After I installed my system from scratch again, I wanted a nicer login screen. I looked around KDE-Look.org for a theme that I could use. After some experiments, I settled for making a theme of my own.
I started off with the Kubuntu Edgy UserList theme and Gentoo-ified it. Then I replaced the background graphic with my favorite wallpaper. This is the result:
To install the same theme for yourself: Read the rest of this entry »
Having switched to genkernel, for better or for worse, I wanted to use gensplash to have a boot splash and some framebuffer background graphic. Looking at KDE-Look.org, I settled for Gentoo-Blue, but I didn’t like the console background graphic, so I created my own from the Go Gentoo Go Bootsplash. This is the result:
To get the same framebuffer background: Read the rest of this entry »
I can’t stress this enough: If you need to get DRI to work on your system because it suddenly miraculously doesn’t want to work anymore, then your very first step should be to closely follow the DriTroubleshooting page on the DRI Wiki. Check your /var/log/messages and dmesg or Xorg.0.log respectively Xorg.1.log to look for errors and follow that guide. I don’t remember what exactly my problem was anymore, but that guide helped me to get hardware acceleration back for my system! đ
My beloved Thinkpad R51 broke down and forced me to get a replacement. Since I didn’t want to invest too much time to get a working system back at that time, since I had work to do, I ordered the same model again via eBay. After completing said work and a vacation, I wanted to try and reinstall my Gentoo system from scratch, since I now had a second hard disc for this anyway. This was mainly to see if I really can set up the system on my own (the first time I received guidance), and if it had gotten any easier since I first installed it. Read the rest of this entry »
I just installed Debian on a box again, and even before finishing the installation I was confronted with a defect /var/lib/dpkg/available file, which seemed to be truncated. Most of the items in base-config didn’t work because of this. I fixed it by doing a
dpkg --clear-avail
dselect update
This made me laugh:
Only “stable” software is included in the Debian core distribution. In Debian project parlance, the term stable means that the software is no longer under active development or widespread use and that the authors are long dead; if software is still under active development, it undergoes changes too rapidly for the Debian project to incorporate them. Due to pressure from users, obsolete versions of certain software that is still under development may be included in the non-stable section, but its use is broadly discouraged, since it does not strictly adhere to the project’s guidelines, sometimes including software from after the renaissance.
Everybody knows and hears about piracy in new media, and media conservatives outright condemn it. If one takes a critical stance on this instead of falling into a simplistic mindset, however, then a lot of insight can be gained from free thinkers on this with surprising results.
There is a thought-provoking presentation from the Internet Archive titled Piracy Is Good? and PiratebyrĂ„n’s Rasmus Fleischer gave an insightful speech at the Reboot Conference in Denmark, formally titled “Gray Commons”, while Pirate Bay was still recovering from the May 31 police raid, which further delves into the implications that come with Digital Rights Management and Peer to Peer networks: PiratebyrĂ„n’s speech at Reboot.
Overall, you scored as follows:
2% scored higher (more nerdy), and
98% scored lower (less nerdy).
What does this mean? Your nerdiness is:
All hail the monstrous nerd. You are by far the SUPREME NERD GOD!!!
It was rather painless to upgrade to kernel 2.6.15 (now I even learned to use module-rebuild after compiling and building the kernel modules) and to KDE 3.5, after it left the experimental ~x86 status. Now I’m trying to get the last things working on my Thinkpad R51 that I didn’t dare to touch yet.
Read the rest of this entry »
After enabling “Intel Speedstep on ICH-M chipsets” and “Intel Pentium 4 clock modulation” as modules in the CPU Frequency scaling menu of the kernel’s power management options, I notice that the speedstep_lib gets loaded automatically upon booting, while the p4_clockmod module does not, yet. I can’t load the p4_clockmod manually via modprobe because it says that the device is busy all the time. Mmhm, maybe I should have a closer look at the Power Management Guide later on.
I have installed KPowersave by adding the necessary ~x86 flag for sys-power/powersave and sys-power/kpowersave in /etc/portage/package.keywords and then added cpudyn, powersaved and acpid to be started automatically upon booting via rc-update add XXX default aswell. The KPowersave is a much more advanced tool than the standard laptop power utility that ships with KDE, I’ll make sure to play around with it later on.
C r a c k . a . s m i l e 