New computer: Part II

After fiddling a little with “pre” installed Windows XP MCE (a mutant one too, you’ll see why later), I decided to install Linux. Since I wanted as much as possible of my software to be 64-bit and since I thought that I have enough processing power, I choosed to install Gentoo. I bought L+ Extra Gentoo 2006.1, hoping that it would relieve me of downloading basic packages.

What a fool I was. I forgot about my friends serious problems concerning installing gentoo from those dvds and I tried that “graphical gentoo installer”. Did it work? Forget it…. I nearly destroyed my partition layout thanks to it and it never managed to install anything properly.

So, I decided to use the old and proven way of installing from stage3. And then, surprise!. Those DVD didn’t have any stage tarballs. And every GRP package was created from the files in LiveCD, which I found after installing the most important thing from downloaded sources, because sources for packages created from LiveCD wasn’t included in provided distfiles…..

Thanks God that during all that I could use my uncle’s DSL connection, otherwise I couldn’t install anything.

Fortunately in the end I managed to install the most basic things, like xemacs, fvwm-crystal, openoffice, apache2, Ruby on Rails, PHP5, PostgreSQL and some more.

Now, the only unresolved thing is managing to somehow make ALSA’s mixer behave normally. While my soundcard has only stereo output, the mixer is for 5.1 or 7.1 (I don’t know – I never had such a card), at least as such it is shown under alsamixer. Unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be a channel named “PCM“, so I have to force mplayer into using main volume to adjust sound. Another thing that doesn’t work properly is XVideo extension, but mplayer’s gl2 video output driver works fine (I only have to change DRI/DRM permissions so it won’t need root privileges.)

After that, I re-installed Windows XP MCE from 2 backup DVD’s made after first run of this computer. While there were some errors during post-install configuration (for example, Realtek software failing to install and completely forgetting to install WIDCOMM Bluetooth Stack and drivers) it worked well. Although I haven’t found a way to stop it from formatting Windows partition to FAT32, It didn’t destroy any other partition.

As for why Acer-supplied Windows XP MCE is mutant? Well, It’s basically Windows XP MCE English, which is then loaded with Windows XP MUI Pack with Polish Language pack installed. I think that it isn’t that common to find multi-lang/multi-locale Windows bundled with common hardware. Not to forgot that Acer’s recovery software is in fact Windows 2003 Standard Edition LiveCD, which boots from ISO9660 formatted ramdisk image…..

Well, everything works now, so Ruri is ready and operational :-D

My latest screenshot of Windows XP MCE, with a nice photo as wallpaper, THX to Tokyo by Night :-P

New computer

After whining for six years, my first new computer arrived two days ago. (All my computers up to now were made from either used or scrapped parts :-/).

It’s an Acer Aspire 5112WLMi laptop and it looks like I’ve chosen well for the price of 3650 PLN (around 900 Euro).

Mahou Sensei Negima/Magister Negi Magi

After a hint from a friend (Read: He told me that he started reading it), I decided to check up on it, despite what I’ve heard about the anime.

And you know what? I am not dissapointed. Ken Akamatsu made a really good manga (even though it seems like it will be a REALLY long series).

This time it looks like there’s less romance and the characters themselves are a nice change. First, Negi isn’t as clumsy or stupid as Keitarou and the character that could be thought as equivalent of Narusegawa doesn’t have good grades and has … interesting past? :-P

Anyway, I can’t wait for volume 17 :-)