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.

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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

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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)

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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)

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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:

1. Desktop – Arch Linux
   • Gentoo/Funtoo (OpenVZ)
   • CentOS (VirtualBox)
2. IBM Thinkpad T60 Laptop – Sidux Linux
3. Acer Aspire ONE Netbook – Ubuntu EEE
4. Dell Inspiron 8100 Notebook – CentOS
5. T-Mobile G1 – Android
6. Motorola Rokr e6 – MontaVista
7. 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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• Two New Software Freedoms
• Tuxmachines.org

Edit: Pierre removed the comment after I commented on his site and apologized.  I greatly respect Pierre for taking a stance on this issue though.  It is much needed in the open source community now.

That is far from the truth.  I was merely ranting my frustration I was having with the nvidia drivers on my Gigabyte GeForce 7300GT graphics card on my desktop.  Sometimes they work, sometimes they do not.  AND yes, the nvidia drivers are working fine now at my preferred resolution but I WILL revert back to nv for stability reasons.  That is my preference, it is my FREEDOM.

ubuwalker31 states that we should have:

1. The Freedom to run any hardware, for any purpose
2. The Freedom to run proprietary software, to run any hardware

I agree with him 100 percent.  I want the FREEDOM to use propriety media codecs and drivers on my BSD/Linux system if I want to.  Granted, the usage of propriety drivers and codecs should abide by the intellectual property and media laws of the country a person resides in, ie libdvdcss in the US.  I just agree to the licenses and install them so I can watch and listen to Windows media files or watch dvds.

On my Thinkpad T60, I use the ATI propriety drivers which do, on occassion, break during updates.  I can revert back to an older driver or just use vesa.  It depends what I am doing at the time.  If I am at a coffeeshop working on a presentation, I rather use vesa until I can get the time to figure out what the actual problem is (Debian Lenny is a godsend in this respect, it configured xorg.conf for me and I had not had any problems since using Lenny).

So to reiterate, I support ubuwalker31’s two new software freedoms and so should you!

Comments are welcome

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Regardless of which distro I use, I have a preference to start out with the open source drivers.  vesa is a common open source driver that I tend to start out with.  It ends to work with most video cards.  On my desktop, I have an Nvidia card so I decided to use the nv open source driver.  Both vesa and nv work on my desktop.

I decided to try the nvidia driver on my Arch Linux desktop.  Arch has a good wiki to get nvidia with 3D rendering to work. I got it to work and was quite happy, for about a month at least.  So what happened?

The nvidia drivers, like it’s propriety counterpart, ati, have a tendency to break.  For some computer users, it breaks a lot.  With Gentoo, I never install the latest nvidia drivers.  It breaks X forcing me to either revert to an older driver or switch to nv or vesa.  With Arch, an update to the Gnome desktop broke X with the cause attributed to my nvidia driver.  In Ubuntu, yes Ubuntu systems do break, an update to the kernel caused X to break as well.  In PC-BSD, I was forced to rebuild X.Org.  In all cases, I was either using the nvidia or ati propriety drivers.

When X broke earlier this week on my Arch system, I first had to find out what was the culprit (I mentioned above that I upgraded my Gnome desktop).  X was working but I was getting a low resolution with the nvidia drivers.  It did not matter if I set the Modes to reflect the resolution of my monitor, the lower resolution remained default.

Finally I decided to switch to vesa and the higher resolution (1440X900) returned.  I made some more configurations to xorg.conf and I got the open source nvidia drivers, nv, to work at the higher resolution as well.  The nvidia driver still do not work.  No problem, I will not use them on my desktop again, I will stick to open source drivers which, from my experience, have never broke on me.  Save the headache, stick with nv

I am eagerly waiting for an open source graphics card.  There is one available but the price is quite expensive, $1500 US, higher than many custom-built desktops!  Prices should drop in the future though.

Edit: This is a blog posting, not a news article, Beginner Howto, etc.  The above posting mentioned that I preferred to use open source drivers on my DESKTOP, it does not mention that I use them on my other laptops and systems.  I am also not denying anyone’s RIGHT to use propriety drivers, I use them as well.

See my latest blog posting and response to ‘Two New Software Freedoms’.

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I miss not having to edit something, really.  I even stopped developing on my desktop.  Weird since many developers gave up Gentoo or other distros so they could have a stable system.

Isn’t is strange that I could get a server to run on Gentoo, Arch, or FreeBSD, but not on Ubuntu.  Seriously, this is not right.  Ubuntu is supposed to make things easier for me.  That’s what all the Ubuntu users tell me.

To be honest, I got a lot of things done when I was running Gentoo and FreeBSD systems.  Arch Linux opened up a new world to me as well though I preferred to do things the Gentoo/BSD way.  If it wasn’t for that bad battery in my motherboard, I would probably still be running either PC-BSD or Gentoo now.

Right now I need a stable system to get Django to run properly.  For me, that means doing it with Gentoo, possibly with FreeBSD.

Will I give up on Ubuntu, no way.  As I mentioned many times, Ubuntu is the choice of users in Vietnam. I still need to use it but if I want to go back to my geek roots, I got to use Gentoo again.

I am not a distro hopper, I am just a Gentoo ‘jump back and forth-er’

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Then this week I got another unusual error with my new SATA drive.  When booting up, I kept getting an error message stating it could not find the boot loader, insert a system rescue disk.  It was odd, I then used the Arch LiveCD to chroot back into my system and reinstall grub.  I could reboot into Arch no problems.  I even restarted several times to see if the problem repeated itself.  Everything was fine.

Next morning I received the same error.  Sometimes even after turning off my desktop for two hours, the problem returned.  Each time grub-install fixed the problem but I could not pinpoint what the actual cause was.  My friends felt it was something wrong with my Gigabyte motherboard.  I thought about updating BIOS.  We even thought that my power supply may be bad.

In the end, don’t laugh, it turned out I just needed a new battery for the motherboard.  A French Ubuntu user pointed that out immediately after hearing what happened.  He asked me to check the clock in BIOS to see if it had the correct time.  When he said that, then everything made sense.  I remember getting an error during bootup that a block was mounted in the future.  I thought I fixed that by syncing my computer with a time server but since Arch boots up in 19 seconds, I missed it the repeating error.

I went to a computer store in Saigon, bought a new battery, inserted it into my motherboard.  Everything has been okay since.  Turns out that the battery that came with my motherboard was replaced with a cheaper Chinese version.  I replaced that with a Maxwell battery but I want my friend to bring me back some higher quality batteries from the US next month.

Now I am back running Arch Linux, my favorite distro for the last two months.  I even got my second Samsung SATA drive installed in  my computer now.  I will use it as backup or possibly install Debian Lenny on it for a project.

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I headed to Speakeasy which tested my current download speeds at 1717 kb/s on the Seattle server.

Sometimes you can get these early morning spikes for bandwidth.  The best times are normally between 6-8 AM on weekdays when everybody begins to head to work

OpenOffice ended up downloading in less 3 minutes, the whole binary package.  That never happens very often here.

I think this could be a small sign that the internet infracture may be getting better here.  Then again, I have said that many times in the past

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