Linux Format Magazine Issue #72 had, appropriately enough, 72 speedups for a Linux computer. I really don’t need it for my desktop computer as it has a modern processor and 512 MB of RAM, but my laptop is a 600 Mhz 128 MB RAM geezer. The most important thing for me with the laptop is the startup time. I use it for pretty simple tasks since it is so slow and so I don’t mind perhaps giving up some ameneties to make it startup faster. After all, on a laptop, the longer it takes to start up, the less battery time I have to use when it’s up! I chose the following speedups:

As happens every once in a while, this article tries to spread the FUD that the FOSS movement is a communist movement. That is completely untrue as the developer is free to charge for value-added services. For example, Novell makes a boxed product that sells for $100. You could download it for free, but if you pay the money you get a manual and support. Likewise, Madriva is free to download, but you can pay for the priveledges to get the downloads first by being part of the Mandriva Club. FOSS requires a paradigm shift and some are scared and can’t see how to make money this way so they call it communism. It’s ok, most people are afraid of new things.

Finished my German game in civ4 and now onto warlord. I’ve never been this high up in civ before. Hopefully they don’t crush me!

In my KDE 3.5 post, I mentioned it was the final release of KDE before KDE 4. According to this interview on O’Reilly with a KDE developer, there are some BIG changes a’ comin’! It looks like KDE will be going through some paradigm shifts in the way they think about the desktop. Interestingly enough, it is tentatively slated to come out in Fall of 2006, around the time that Windows Vista with IT’S paradigm shift in desktop philosophy should be coming out. It will be interesting to see where this goes. Both KDE and MS seem to be moving towards Apple’s chic desktop concepts.

I’ll post my file from my last game soon. Just started a new civ4 game with 2 new elements. First of all, I’m playing pangea so boats are irrelevant. Second, I’m playing Germans which have some differences from previous civs I’ve played (Japanese and Chinese). One primary difference is that the German special unit comes much later in the game. The Chinese get theirs very early, allowing me to kill the Japanese very early on before wars take too long. Japanese get their Samuarai mid-game which can be good as you’re trying to expand that last bit of land. But I chose Frederick because of his creative side which gives extra culture (I’m a big culture person and always win a bunch of cities from the opposition on culture) and philosophical which helps in Wonders. Execellent! I’m still Cheiftan, but I think next game I will go to War Lord. I still won my last game by a large margin.

The title of this post is, of course, a play on words. The company Ximian has developed Mono, an open source competitor to MS’s .NET. Mono is spanish (and probably latin) for monkey. The reason I’m excited is that according to Gnomedesktop.org, Fedora Core 5 will have mono! This means we’ll get great new programs being coded in Mono such as F-Spot, a photo organization program, and Beagle, an AMAZING search tool on par with the search tool in the latest Macintosh. Basically, it indexes the file system in such a way as to be able to look through not only filenames, but also tags in photos, music, and documents. Beagle even searches through AIM logs created by Kopete and Gaim. But the COOLEST thing is that, unlike the search in Windows which takes forever, this is instantaneous since it’s always indexing your computer. In fact, there are demos you can see by clicking on the beagle link on the right-hand side of my blog, that show a search being conducted and as the author write stuff in his IMs, it appears in the search. I can’t wait for this to be available to us Fedora users!

I was successful in sharing the drive with my windows computer and have tested that I can create files and delete them in Windows. I followed this tutorial. I did everything as they said to setup Samba, which communicates on the Windows smb protocol. They only thing different was to uncomment the line security = user. That has to be set to security = share. Now I’m trying to adapt their NFS to work for me for sharing with Linux. It was working before I formated the drive from FAT32 to ext3. (I reformatted because FAT32 has no ability to set file permissions. Shame on you BGates!) If/When I figure it out, I’ll probably post what I did differently on here. Stay tuned!

In Fedora Core 4 (and earlier Cores) when the user is in Gnome or KDE, the HAL daemon will automatically recognize when a USB drive is attached to the computer. It will then create an fstab entry and all will be good in the world. I’m not sure if this happens in Debian, but I’m using Debian as a print/file server so I don’t have any GUIs installed. So I will go over my learning process for others who may be having the same difficulties.

Here is the abbreviated commentary on my building of my new computer.Above are the new computer parts I used. In addition to these, I scavanged my DVD-ROM, DVD+-R, and hard drive from my old computer. I actually didn’t use the firewire ports as my motherboard has one in back and a connection for one in the front. I only use firewire for my video camera, so that was enough for my needs. I’m hanging on the to the firewire card for future potential projects.

At first, Civ4 seemed not to play much better on this computer with twice the stats of my old machine. Yeah, the game didn’t take 15 minutes to load, but it wasn’t as close to instantaneous as I’d hoped. But then I slowly began to see the places where Civ4 was much better on this computer. The first thing I noticed is that the Wonder videos are no longer out of sync with the sound, so I was able to watch them and enjoy what the programmers had put together. Then I noticed that the scrolling was much, much smoother than it previously had been. Finally, I was able to talk to other civs without that causing me to have to wait 3 minutes for the other civ to load up. I finished yet another game, this time as the chinese, and I’ll be uploading that soon.