LeeNukes

OK, first let me say something, don’t get me wrong. I think its great that there are Linux PCs available to the masses finally.
However what I don’t like is it feels like we’re having to sacrifice to get peoples attention. Yes, they’ll take Linux…when its in a cheap PC that if they like they can reinstall it with Windows (good luck finding the drivers).

So, let me get to the point, I downloaded gOS and ran the live version in a VirtualBox session, and I thought, what’s this?

Not only is it cluttered with over sized icons (Mac-esque), a silly task panel which appears to be being hailed as a great innovation. You open an application and it puts another icon at the bottom, you move onto the panel to open something, it moves out of the way.

Its Linux, but not as you know it.

Well I wish the best of luck to gOS but its not very nice and it could be damaging to the Linux community if peoples opinions of Linux are tainted with this.

Oh, and as for the topic title, I’m referring to this article: gOS: Undocumented Enlightenment

Well, tonight I was in Sainsburys just buying my weekly shop and I passed some air fresheners. Its getting near Christmas and I like the spicy smells they often have around this time.

I saw a few things on offer, one of which was this:
£1.94 on save 50%

Thats good I thought, but hang on, as I’m familiar with printers and cost of printers vs ink prices etc I thought it best to check out the refill prices:

£3.48 each

For a shop that is cleaning up the environment I’m slightly annoyed that this kind of practise still goes on. This is forcing people into throwing away extra packaging and possibly even the plugin device as if the refill is THAT much more then a refill and a plugin, its easy maths to work out which people will buy.

OK, this is the methods I have used to successfully upgrade my system OS from Fedora 7 to Fedora 8, your mileage may vary.

1) Get into a terminal and su to root

2) run yum update

3) rpm -Uhv http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/
releases/8/Fedora/i386/os/Packages/fedora-release-8-3.noarch.rpm

once I ran this command I appeared to have to wait a few minutes, maybe for things to get setup but when I first ran a yum upgrade command after, it didn’t work. If waiting doesn’t work for you, this is what I did to trigger it to work:

yum -n remove fedora-release

then run:

yum upgrade

it gave me some errors on dependency problems, it could be due to me having livna repositories:

Error: Missing Dependency: libwnck-1.so.18 is needed by package heliodor
Error: Missing Dependency: beryl-plugins >= 0.2.1 is needed by package beryl-settings
Error: Missing Dependency: libwnck-1.so.18 is needed by package bdock

I did this to resolve:

yum -y remove beryl-plugins heliodor bdock

the above removed 6 packages for me.

then do a yum upgrade and all “should” go well, as I said you might run into your own difficulties but it worked fine for me.

finally to add back livna repos:

rpm -Uhv http://rpm.livna.org/livna-release-8.rpm

I did this last night and when checking this morning I’ve only noticed one issue so far and that was that gedit didn’t apppear to have a top bar, this could be due to me having to install beryl items back, not sure yet.

I recently built my PC, apologies to anyone who was waiting for a guide, I couldn’t wait to get stuck in and I only had a couple of hours due to going out the evening. I still need to tidy up the cables etc inside, never the less, its up and working with no problems at installation.

Anyway, thats not why I’m posting this, I’m posting this to announce I’m playing this game, and not in Windows, in Linux.

I bought this game assuming that I’d have to play it in my Windows XP installation, after a curious google search I found that there was a Linux client available, what the heck I thought, considering the previous Doom 3 client I’d tried worked pretty well.

So, I downloaded the Linux client from their website and ran the installer, a few minutes later I was up and running. Graphics onto full, didn’t notice any real slow down of the game. I did find that it wouldn’t work online for some strange reason, but as it was a new game I was playing against the computer to practise anyway.

The latest update has resolved the playing online issue, anyway. Game play is great, I’m not great at the moment, still learning the ropes but so far so good.

Nice move Splash Damage, thanks for supporting other then Windows Users :)

I’ve been a Virgin Media (previously NTL) customer for many years now and I’ve been happy with their service overall. When there were outages it was often up within a day or so. I only had to get an engineer out twice and one of the times was to correct and issue the first guy should have resolved.

But now they have introduced speed caps to their service, see here and I am not happy. They claim that if I download over 750MB on my service in peak hours then I will get capped to 2Mb. I’ve found this not to be the case, sometimes when I come home at night (nothing is on in my house using anything like 750MB downloads) I find that my connection is already at the lower speed. How can this be when I’m the only person in the house at the time!?

Their response is contact the pay for support line. My response is shove that up your arse. I’m not paying for a phone call to tell them what I’m already paying for is not working. That should be free.

I admit, I do sometimes download large files, given I am an IT Professional and a Linux advocate sometimes I do download large files. Personally I think that they have been very short sighted on this capping and are pissing off many legitimate and long standing customers.

I’m hoping that they see the error of their ways soon due to the hassle of getting Sky in and a BT phone line to get ADSL but unless things change before the end of the year, I can see myself going to this trouble.

Please, if you are on Virgin Media or even if you disagree to this capping:
Sign The Petition Against the Speed Caps