» 2004 » May

Article posted on May 30

No Title

• Posted by Ryan Finnie on May 30, 2004, 3:50 am

Rather than post anything meaningful, I figured I'd just post a screenshot of my laptop. I've been running linux on my laptop for the last couple weeks. It wasn't until recently that I could even USE linux on this laptop; I bought it when the model first came out, and many things just weren't usable under anything except windows:

* The touchpad is one of those touchpads where the right fifth is a scrolling region, separated from the rest by a little bump. The synaptics driver was treating the entire touchpad as one region. Updated drivers were released, and both the touchpad itself and the scrolling region work as planned.
* The PCMCIA bus driver was broken. It would puke whenever you put any device in. This was also fixed.
* The built-in wireless is a Broadcrap 802.11g chipset. Broadcom released the technical specs for their wireless chipsets, and open source drivers were created. Heh, but seriously, I am using ndiswrapper, which lets you use windows NDIS (networking) drivers under linux.
* No accelerated X. While not too big of a problem, by using kernel 2.6.6-mm3 and some CVS X stuff, I got it working, kinda. Though the display is messed up when both in fullscreen using opengl and not at 1024x768.

Anyways, on to the screenshot:

* The distro is Gentoo, of course. No other distro is up-to-date enough to support the hardware without a lot of hacking. Kernel 2.6.6-mm3, which is needed for the aforementioned accelerated X, and to get the combo dvd reader/cd burner working.
* Windows manager is fluxbox, with the Meta style.
* Terminals are aterm, with transparency at 25%.
* Background is xplanet, which just plain rocks.
* At the bottom left corner is gkrellm, displaying CPU load, temperature, disk activity, wireless activity and signal, and battery status.
* Media player is xine, playing Kill Bill, Vol 1. (DVD-quality DivX rip from my DVD, stored on the fileserver) (In case you are curious, a DivX rip of a 1h51m movie that is nealy indistingushable from the original DVD come in at only 864M.)
* The OSD volume display is controlled by lineak, and uses xosd for actually displaying the OSD information.
* The battery warning is a script that I wrote that monitors battery and thermal ACPI information, then outputs to xosd when something changes. If it's worse (battery going down, temperature going up), the display is red; if opposite, display is green. One day I may polish up and release the source to that.

Wow, I just realized that most of the sites that I linked to are sourceforge sites.

• 1 Comment
• Posted in Uncategorized
• This post was imported from LiveJournal.

Article posted on May 2

"I am happy!" -- 7-Eleven clerk in Seattle

• Posted by Ryan Finnie on May 2, 2004, 9:13 pm

Sorry, but I have to say this. Lately it seems that most of my friends' LJ posts are, well, depressing. Am I the only one who is relatively content these days?

• 9 Comments
• Posted in Uncategorized
• This post was imported from LiveJournal.