FergyTech

Well, I ended up installing a fresh copy of Fedora 9 this morning.  Didn’t take long at all.  I didn’t have the patients to try and figure out why my xserver wouldn’t work after my upgrade from Werewolf to Sulphur.  When I got home yesterday I reinstalled my video card drivers, for my nVidia GeForce 8600 GT, but that didn’t fix the problem.  Oh well, the good thing is I’m back up and running with the latest version of Fedora - so now I just have to remount my DATA partition and restore my home directory.

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So last night I finally decided to upgrade my home desktop from Fedora 8: Werewolf (best name ever) to Fedora 9: Sulphur. My main reasoning was to get Banshee 1.0 installed and have a happier podcasting life. Lukily for me I have a seperate partition to store my data and I backed up my /home directory. Not all the files just the ones I thought were important, which included most of the [dot][files/folders].

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I am experiencing a deafening silience when it comes to the audio on my Fedora box.  As of this article being published I can not hear audio playing on my computer.  Such as:

• MP3s, Oggs
• YouTube, Hulu, and Flash-based player

Ironically when I do a “Soundcard Detection” it does find it, I hear the test audio.  I can even hear my recording that I just created in Audacity.  I am at a lotal lost.

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I’ve created a new category called “Linuxapade” - from the multilingual word “escapade“.  I wanted to see if I can document my adventures with the wonderful, yet frustrating, yet rewarding world of linux.  It’s a mad house over here, almost like going on a seven day adventure to the land of nowhere and you learn to build fire by your self, hunt for your food, enjoy the kill and the feast.  In this case you’re actually forced to learn how an operating system works and hardware, etc.  It doesn’t do it for you like Windows or MAC.  There are some automated features that work out-of-the-box, but if it starts to break you have no choice, but to find a solution - no matter how many hours it’ll take you to first understand how this device is supposed to work.

I saw this on a post from Fresh Ubuntu podcast. You gotta love linux programmers. I’m a big fan of ordering pizza online. The problem is the closest Dominos, in my area, keeps screwing up the orders. Besides that - this video is awesome and I’m going to install it just to try it out.

Here’s the site to download the application: www.beigerecords.com/cory/pizza_party/

Quick Answer: Delete any related file ending in “.ev-summary” in the ~/.evolution/mail/local/ folder.  Make sure Evolution is closed before you do this.

Rant: Here’s my ordeal with this horrible error, at least to a noob in linux, like myself.  I couldn’t figure out why I was getting this error.  When I opened Evolution I would get a pop-up saying “Summary and folder mismatch, even after a sync”.  I thought it was my mail stored on my server, I have 4 pop accounts and I ended up deleting all the old emails 500+ each (Yeah I’m a pack rat).  It was literally driving me crazy because it wanted to redownload ALL my old emails.

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I’m having a hard time understanding what makes Livna so hot, in the linux-world.  To my understanding they are better than getting videocard drivers from nVidia’s web site because they are opensource and when you install the latest kernel update - your card won’t go bonk!? on you.  As for me, I’ve been using nVidia’s propriatory drivers because that’s the only way I get World of Warcraft or any other video game to work.

The only issue that I have to deal with right now IS, when my kernel is updated.  I have to run through the Xserver configuration.  Once I get into my desktop, I would then switch back to my propriatory drivers or CTRL+ALT+BACKSPACE back out to a full shell environment to reinstall them.  It is a bit of a hassle, but I have yet to jump on the band wagon of Livna.

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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