Saying hello. Love 5.3.1!

[dahveed3]

Hey all,

I originally tried to get registered on the forum here quite some time ago, but was thwarted by not receiving the email response, and seeing no sight of it on the comcast spam mailbox either. This time I was more persistent and emailed our webmaster/administrator a couple of times. I thank him for getting me on here!

For the last year and a half or so I've been using Linux 98% percent of the time on my computer. First was OpenSUSE, then Debian, back and forth between them, Mandriva for a short period, and now back on Debian Lenny. During all this I experimented with other distro's Live CD/DVD as well. Knoppix appears to be the only Live distro (excepting the small distro's like Puppy Linux) that really is designed for a user to make full use of what Linux offers. Most have a small selection designed for a user to check out the distro before installing it on the hard drive, where they would have access to real computer use.

Knoppix on the other hand and especially on the DVD editions, has so much available on the CD/DVD image that there really is a real full experience and use of just about anything one would want. And there's a bit of space to install much of what one might find missing. Really an ingenious design!

I just bought an 8GB Sandisk Cruser Micro USB flash drive and have been reading the various how-to's on installing Knoppix as well as noticing how OpenSUSE also provides some guides on doing much the same type of thing. I am kind of stuck here at home, have been for several years with my Mom needing home care and I'm the one doing it. But I do have some friends that I occasionally (usually during football season) get out to see, and they know nothing about Linux. Actually I'd be hard pressed to not say that they don't know much about Windows either but that wouldn't be too nice. They are friends, after all.

I just figured it would be fun one day to show up with either the Knoppix DVD or my customized USB version and show them the works. Plus the cool factor of being able to travel anywhere and be able to have access to my stuff as long as there was a computer available.

For now, it's just to have the experience of doing the USB install. Don't need to, but well, because it's there! I already used Vista to uninstall that U3 stuff so the drive's clean and ready.

It was fun checking out the new version. It had only been a brief try with 5.1.1 as I was still doing baby steps with Linux with my installed distro and really didn't see the point. I had a distro right here, installed! I wasn't going anywhere.

Anyway, it was nice to see how easy it was to install the NVidia drivers the Debian way. The linux-headers, build-essential, and module-assistant are already installed so I just needed to do the module-assistant and aptitude (keep-all first so it wouldn't start removing the whole system) steps to get it installed, modify xorg.conf, init 2, init 5, and I had 3D. Tried a few games and they played fine, and ran Compiz Fusion alright as well.

I did have a bit of trouble with Compiz Fusion after I added some installations from debian-multimedia.org (added the repo and installed the codecs, switching out Helix for RealPlayer, etc). Compiz Fusion had survived several logouts and logins until I installed those codec things but afterwards it ran without the window decorator. I got the no FBGLX available for default depth 24 (which I had changed the default depth to as Compiz doesn't run on 16). Nothing but removing Shame's Compiz Fusion and installing Debian's version from Lenny would get the decorator to work. Once I did that it worked fine.

I've got Shame's Lenny version on my current Debian Lenny and it works fine, with no decorator problems. It is a slightly newer version than Knoppix 5.3.1 comes with so it's possible that if I had simply upgraded the Shame Compiz packages the problem would have gone away. I'll check it out next time.

I had the Debian version installed, but once I saw Compiz Fusion came out with another development build I just wanted something newer than what's in Lenny. I made the switch out and it went fine. Had to make uninstall my 0.5.2 Emerald packages that I had compiled myself since Debian doesn't have Emerald.

I've purchased the 3 books out (Dummies, Hacking, and Hacks, fill in the rest) on Knoppix. I always like books. Some are more technically helpful than others, but even the simplest offer a nice tour and offer points it might have taken be longer to discover and figure out with web searching and exploring on my own. I can't complain about my purchases of "The Debian System," "Debian GNU/Linux Bible," "Linux Bible 2007," or the books by Keir Thomas on OpenSUSE and Ubuntu. Never used Ubuntu, but it helped me learning Debian.

Nothing much to ask about yet. I generally check out forums for learning and also chip in if I see someone needs some advice on something I might know something about. I didn't want to get the webmaster get me in here and then not post anything, so I figured I'd post and ramble a bit.

Debian Lenny's getting KDE 3.5.9 sometime today. That's good. I missed my system notifications, which haven't worked for anybody for a couple of weeks now. KDE 3.5.9 fixes that. Let's hope my system survives the upgrade! That's a lot of stuff, and one never really knows if that many things will go in smoothly and still work properly. Debian and aptitude are probably more trustworthy for massive upgrades than most, but then there's the guy at the other end of the keyboard. I'll make sure to get out of X for this one. That ought to help.

[Harry Kuhman]

... This time I was more persistent and emailed our webmaster/administrator a couple of times. I thank him for getting me on here!.....

Welcome. I'm unsure if by "our administrator" you mean this site's admin (Eadz) or an administrator at Comcast. But it sure seems like it took you a while to get your e-mail, you signed up and your confirmation was sent last August! I would hope that you have complained to Comcast, and you certainly might want to consider having a non-Comcast mailbox to prevent such problems in the future (such as a free Gmail account that will not block forum sign-ups and that you can take with you if you get sick of Comcast games and go to a different service provider in the future). It is unfortunate that we even need to confirm e-mail addresses, but even with this extra step we get an awful lot of spammers and spam accounts,a and the problem of spam posts was much worse before this was put into place.

By the way, we optionally will send out an e-mail notice whenever there is a response to a thread that you have posted in, so that you can better know when someone is responding to you. If you have that feature enabled in your profile and you don't get notices about responses (like this one) then you still have a Comcast filtering problem. Moving to another e-mail service will correct that also.

[dahveed3]

No, it wasn't Comcast it was your esteemed webmaster. And I received both his reply and the email regarding a reply to my post here just fine.

It seems that the problem is a rare occurrence but mostly occurs with those forum joining verification emails. Yours was not the only one I've had difficulties receiving.

I keep an Earthlink dialup account active just in case Comcast cable internet goes down for a long period. It has done that in the past but that's pretty rare too. The biggest annoyance is the known interference with Torrent use. At times it's fine, and then at times if one finishes it is impossible to get it seeding and a new torrent to start downloading. The internet connection is fine, only the torrents are being blocked. Since I use torrent downloading so rarely, mostly for linux distros, it does annoy that they choose my connection to block. Not as if I'm a big time file sharer or anything. But that too, getting bored? is rare.

Lots of rare things build up. Ask all the divorced people! We'll see how it goes.

I don't keep the email reply to message thing active by default because at times I might post to long generic posts, like, "Windows vs Linux, which should kill the other," and I have no interest in getting the 50 + emails each time someone posts to those kinds of threads. I turn it on when I post if I do desire to keep track of the thread.

The 220 some odd aptitude upgrades to KDE 3.5.9 went perfectly. Amazing, this Linux thing eh? Been using a home computer since about 1998 and was clueless about the existence of an alternative operating system. Even with my enlightenment, I still, like Pavlov's dog, did the usual proprietary thing and dutifully paid my dues with Windows Vista Ultimate Upgrade retail, Nero8, Office 2007 Home and Student, Encarta Deluxe 2007, etc etc. And I barely ever use any of it. At least I broke out of the McAfee annual dues by switching to Avast, Spybot S&S, etc free things. I install it all, and once in a blue moon boot into it for a Windows only game. And it takes several hours of updating stuff and scanning to shut the Security Police, er Center, up to prove I'm clean before I can get to playing a game. I think they think each Windows release just wasn't annoying enough so they make the next one more taxing of hardware and more annoying for the user to actually use the software. Gotta wait until the software is finished using my computer and completing its indexing and backups before we're allowed to jump in for a few minutes and do anything.

I like Linux. It stays out of my way because the original design is so far superior to the glue and patch Windows OS. It doesn't need a zillion security devices running and scanning because it's so hard for nasties to do anything in the first place so they don't bother mostly. And besides optional things like Beagle, there's little to slow things down in the background. I really know where I put my files, thank you. Why are people so interested in desktop search engines anyway? Can't they organize their music, photos, documents in a non-haphazard way? What's so hard? Then they wouldn't need to look so hard to find things. Isn't that what we learn from parents? Clean your room?

I was over my cousin's house recently and he had his hard drive nearly full, stuffed with music. Since there was no money involved I didn't want to spend all day. He had no idea where in the world his mp3's were and they weren't in the My Music folder (this was XP). He kept saying they were in Windows Media Player and was clueless that the Media Library was only filled with links to the actual files. I left him with his drive crashing his system. I know them. There was more wrong (spyware) going on without me even looking for it. HE BOUGHT A NEW COMPUTER! Well, the thing was ancient anyway, with just a 10GB hard drive and originally Windows 98 First Edition. It's a wonder Windows even fit on that thing, and he had the full OfficeXP and tons of wallpapers and screensavers in addition to all the mp3's. I just didn't want to deal with all the spyware, virus scanning, asking him, "is it okay to delete THIS one? How about THIS one," that fixing that thing up would have taken. Not for free.

It sure is a topsy turvy world, that proprietary software is so prevalent. Then again it's also been nice for those that make their way over to discover there's another way, where people contribute to improve things and are encouraged to examine and create using software invented by someone else, all to the betterment of all the users. No secret lines of code where the developers, as Microsoft Windows developers did, actually write into the code how crappy these bubble gum patches they're applying are and how crappy they were programming. Free software dev's are going to want to use the stuff themselves so they do their best to create quality software.

Okay, enough of that. I don't extrapolate often. It was fun. Now I won't need to take something for that.