guild members and intended to go to bed, but I found myself double-clicking on the San Andreas icon and to my surprise - I was up till 2:00 AM - AGAIN!!!?!?!?! It’s funny playing the game on my PC. I certainly had to get comfortable with the controls - it really handles different than the PS2 controller, but I did notice that I took my time with everything. I actually got more emersed into the world than I did when I played it on my console.

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Just wanted to share this great resource with folks. My brother has recently gotten into linux and he’s trying to stick it out because of the difficulty factor. He got very confused, as did we all, about installing applications and understanding how things are separated in open source and not all bundled together like Windows - where in windows your OS/Desktop/Kernel are all known as Microsoft Windows - compared to linux where your kernel, desktop, distributions, applications are all different applications working together.

OK; I’m ranting. Linux Reality is an awesome podcast, which was retired at episode 100. I’ve downloaded all his files and I listen to it periodically. A good replacement would be Going Linux. This one that I’m sharing is about compiling linux application from the provided source.

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 Linux Reality, Episode 41: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Since I’m new to linux, one of the most important tip to know is how to back up your data. With Windows we’re all used to the fact that our data is saved in multiple areas on the computer. Unless you’re very computer savvy it’s hard to know where everything is. It’s a bit different with linux. The files to your applications may be in different areas of the file structure, but all of your important confirguration files to those applications is conviently saved in your /home directory.

Hidden Files and Folders

You may not see them at first. That’s because they are hidden. If you’re using the GNOME desktop, then your file browser (equivilent to Windows Explorer) is Nauttilus. Find your /home directory, usually found /home/{username}/. You can either click on View | Show Hidden Files, or keyboard shortcut CTRL+H to show your hidden files and folders. Once that’s done you will see files and folder that begin with a period.

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A GUI is a very complex piece of software and there could be any number of reasons why it would lock up on you. If you need to kill your x server and then restart it, here are some tips:

Killing X server via Command

Type “init 3″ in your terminal and that should kill x server.  If it doesn’t find the command, then switch to the root user by typing “su -” (you will need to know the root password).

Restarting X server

Simply use the keyboard combination CTRL+ALT+BACKSPACE. Some times this will help, but this combination will explicitly restart the X server.

Working with a Console

If the previous keyboard combination did not work then try CTRL+ALT+F1. This will not kill X server, it will simply open a full screen console. I believe Red Hat and Fedora Core have F1-F6 as options. If you want to switch back to a GUI environment use the keyboard combination CTRL+ALT+F7.

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I scrolled through my Google Reader to and saw a post on WoW Insider by Daniel Howell about a RAID he was in and he did a great job explaining what hunters to, or did, in a particular RAID.  I have OMEN installed, but I don’t know the first thing on how to make it work.  It pops up when I party, but I usually turn it off.