“She’s going to be a slutty eight ball for Halloween?” - Me, hearing my wife incorrectly

Posted over on Blender artist s and told them about the problems I was having with Indigo and getting it to render Suzanne as glass. It turned out that I had two things wrong. One: I needed to set the gain to 2 instead of the standard 100. Apparently this controls the transparency level. Two: I needed to set the absorption color as it didn’t transfer over from Blender. In fact, a quick look on the Indigo forums showed that the materials don’t export over well without some work. Here’s the final result after 28 hours:

The word irreverent is tossed around way too flippantly these days, however, if there’s one site that deserves it, it’s ZeroPunctuation. ZeroPunctuation is a site where a British guy living in Australia reviews video games within a video format weekly. He often makes fun of games and the genres they belong in. The animation is extremely simple, yet remarkably effective. It’s slightly more than xkcd, but not much more than stick figures. The way he does this is brilliant and it must be seen in order to explain it correctly. Just one warning, if you get queasy over profanity, do NOT visit his site.

For nearly a year now, I’ve seen a lot of really great images in the blender gallery. Many of the most breathtaking images are rendered with outside renderers like Yafray or Indigo. Here’s an example of a subtle, but real-looking render made with Indigo.

I already tried Yafray before, and didn’t really like it too much. I decided to give Indigo a shot. So I went to the Indigo website and followed their directions for rendering with Indigo from Blender. The tutorial shows it as coming out like this:

I followed the procedure at http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/YumUpgradeFaq so the point of this is just to go over my experience with these steps.

1. Review and remove all .rpmsave and .rpmnew files before and after upgrading I basically did a locate, found them and deleted them.

2. for a in $(find /etc /var -name ‘*.rpm?*’); do b=${a%.rpm?*}; diff -u $a $b; done I did this, but I didn’t really know what to do with the results. It appears not to have mattered in this case

1. The bootup screen is pretty, but….

2. The default GDM screen looks a little ugly to me….perhaps it’s just too new.

3. The new SELinux notification tool may be useful if something is not working correctly, but it just bugs the heck out of me as every single program appears to be trying to access protected memory. Of course, some people may welcome this new program. It looks very nice, but I’ve never been one of those who had problems with SEL to begin with

Well, at least it worked pretty well on my future PVR. I will give a more detailed explanation/directions of my experience for others who may be wondering if this is really as scary as it sounds since it’s “unsupported”. However, my main Linux computer is much, much more complex in the number of packages installed. I’ll probably be waiting until after the Thanksgiving Holidays to tackle that one to make sure that I have the needed time to fix things if they go wrong. At least I’m happy at the prospect and I plan on letting the Fedora Live Upgrade SIG know about this so they can make it officially supported.

This short film won a contest over on MyToons.com and it’s no wonder!

Check it out!

Well, the entire upgrade process is not yet over, so I don’t want to get too excited, but I think this may solve my problem.  I started a yum upgrade on my living room computer  - which will one day be my MythTv PVR (once I get the necessary hardware).  It went through the dependency check in roughly 4 minutes or less.  It’s now downloading 951 MB of updates, so it may be a while before it’s ready for the next phase.  Still, if this works, I know what I’m going to do with my main computer.  I really hope this can eventually become a supported method of upgrading.  It seems to be a lot faster and doesn’t require me to uninstall all of my third party programs.

It may have been about to install or it may never have installed, but after 35 hours, I was getting a little annoyed.  I’ve decided to try the unsupported yum upgrade.  I’ll try it first one a guinea pig computer that’s at Fedora 7.  If that works, I’ll try it on my real machine.

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Tags: [Fedora 8](http://technorati.com/tag/Fedora 8), upgrade, yum