After installing the nVidia drivers in Ubuntu 6.10 the screen was pushed slightly to the left. It was enough to be annoying, and since I didn’t want to shift the monitor settings (as I run windows as well) I ran the utility xvidtune from the terminal, pushed the “right” button about 6 times to move the screen to the right, hit show, got the modeline from the terminal output, and inserted that into the Monitor section of my /etc/X11/xorg.conf file (after backing it up!) with the prefix Modeline. All better now!

Since I am nuts, I finally decided to try out Gentoo on an old sandbox computer laying around. Basically I followed the gentoo handbook line by line, and had minimal problems through most of it (besides mounting the root directory twice, whoops!). Emerge is, um, emerging as a wonderful command, and basically the only error I had so far was having to re-emerge the x11-libs/cairo package with the X flag.

USE=”X” re-emerge x11-libs/cairo

Of course, I started this whole thing 2 days ago with a stage three tarball! XFCE is in the background happily (I hope) compiling away. The jury is still out as to whether or not Gentoo will provide a faster machine, but it has been a fun learning experience so far!

In a previous post (Installing nVidia drivers on Ubuntu 6.10) I wrote about installing the nVidia drivers on my AMD 4200+ X2 with an nVidia 6800GS system. This worked, apparently, but the computer was no longer recognizing the second core (type: `more /proc/cpuinfo` to see) . Not only that, but the computer was running Ubuntu slower than Windows. Something was not right!
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I finally got off my lazy butt and moved my main Windows XP hard drive to one of the SATA removable drive bays I had so that I could cold swap operating systems and avoid having to dual boot. The major impetus for this was to try out the new Mandriva Live CD, but ran into serious problems with my video card. Now I know that there is a way to boot the live CD up identifying that I want to use the vesa drivers, but it just wasn’t happening, and I wanted to get a working OS up today. Knowing that the problem was most likely my nVidia 6800GS video card, I chose to try Ubuntu because it’s easy to install (usually) and there was already a great guide for getting the nVidia drivers. installed.
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I was having trouble changing my hostname in SUSE 10.2. I finally had to go into YaST and under Network Services -> DNS and Hostname I deselected change Hostname via DHCP. All is well!

I’ll hopefully fill this in more later but from a recommendation from Jimbo at UNJX I decided to try installing the server edition of Edgy Eft on my Gateway 500 Mhz monster with 384 MB of RAM and an old ATI Radeon 8500 AIW. Installation of the server was simple as I had already made the partitions as outlined in Creating a Custom Partition Setup for a Linux Install. I reformatted and set mount points for all the partitions except for the /home partition where I just set a mount point.

Installation was a breeze and super fast. It took about 30 minutes on this archaic beast! I then ran

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I set up Ubuntu on an old Gateway 500 Mhz machine to act as a server. I got Apache, FTP, and SSH all set up and have dynamic DNS through www.dyndns.org. SSH and FTP worked fine but I could not see the web outside my browser even though I forwarded port 80 to the computer on my Netgear router. After much looking I finally figure out that I needed to forward port 8080 (http server) as well. Once that was set I was golden! By the way, I used the How-To forge guide to get this setup.

Due to Thunderbird repeatedly crashing on my in openSUSE 10.2 I am now using Kontact/Kmail. Aside from a few config issues Kmail is great, and I am really loving the simple interface. I wanted to incorporate the calendar however, and also have the ability to email reminders of upcoming events. Kontact has a great calendar associated with it, as well as a To-Do list with the ability to configure simple and advanced reminders.

The ability to email the reminders is not available though, and in my searches through Google it seems that this is a feature many people would like to see. While you can’t email directly from Kontact you can run a program at a specific time (shades of Cron!), and this is where I was able to fudge something together with mutt.
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As per the instructions at Jarkolicious, I verified my site at Google, and then installed the Google Sitemap Generator plugin to make an XML sitemap and have it automatically uploaded. More later if it works…

I’ve been playing around with Parallels at home lately, and while I really like having a linux box at my disposal without having to reboot, having a major KDE-based distro is pretty to look at, but takes up a lot of system resources.

As my needs are pretty simple, I wanted to try a few different distros to compare and contrast, and also to learn more about being a linux SA. My exploits with SUSE 10.2 are scattered throughout this blog, but I’ll summarize here that I truly love openSUSE 10.2, and it is my distro of choice on my work production box, but tends to be a tad bloated when run as a virtual machine.

My needs were simple:
Internet Client
Email Client
Ability to run the LAMPP () server suite
Install and run the Generic Mapping Tools
Install and run the R Statistical Software package

Enter Damn Small Linux

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