Adventures in widescreen-land

My girlfriend got me a 19" widescreen monitor for Christmas to replace my 20" CRT monitor that had been hogging the better part of my desk for the last 10 months or so. I shutdown my computer, rebooted, and when it came back up, things were a little odd. My resolution was set at 1280x1024 (my old resolution) even though the native resolution of my new LCD screen is 1440x900. I was a little puzzled, so I downloaded the nvidia-settings program to set the resolution manually; after I set it to 1440x900, I was asked to restart X to set the resolution correctly (or something like that). After I rebooted (I know, I could have just reset X), I couldn't even load X, had to try to fix my Xorg.conf from the cli, which wasn't really a problem, except it didn't seem like X was even looking at the xorg.conf file...so I was stuck. Luckily, I'd installed Gentoo on a different partition, so I booted into that, emerged k3b (which took at least 2 hours), burned a new gutsy cd, and re-installed ubuntu.
My adventure doesn't stop here. After I reboot and boot from my new ubuntu partition, I'm stuck at 1024x768 with about 3 inches of black on the left side of the screen. Daunting. I installed the nvidia-glx-new driver, rebooted, and I was set...I just got compiz fusion going, and now I'm happy.
What I'm not happy about is the time it took me to get the whole thing up and running. Just to get the correct resolution on a new monitor, I spent at least 10 hours configuring, installing, reinstalling, and praying. Whenever I read stories about how hard something was for somebody to do with linux, I tend to roll my eyes and think "No way it was that hard. I could fix that in a minute", and I'm sure someone is going to do that here as well. Just let me prefix the flaming by saying I'm pretty experienced with linux, and it took me 10 hours. Just think about how a linux novice (someone using an eeepc/gPC) would react!
That's all, let the flames begin.

Installing Gentoo for real

I know it's been awhile, but I haven't really been doing anything blog-worthy lately, so there it is. The other day (more like last week sometime), I started to ponder installing Gentoo on my desktop box. I printed out the gentoo handbook, burned a brand-new minimal-x86-2007.0 disk, rebooted, and I was off!


After about 2 hours of emerge --sync, compiling, and untarring, I was set to go. I followed the handbook to the letter, except for a couple of things: For one, I didn't make a separate 32Mb /boot partition, because I already had grub configured on my root drive for ubuntu, and I _really_ didn't want to lose my beautiful working operating system. I simply edited /boot/grub/menu.lst on /dev/hda2 (my ubuntu root drive) to include a couple references to the gentoo root partition.
Also, because I was dual-booting, I had to modify my partitioning a little bit, but nothing major.

In other news, I'm engaged to a beautiful girl, and we're set to get married in May, God willing.

Updates, and some events of today

Wow, where to begin? I finished installing Gentoo on the box I got from the mafia guy, fooled around with synergy, vnc, ssh, fluxbox, and eventually set it aside. I really like gentoo!

My girlfriend works at Radioshack, so I can get stuff at a reasonable cost, but that's not really what I'm going to go into right now. There is a new shopping center opening, and the local Radioshack is moving from an old location to a new one in the brand new shopping center. I assisted in the move, and noticed some older computers in the back, which I eventually purchased (with 2 monitors) for about 10 bucks! When I get these boxes home, I realise two things: One, neither of these computers have any RAM in them, and two, both computers are under 300Mhz...not ideal for anything really.

My friends and I are starting up a computer-oriented business together at the end of December, and one of the services we want to offer is a free-of-charge internet cafe. Of course, since we're all under 20, finances are of the utmost importance, and anywhere we can save a buck or two, we try to. I was using stumbleupon, and found this . After about 4 hours of trial and error, I was able to get each computer to boot from an etherboot floppy, load a minimal OS from a central server, load X, and get to a desktop! The cool thing is, 90% of the processing is done on the server, the crappy box that the customer sees is just a thin client. Of course, we want to look professional, so we're not going to be displaying 10 year old technology in the front room, these boxes were just for me to practice on. Now that I know the theory and practice, we'll be using these <--link to 533Mhz box as our thin clients. Small, cheap, stylish. I'm digging it, for sure!

In totally unrelated news, I slid off the side of the road (it's been pouring down rain lately), got pulled out, locked my keys in the truck, and had to break the window to get them...what a bummer! :(