Tomorrow is the last day of Tet, finally. This has actually been one long boring Tet for me. Normally I would spend some time out of the city but this year I just felt like hanging out at home. My alleyway, though quite loud on Day 2 of Tet, has been relatively quiet since with the exception of one yelling kid screaming.
I did get some things accomplished. I finally finished Traders Guns & Money. Clifton let me borrow his book first but I was a slow reader so I had to borrow a copy later from another friend. It was a great book but by the time I got to the end, I was glad to have finished it. Still, I will get a copy a do a more thorough reading next time.
I met another fellow Linux geek on Day 1 of Tet named Pratik. He has his own blog titled BirdBrain. I also met Tung, another new Saigon blogger who authors Saigon in a Cup at the same meeting with Pratik.
Though tomorrow is Day 5 of Tet, I must work and update a website for Operation Reunite. They will have an interview with CNN on Friday and this could be an official launch of the site. I am using Wordpress with the site and unfortunately a couple plugins broke some features that I will have to manually add such as the Facebook Add button.
By Friday, many people will start to return to Saigon for day 1 of their workday. The rest will return Sunday night. Saigon should still be a quiet city until then. Just need to remind myself not to go out Sunday afternoon. 
Today I installed Fedora 10 on my desktop. I need to spend some months working with Fedora to prepare for my Red Hat Certified Engineer exam which I will hopefully take this summer.
I immediately had sound problems. Luckily, I was able to refer to my old posting from one year ago for the fix. This is just an edited version of that post.
My desktop is currently using the Creative Audigy SE sound card (ca0106) which can be very un-Linux friendly. As I mentioned 9 months ago, I was able to get sound from my front 3 speakers but I wanted all 5 speakers to work as well (5.1).
With Arch Linux and Gentoo Linux, I was able to get surround sound on all five speakers with the following .asoundrc file and saved it to my /home directory:
pcm.!dmix {
type plug
slave {
pcm surround51
channels 6
}
}
pcm.!default {
type plug
slave.pcm “dmix”
slave.channels 6
route_policy duplicate
}
With Fedora, similarly to Ubuntu, I was not getting surround sound with the above file.
I remembered that I needed to add the following to /etc/pulse/default.pa:
load-module module-alsa-sink device=”surround51″ channels=6 sink_name=sur51
Still, no surround sound. Then I reread my old post and realized that I needed to add the entire contents of .asoundrc to /etc/asound.conf as well to make the settings system wide.
I rebooted and got all 5 speakers to work. Thank God for old posts
Well, it has been over a year since I made the move to the Gnome Desktop. I was not happy happy with KDE 4 and ended up dumping it. I thought the KDE Developers were crazy for making too many innovations. It was too buggy and took a lot of resources to run it.
Now KDE 4.2 is available and I am hearing a lot of good praises. Tony(saigonlinux) runs it on openSUSE and gave me a demonstration last Thursday. I was very impressed. As a former KDE user 5 years, I decided that I will give it a try this week.
Currently I am running the Gnome Desktop on my Arch Linux desktop. The Arch Linux developers are well known for their stable packages and sure enough KDE 4.2 was available. Tomorrow I plan to make the switch for a couple days to see how I like KDE 4.2.
Don’t get me wrong, the Gnome desktop is nice but I find myself prefering KDE applications over Gnome (k3b, kaffeine, amarok, etc.). Pidgin is nice but I really prefer Kopete. The list goes on and on. It is just a preference thing.
I will let you guys know what happens.
(KDE 4.2 Desktop – Source: KDE)
Last week I upgraded my motherboard and cpu, a yearly ritual for me now. Arch Linux is now the main system that I run on this desktop. Gentoo/Funtoo will be there for testing (Funtoo is really fun to play with). I will also test Pardus, a Turkish linux distribution. It may be a good distro to use in the educational setting.
Below are some pictures of me adding the new hardware:
(My tower with the old motherboard removed)
(The P43-series Gigabyte motherboard)
(I just installed the new motherboard in the tower)
(After I installed the new core 2 quad cpu and 4 Gigs of RAM)
(The finished system)
So I use Linux for most aspects of my tech life. I only run Windows at school or work but nearly 99% of the time I am running Linux.
Yes, I can listen to music, watch DVDs, and edit Word documents in Linux. Most of my colleagues and students do not even now that the documents I send them were edited with an open source word processor.
The only thing I cannot do is play my favorite games in Linux. That will change in a couple years though as Linux starts to take a chunk out of the market
Here are my current Linux systems:
- Desktop – Arch Linux
- IBM Thinkpad T60 Laptop – Sidux Linux
- Acer Aspire ONE Netbook – Ubuntu EEE
- Dell Inspiron 8100 Notebook – CentOS
- T-Mobile G1 – Android
- Motorola Rokr e6 – MontaVista
- Nokia N800 Internet Tablet – Maemo
My Dell Inspiron 8100 and Motorola Rokr are currently working at the moment. I need to replace the power supply unit on my Dell. This will be the third replacement. I dropped my Motorola phone a couple weeks ago. It bounced a couple times.
Both units will be running by the end of the month.
So how about you? What do you run Linux, or BSD (that means you Mac guys), on?
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