fedora.short-stack.net

i finally reformatted. i finally have fedora 11 on my main laptop. i reformatted my web server with cent OS and have been procrastinating getting that back up and running i have a lot of backing up/moving crap around to do. i am about to reformat my eee PC with linux mint (leaving for defcon today so i don’t want it to be obliterated by evil shenanigans). we’ll see how that goes.

SO… in the midst of my reformatting frenzy, i did want to share something that has made gnome even prettier and fun to use. gnome-do. i had never seen it until i started my new job. a coworker referred it to me and now i’m referring it to whoever reads this. i don’t think i’ll ever not use it unless something better comes along.

i won’t be good at explaining it so i recommend trying it out. i’ll be more specific about my fedora 11 install later on, however it might prove to be a moot point if my hard drive dies. i think it’s about to bite the dust.

it’s about that time again. i think i’ll be reformatting soon. i can feel it.

fedora 10. this blog will more than likely come back alive.

in the meantime, i’m finishing up my research on the effects of gender socialization on females in open source. the details can be found at osfemales.short-stack.net.

this article is fantastic. to tweet from the command line, make sure you have wget installed and simply do the following: wget --keep-session-cookies --http-user=youremail --http-password=yourpassw \ --post-data="status=HOORAY!" \ http://twitter.com:80/statuses/update.xml OR! curl -u youremail:yourpassw -d status=”HOORAY!" http://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml thank you, IBM, for distracting me even more tonight. i was not procrastinating nearly enough.

appalachLAN XII is today and i have spent the last 3+ hours reformatting my laptop. twice. i couldn’t make up my mind between 8 and 9… i settled with the one i know best. it seems like every time i reformat, with every kernel update, i have to scour the internet for a new BCM4328 driver. the one that worked this time is R140746. wget http://ftp.us.dell.com/network/R140746.EXE i hope this helps someone. after you download that, do the following: echo "blacklist bcm43xx" >> /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist
yum install ndiswrapper
ndiswrapper -i bcmwl5.inf
ndiswrapper -l
ndiswrapper -m
modprobe ndiswrapper make sure you have a wireless interface set up under your network settings and make sure your /etc/modprobe.conf has an “alias wlan0 ndiswrapper” line somewhere in it. you’ll probably have to reboot. you shouldn’t have to with modprobe but i had to.

i don’t know why i didn’t switch sooner. it just WORKS!

i never tried empathy (see previous post). i got sidetracked. such is life.

BUT… we had AppalachLAN XI yesterday (gaming club) and i had not played quake since before i went strictly linux. if you are not familiar with open source gaming, quake 3 arena runs on linux. WOO! i installed it and low and behold, it did not work.

turns out, if you have pulseaudio running, it does not like to work. i was screwing with it for HOURS and could not figure out what the error message was for. i would post it here, but i forgot to save it and thankfully have not replicated it. :-)

bottom line, if you try to install quake 3 arena (ioquake3.org) on fedora and you get a funky error message, that might be your problem. give it a shot. if all else fails, download open arena. it’s 100% open source and is based on the q3 engine.

i can’t wait to try this when i get home!!! updates to come.

is it possible? i’ve been googling this all night because i love to give myself headaches and am using remote desktop + virtual box + my usual desktop all at one time working on my portfolio. life would be much easier if i could just take a screenshot while i’m within virtual box of my windows desktop but that darn pop up window to save my screenshot keeps coming up in fedora. I WANT TO PASTE IT IN WINDOWS–NOT SAVE IT IN LINUX.

this was not as easy to figure out as i had hoped but i found a thread that explained how to install fonts in fedora that finally worked. most of them said to go to system > preferences > fonts but that menu item didn’t exist. so instead i just did this:

cp *.ttf /usr/share/fonts
fc-cache -v -f

log out and back in again and voile! you can has a new font.

there are SO many things i’ve done with fedora lately that i swear have changed my world. my god, it’s amazing. i know that sounds exaggerated but it’s the truth.

i tackled my photoshop woes this week and learned a lot in the process.

this week, we got a new girl at work. since the company i work with is fairly small, they can’t afford top notch computers for everyone in the office to work on. i decided i’d let her use mine and i’d just bring my laptop in, completely forgetting that i had not yet found a reasonable way to get the adobe suite working aside from the pain-in-the-ass, bandwidth-hogging remote desktop method. this gave me a mission.

i’d seen my friends use a windows emulator but had never looked into it. mostly because i had left all my windows/warez CDs in boone. just my luck! i was in boone this weekend for my birthday and remembered to snag them all. step 1 accomplished.

i googled a few solutions and found vmware server. it’s free and seemed like the perfect solution, except for when you up the RAM usage for the virtual server to 2 GB (the minimum requirements to install adobe master suite), you can barely move your mouse when it’s all said and done.

a friend suggested virtual box and that is what i ended up using. after a lot of trial and error, i finally got things working. i will say this, though: make sure you give yourself enough space (15+ gigs) to install the programs you want because resizing the virtual disks is a serious headache.

i looked up many ways to do it and finally found a system recovery ISO (reminded me a lot of knoppix) to boot the guest OS from, run gparted, copy the old partition, put it on a bigger one, and resize it. it took like 7 tries, however, because i kept getting an error in gparted and the new windows partition would not recognize the extra space and it acted like the partition was still 10 gigs instead of 15 (even though it was running off of the 15 gig partition). i honestly do not know what fixed that problem other than luck and jesus having pity on my soul and my processor. it may have been the fact that i finally selected the option to check/repair the new partition in gparted so when the guest OS booted, windows ran chkdsk and recognized the extra space. i’m still gonna say it was a miracle.

so… short story long: if you want to run adobe master suite cs3, it runs beautifully (almost zero lag) under virtualbox.