Eee!

Well, I finally went mobile. I got, from Woot, an Asus Eee PC 900A a couple weeks ago. The Linux edition, of course, because I’m sticking to what I said many years ago, and never giving Microsoft another dime of my money if I can possibly help it. It’s a nice little netbook, that I got at a bargain price (under $180 with shipping & handling).

The one problem I have with it, hardware-wise, is that the SSD (solid state hard drive) is only 4 GB. In these times of 1 TB (i.e. 1,000 GB) hard drives, it’s pretty amazing what you can do with just 4 GB. Unfortunately, it’s not quite enough for me to do everything I want to do. I also wish there was a built in webcam. The wikipedia article on the Eee PC says that this model has a (fairly worthless) 0.3 megapixel camera, but it actually doesn’t have a camera at all. There’s a spot where a camera should be, but it’s covered up. On the “wow, that’s slick!” side of the coin, the touch pad on the Eee is multi-touch enabled. It’s easy to scroll down web pages by just dragging 2 fingertips down the touch pad instead of one.

Software-wise, the Xandros Linux operating system was… adequate. I didn’t keep it for long, though. It comes pre-installed with something called DansGuardian. This extremely annoying installed-and-enabled-by-default piece-of-shit software refused to let me access Facebook, telling me that it was “Japanese Pornography”. I tried to google ways to disable/remove DansGuardian, and the search result that seemed most likely to answer my question was also denied to me on the premise that it was “Proxies, Pornography”.  I decided that it would make my life a lot easier just to blast the whole OS away and install Eeebuntu NBR. And I was right. Sort of. It was actually a pain in the ass to install a new OS, because the netbook did not want to boot from USB, even though I put USB first in the boot order in BIOS. It turns out that in order to boot from USB, you have to disable “Quick boot” and “Quiet boot” from BIOS, and then hit the escape key when the screen prompts you to “hit <Esc> for boot menu”. It’s very annoying that the boot order in BIOS means absolutely nothing.

One of the major problems with Linux is hardware compatibility. That’s what makes an Eee PC so nice. Because they are sold with Linux, we know the hardware is compatible, and because there’s a large user base for this particular model of netbook, we have multiple distros out there that customize specifically for this hardware. And Eeebuntu NetBookRemix is far, far prettier than Xandros.

I installed Google’s Chrome (actually, Chromium) browser as my default browser, because Firefox is a bit of a resource hog, and also Chrome’s got the fastest javascript engine out there so far. With only 1GB of RAM and a wimpy 1.6 GHz Atom processor, light and fast is good. I can live without AdBlock if I must… I also installed Gwibber for microblogging, and Wine so that I could install PokerStars and be a mobile Hold’em player. Last but not least, I installed Puzzle Pirates. Of course, that wouldn’t fit… I had to remove some software from the stock Eeebuntu to make room for PP, and then when software upgrades became available I wound up needing to delete more software to make room to download updates. The good news is, I can double my drive space with a $17 USB thumb drive. Actually, if you hunt for good deals, I think you can double it for less than that. I recently saw an 8GB thumb drive for $20, so that’s triple my capacity. And the Eee has 3 USB ports. I believe I can also upgrade the SSD, but I haven’t really looked into that yet. I do know the 1 GB ram is upgradable to 2 GB.

In summary: If you want to go mobile, but don’t want to (or can’t) shell out a lot of cash, the Eee 900A is a lot of bang for your buck. But be prepared to install your own Operating System. Which should be very easy to do now that I’ve warned you about the BIOS settings.

Linux Hold’em

So a couple months back I was reading a Wil Wheaton post about him running a small stakes tourney on PokerStars. I’d tried in the past to use PokerStars, but the software wouldn’t install under Cedega, which is what I used for my Windows games at the time. I decided to try again, and met with outstanding success using WINE.

So I signed up, but not until after the tournament was over. I’m leery about giving my money to an online poker site anyway, so I just enjoyed the play-money games, and some WSoP freeroll tournaments, and life was good. Then PokerStars deposited $2 into my real-money account, “to get me started”.

Well, it did get me started. I tore up the 2-penny tables, and was pretty quickly hooked on this hold’em thing. I put a Hold’em book on my Amazon wish list, and wound up with 2 books for my birthday (the one I asked for, and a different one). I still have not put any of my own money into the site, and I’ve turned that $2 into nearly $5. Yeah, I know… I’m rich now. :-p  But soon I’ll start playing the nickel tables, and the cash will really start rolling in!

Anyhow, the one book I got was about the mechanics (read “math”) of Hold’em, and the other book was about the ups and downs of online play specifically, and basically every aspect of online poker except for the math. These two books really compliment each other well. The non-math book recommends not tying yourself down to just one site, so that you can reap the bonuses from multiple sites, and go wherever the best action currently is. So off I went, in search of more online accounts, which would (hopefully) be as generous as PokerStars and give me free starter cash.

How fortunate I was that I started my journey with PokerStars! Because so far, that’s the only site that will work with Linux at all. I hit a “top 10″ list of poker sites, and didn’t finish it because I got discouraged.

Titan Poker installed with no problems, but it chokes on account registration, which has to be done through their software apparently. I might be able to play if I could do account registration on their website, but that doesn’t seem possible. Not that I’d trust playing on a site where the software isn’t 100% anyway.

FullTilt is a big name in poker, but their software will not run at all. It installed, but when I try to run it, it just dies quietly.

PKR has a beautiful video intro on their software, but that’s all it’s good for. I can’t get past that intro. Worse yet, I can’t even quit the program. I have to go into my process list, hunt for it and kill it.

PartyPoker isn’t poker anymore. It’s now PartyGammon.

PokerRoom I used to play, since they had a web Java interface. Unfortunately, they no longer provide poker.

So that’s it, in a nutshell. Anybody know of any sites other than PokerStars that work on Linux with or (preferably) without WINE?

KDE 4.3

I made the Kubuntu Jaunty upgrade to KDE 4.3 this weekend. Other than the taskbar looking nicer, and having to reconfigure everything back to the way I like it, I didn’t really notice any spectacular difference yet. The upgrade was also not smooth. I had to remove kdebase-workspace-dev to get the dist-upgrade to complete successfully. Your mileage may vary.

There’s some new options for the desktop wallpaper setting, but “Virus” is pretty lame, and “Weather” does not seem to work at all. “Mandlebrot” is pretty cool, though, if you don’t like to put actual photos on your desktop.

The “Info” icon now has a permanent home on the taskbar, instead of appearing and disappearing based on whether or not you have info to see.

Some new plasma widgets (or at least, ones I don’t remember seeing before) like Pastebin and Remember The Milk.

But all in all, I have no idea why other people are raving about this release.

Oh, and the KDE advanced settings for active and inactive transparency levels on a window *still* doesn’t work…

Once more, with feeling

Once again, UUID really sucks. Installed OpenSUSE today on my spare drive, now I can no longer boot into Ubuntu even though that hard drive was untouched. This makes sense how?  Stranger yet is that I installed Linux Mint before OpenSUSE, and if I selected Mint from the GRUB menu, Ubuntu would boot instead. (If I selected Ubuntu, I would get an error, so I suspect Mint fried my UUID before OpenSUSE had a chance to).

No big deal… when I get home, I’ll eradicate UUID from my menu.lst and fstab files AGAIN, and all will be right with the world. It’s just freaking annoying, and I want to document all my UUID hassles so I can easily point to them when people ask why I don’t like UUID.

Jauntily Jumping with Jackalopes

After hearing from my friend, KE9Vee, that 64-bit Intrepid is actually usable (as opposed to every other 64-bit OS I’ve ever tried), I decided to do a second Intrepid install, to take advantage of the full capacity of my CPU for the first time ever. And I went with Xubuntu since I’m disaffected with KDE4, and still really don’t like Gnome. But since I couldn’t really tell the difference between XFCE and Gnome, I installed Openbox. It’s what all the cool kids seem to be using, and should be similar to the Fluxbox I used way-back-when (and recently reacquainted myself with).

Shortly after that, I decided that since I’m being all cutting-edge and trying-something-new, I might as well hook up with the alpha-quality Jaunty Jackalope release of Ubuntu. The UDS for this release just ended, so I expect to see rapid changes on this desktop. I’ve changed all my “intrepid” to “jaunty” in /etc/apt/sources.list (with the exception of 5-a-day, which doesn’t have a jaunty repo yet), and I’m running a dist-upgrade in a term window as I write this. Wish me luck. I just really hope the USB optical mouse problem I’ve been having in Intrepid doesn’t follow me to Jaunty.

Update: Crap, I’m scared… dist-upgrade just informed me Jaunty uses LiLo??!? I thought that piece of software was outdated and discarded. I’ve been on Grub so long I can’t recall what LiLo was like. Crossing my fingers this doesn’t hose my whole box…

I like Curves

Blogging things somewhat out of chronological order… before downloading the new Ubuntu on Thursday, I made a stop at the AT&T store on my way home to trade in my old “new phone” (the LG CU515) that I didn’t like much. I got, instead, a BlackBerry Curve 8310.

This, despite some issues, I am very happy with. But I’m still going to start out with the issues.

I don’t like the fact that I can’t transfer multimedia to/from the phone. I downloaded the latest version of the desktop software and put it on my work laptop (Windows… ew…), and there is a Media Manager that is supposed to be available, but the selection is grayed out and I can’t choose it. There’s also a “BlackBerry Media Sync”, but using that requires that I install iTunes, which I really don’t want to do. I just want to transfer crap to my phone. Or from my phone. Google assures me, though, that I’ll have no problem once I buy and install a microSD card (for $8), so I can deal with that.

Second issue is that the GPS seems to be extremely inaccurate, when it works. Perhaps that’s just the free interfaces I’m using. Maybe it would be precise if I paid for the TeleNav service. <shrug> Can’t really see paying for GPS service when I have zero confidence that the GPS will spot me within a quarter mile of my location (it’s placed me as far as a mile and a half away from where I am).

Now that that’s out of the way… I love this phone! I’ve got a blackberry e-mail address now, and I set up filters in Gmail to forward important e-mails to my phone. Text messaging is a breeze with the full keyboard. Google has a sync program so that my BB and Google Calendar are never going to be different for more than 2 hours. I’ve installed IRC and SSH clients. One of these days I’ll get around to putting some games on. I was nervous about the track ball navigation, but so far I am loving it. I just wish that scrolling upwards at the top of the list (or downwards at the bottom) would wrap around to the other end. The camera is good, and has settings for white balance (I was surprised). I love the way it recognizes when you put it into or take it out of the holster (blanking or turning on the screen as appropriate), and you can set separate ring/vibrate rules/volumes depending on holsteredness.

In the near future, I’ll be playing with Barry to get my BB Curve charging and syncing on my Ubuntu box. If nobody beats me to it, I’ll package that software for Ubuntu, too, to help out other BB users. Somewhere down the road, I need to learn Java ME, so I can write BB apps…

Now I’m still looking for some software, if anybody can help me out. There’s all sorts of stuff to buy, but I’m hoping to find freeware since the economy sucks. I want:

1. an SFTP client (FTP would work in a pinch)
2. a chess game I can play against the computer (with option to play remotely against humans a definite plus)
3. an exercise logger
4. a Perl interpreter, if such a thing exists on this platform

Gearing up for OLF

Ohio LinuxFest 2008 is coming up in October, which sounds farther away than it is. I’ve never been to OLF before, but I’ve heard great things about it. There’s a “free” admission, which I will probably take advantage of since I’m looking at $150 or more in gas and hotel fees (and that’s with sharing a ride and sharing a room). On the plus side, there’s going to be a lot of local Ubuntu folk there. Jono Bacon is speaking again (I enjoyed his presentation at Penguicon earlier this year), and so is Zonker. Looking forward to a good geeky time, and maybe get some more people doing 5-a-day for Ubuntu (which I’ve been slacking on myself until last night). If you’re going, and want to meet up, give me a shout here in the comments, or the Friday night of OLF on Identica.

Suddenly stormy

Had a tornado warning. Didn’t see a tornado, but saw plenty of high winds, and lost power two or three times. Took some pictures after the storm ended, to document the damage.

My computer wouldn’t boot again after the second outage, and the culprit turned out to be…. UUID! I hate UUID. I popped a Gutsy LiveCD in the tray and booted from that. Fixed my /boot/grub/menu.lst so that root=/dev/sdb3 instead of root=UUID=67732679-a241-4e4c-a86a-74320624f7c7 and then I was able to boot again, no problem. So now I’ve found two things (installing a second system, and power outages) that FUBAR the dreaded UUID system.

10 easy steps to becoming a Vim expert

Somebody asked for it, and now it’s up on the web. Here’s a link to the PDF of the presentation, and a link to Zonker’s post about it and Penguicon in general.

9 out of 15

I guess that means I’m addicted to Linux. Though the list is rather silly… Understanding a simple command-line instruction is evidence of being addicted? Even some people who don’t use Linux at all want penguins for pets. And I think Linus Torvalds is well known in Redmond, but I doubt they are really Linux addicts.

Still, having 9 out of 15 probably does qualify me.