I was finally able to ditch the crazy Helix engine!!!

What I did was to download the full version of Xine (which is also a great media player btw) as described here. Once I did that I ran Xine (which was in the multimedia folder) and put Xine in Amarok to autodetect. So far so good!

I often have to convert dates when programming to do timeseries analysis, make a continuous variable for generalized additive models, etc. In MATLAB there are built in date functions which are helpful, yet in R I was forced to create some, or so I thought.

There are actually some nice routines in the Survival package including routines to convert to and from a Julian date (year day).

Now that Kubuntu is installed and running, there are some tweaks to do to get the KDE interface I desire

Continue Reading »

I have to state this first, I love VI. I know that emacs is great and all (especially with ESS), but there’s something about VI that really speaks to me.

One thing is that ALWAYS on a new system I forget how to turn on the syntax color highlighting. So here it is for the next time I forget.

In your $HOME/.vimrc file uncomment or add the line

syntax on

That’s it!

Well, I have had so many people tell me that I should be using Kubuntu that I finally decided to give it a try. I installed it this morning on an old computer at work and besides the horrifically ugly install menus it worked like a charm! The only weird thing was that by default my ethernet card was turned off, but a quick trip to the help file got that fixed up (go to system settings, network settings, enter admin mode, enable eth0). I will most likely use this distro at home.
More to come!

I was playing around with some styles in PHPBB today and had a funky problem. I downloaded 10 and 8 worked liek a charm! 2 however, obviously were not loading the .css files. I was a bit stumped until I looked I did an ls -l on the templates directory and saw that the file permissions for the two directories containing the non-working styles were set to 400. I went through and changed the dirs to 755 and files to 644 and everything worked great! Soooo, if youare having problems with PHPBB styles not working, check file permissions!

I installed security patches today, and one of them was Real Player 10 for linux, which incorporates the helix engine (the one I was having a problem with in Amarok). The problem I had was that the helix engine would reset the PCM sound to 0 after every track, which was annoying! Xine also would not work. I had given up and moved to XMMS (not as good) but after this patch that bug is gone!!

Happy days!

I had been having trouble with SUSE in two areas, playing MP3 files with Amarok, and with the clock drifiting from real time.

After playing with Amarok for a bit I ditched it and loaded XMMS (Winamp for Linux). It’s a bit of a backratchet but it works. I also installed the FAAD2 codec to get AAC support.
To fix the clock drift I moved the file /etc/adjtime to /etc/_sav_adjtime and then ran (as su) hwclock:

hwclock –set –date”03/20/2006 20:02:05″ which was the accurate GMT time. So far so good. *update, this actually didn’t work as the system clock would drift after shutdown. I ran hwclock –hctosys and after some time it set the system time to the hardware clock.

I thought I would give SUSE a try and attempted to install it on my Athlon. I was having problems with the Kingston removabale drives I bought from the get-go, with sporadic errors from the bios that the boot disk was not recognized. This was frustrating in and of itself, but I finally got things to work it seemed and started to install Linux on a fresh disk. Installation was a breeze and only took about 10 minutes for all of the packages that I wanted. The first snag was during the network test. This had been cake on the two previous systems, but the test failed here, most likely because I was hooked into a Netgear router. I didn’e even get to fix that though because as soon as the system tried to load into KDE it freaked out and turned my display into a rainbow-hued ghost of a machine. It must have been something with my nVidia 6800GS, but at that point I gave up for the night and after more sporadic errors due to a missing boot disk I got my system back to zero point.

This entire Linux situation has been incredibly frustrating for me since I have been an avid Red Hat user for many years. A user, not a systems administrator, and this is where I am becoming frustrated. I did successfully install Red Hat 9 a few years back, and had none of the problems that I have faced in these last few installs.

I will try again though (not on my Athlon gaming machine however!) since I am a masochist and would really like to have the freedom to use the Linux environment as well as Windows.

I thought that I would give Kubuntu another chance (this time unplugging my XP drive first!) and googled up osme ideas for possible errors on my end. One reference claimed that Windows XP could not burn bootable CDs. I had used Nero to burn the iso, and I thought I was OK, but they claimed that it was better to use a program such as ISO recorder. I downloaded and installed ISO recorder, and then attempted to burn the Kubuntu live iso to a new disk. ISO recorder burned the disc instantaneously, so I knew something was wrong. Sure enough, there was nothing on the disc when I attempted a boot. The saga continues…