Walk Alone

The d@#$ graphics card gave out two days ago!!!

My current machine seems to be worst I have ever bought, at least as far as the reliability of its peripherals and the computer guy is concerned. To be fair, the rest of it is fighting fit. But I have blown out at least one USB port by using it to power a USB light. And in the 14 months I have owned the graphics card, I have used it for a grand total of barely one month.

An unused LAN card followed the dead graphics card out of the box. Since I was in the mood, I did a quick inventory of the useless or extra hardware I have stockpiled:

• Two keyboards - Intex, Logitech
• Mouse - iBall
• Asus LAN card
• Taiwanese Bluetooth dongle
• USB light
• NVIDIA GeForce 7100 with 128 MB RAM

Except for the BT dongle and the NVIDIA card, the rest all work, or are salvageable in an emergency .

I’m happy happy happy!

The hardware guy has returned my video card and my Gladiator DVD! My system is complete! I ‘ve to look into installing some nvidia thingy to get a better look at the card’s capabilities.

As for the scheduled upgrade, just like from 7.04 to 7.10, 7.10 to 8.04 has gone smoothly. In case you are wondering why I had to do a clean install for 7.04: I assembled my current machine in late March 2007 - 7.04 was just in time to be the first OS to be loaded on to this machine.

The upgrade pulled 463 MB from the net in spite of having the alternate CD at its disposal. I ran the update-upgrade sequence a couple of more times to get the third party repos up to the mark.

No major surprises except for XMMS, which is replaced by Audacious. And it may be the novelty of the upgrade, but things look even more glossy than in Ubuntu 7.10.

Life is good.

The best version of Ubuntu ever is coming out; right on schedule on 24th April.

This time around, I ‘m in two minds - go for GNOME or go for KDE, specifically, KDE 4.  The facts that KDE 4  is still  not complete and that the only clean way to go from GNOME to KDE is to reformat are keeping me in the GNOME camp for now. No time to experiment. No time to backup data and restore.

An OS upgrade is also the time when I take a good, hard look at my machine and decide on any upgrades to the hardware. I have added a 250 GB SATA hard disk (Western Digital) and a new keyboard to my machine in honor of the Hardy Heron. I had other reasons too - I sorely needed the storage space. As for the keyboard, the one connected to my dad’s machine was getting clunky. You would have to apply about as much force as you would put on a circuit breaker to switch it on. It took the fun out of using the PC. So my comfy Logitech keyboard goes to my dad, while I got a Samsung Pleomax. While it doesn’t have the brand, it had a compact form factor and smooth, consistent tactile feedback.

The third thing I bought - a USB Bluetooth dongle - was a stillborn. It didn’t even get detected. A pity, really. The stores offer you no other brand than the el cheapo Chinese one. This was my second attempt, incidentally, to get a useful Bluetooth experience. The first dongle petered out in a couple of weeks… So now, I ‘m a huge fan of the USB cable. It just works!

In other news, I tried Wammu to backup my SE z550i. It did read the contacts and messages correctly, but was not able to restore the messages from backups (I did not attempt the contacts). I filed a bug - it seems to be a copy of an existing one. Let’s see if I can ever get my messages back on to the phone.

My lean and mean rig is still incomplete. Yes, one year after I paid money for it and got it delivered, I still haven’t received the NVIDIA GeForce 7100 graphics card. It went kaput one week after delivery and has been in “repair” ever since. I have given up hope of ever seeing it again. To add insult to injury, the computer guy (who has also failed to return my original DVD of Gladiator - see a pattern here?) calls me frequently for “Linux advice”. Call me a sucker for … whatever; but the times I have asked him about it, I was promised it would be delivered in a week. Lesson has been learnt.

This new Samsung keyboard has a few buttons I need to explore - power, sleep, wake, turbo and the Win keys. I should be able to map them to do something useful.

I always used to hear the big deal pilots and race drivers made about their gloves. How they have to fit perfectly and so on. Otherwise, the poor guy holds the stick (or the wheel) too tightly and pretty soon cramps his hands. I never thought it could apply to something as redundant as a computer mouse. Redundant, you ask? Why not? I believe all tasks except the ones involving freehand drawing can be done through the humble keyboard. Ask me. For some months now, my mouse had been giving me trouble. First, the damn buttons went haywire - intent on double (sometimes triple) clicking all my single clicks. Then the trackball forgot that it is supposed to stay in touch with the horizontal roller. Tremendous wrist pain. And incredibly, I adapted! From sharp flicks of my wrist that ensured the pointer snapped from one side of the screen to the other to using keyboard shortcuts for stuff I never knew could have them. OK, so I didn’t learn all the shortcuts, but enough to forget that basically, I needed to replace my mouse. ASAP.

So what changed the status quo? My project report. I needed a good mouse. One that sent the pointer where I wanted to, without wasting any time or straining my wrists. In a bind, I borrowed Bhise’s piece. And I realized what I was actually doing so long. It was wrong (that rhymes?). Forget memorizing shortcuts and enduring painful wrists. The broken mouse was slowing me down! Damn. Double damn.

Today, I got a basic optical mouse. Logitech. And I’m happy.

Its submission time. If you have been tracking this blog since its first post, you know what that means - no posts till exams are over. Sucks. But hey, I have to do it just one more time and then its over for ever.

****

I configured my USB printer to print from DOS. Details here. It requires Windows 2000/XP. The short version is - share your printer and map the network share to LPT1. If you don’t have a LAN connection (even a cable modem connected to a NIC will do), use Microsoft Loopback Adapter, as shown here. Once done, you are ready to fire print requests from DOS. I tested listing a DIR output and a file from Turbo C++ IDEv3. It is slow. I read somewhere else that win32 was putting in a delay of 15 seconds for network printers (remember, DOS sees a “network” printer) - something to do with print spooling. It can be removed with a registry hack, but thats OK. Also, right now I have no way to change the default fonts and layout. The font is fine but the layout is almost touching the paper’s edges.

Here’s how the plan went on my PC. “System error 66″ resulted becuase I hadn’t shared my printer yet. The commands are preceeded by the prompt.

C:\>net view \\makubex00
There are no entries in the list.

C:\>net use lpt1 \\makubex00\hp3325
System error 66 has occurred.

The network resource type is not correct.

C:\>net use lpt1 \\makubex00\hp3325
The command completed successfully.

C:\>net view \\makubex00
Shared resources at \\makubex00

Share name Type Used as Comment

——————————–
hp3325 Print LPT1 hp deskjet 3320 series
The command completed successfully.

C:\>dir > lpt1

C:\>

****

I’m going to install Ubuntu 5.10 after the exams. Took me about 4 days to download on Torrent. This time, I kept my client running and got a share ratio of 52%. I had set an 80% or 300 minutes - whichever is earlier - limit. For the record, the share ratio by the time the download finished was 10%. Anyone wanting Ubuntu 5.10 for x86 and willing to wait till December 25, feel free to contact me for details - after December 25.