Category Archives: Linux

HP and Linux

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Tonight Denise and I went out and bought a printer. Well, it was a printer, scanner, and copier all in one. Guess what? Yep… It is Linux compatible. I am more than pleased with Hewlett Packard’s stance on Linux with printers and to a bit smaller degree with their hardware in general.

When I emailed them earlier about a specific printer, they were gracious enough to tell me the specific product I was looking at was not compatible with Linux, but then went so far as to tell me about a comparable product that was… get this… the email was signed by a real person too!!!

What Denise and I ended up settling on was the HP PSC 1210. I have already scanned, copied and printed with it, and oooooooh baby is it nice. I tossed the old HP 660cse in the garbage dump because it was too old and decrepit to give away.

So… I say this…. because….. I like Linux, and I like HP. So there.

Rss Reader for Linux

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Okay… okay… I finally found an RSS news aggregator for Linux, and it can be found at this place. I was really excited because it is developed using XUL… which is in itself an XML based language. So we are using XML to read XML through Mozilla… oh… you have to have MozillaFirebird installed to get that RSS news reader to work. It works in Windows and OSX too.

Win95 and LAN

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Wow… I am writing this on a Win95 computer I setup to do voice chat… well, I am sorry to say the Linux Yahoo Messenger client doesn’t do voice. In other news, I have dial up piped in to my Redhat 9 box, and this computer… How exciting! Anyhow, I am having trouble with the “dial up on demand” function of my router… when I request a connection it “should” connect… right now I have to go into the web administration and force a connect… definitely not the best solution. Difficulties lie ahead of me… :-( I see lots of networking in my future… oh boy!

Linux, DRM, WMA, and MP3

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Well, I downloaded the song FFH – So Is His Love from the MusicMatch service. However I was a little dissappointed. It wasn’t until after I had paid for the song, that the message appeared in the software, that it was Windows Media Audio with Digital Rights Management.

TOTAL BUMMER!

It just so happens my portable MP3 player also supports WMA, however not with DRM. The only way I was able to listen to the song on my portable (and for that matter my Linux computer) was to loop the output on my soundcard into the input (mic) and record it while playing it in MusicMatch. Of course all of you in the digital sound arena would know that if I did what I just described… you get quality loss. It irritated me that something I payed for wouldn’t allow me to use it how how I wanted. I suppose there will need to be huge changes in the legal music download services before old-school digital media users like me want to actually use them. Needless to say, I complained to MusicMatch about my troubles in the Non-Windows world, and they refunded my 99 cents… and I deleted the music file. I guess I’ll have to buy the FFH CD.

However, if you are a Windows user, there is not a better service than MusicMatch… yet.

My state of audio on Linux

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I finally got the nerve to install Redhat 9 again. I have in the past found it impossible to get my AC’97 soundcard to work. Therefore I have never used the -only- version of Linux I have ever paid for.

First I discovered recently that this soundcard is backwards from most soundcards, and only Windows at the time has drivers to map this, or so I thought… So, plug the speakers in the pink jack (normally reserved for microphone use… because that’s what the pink jack is for). IT WORKS!!! SOUND!

Okay, but this was undesirable, because when I plugged my mic into the speaker jack (green), it would create some sort of digital reverberation… ??? When I turned the microphone volume up (which oddly enough the mic didn’t work) it would scream digital maddness out of the speakers.

Back to ALSA, and lo and behold… it now REALLY supports my soundcard. Like it was supposed to (as it said) months ago. I guess I shouldn’t complaint though seeing how it is free software. Yeah, my sound works, and I am happy to report that I am typing this on Redhat 9.

Linux voice chatting

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I had decided it is almost impossible to do voice chatting easily with Linux, until I was chatting with the creator of GAIM via Yahoo Chat (I think), and he said in the future GAIM would probably support it, but in the meantime I should try out NetMeeting on the Windows side, and GnomeMeeting on the Linux side.

I have to say I am impressed. Though, not with upgrading my Redhat 8.0 default GnomeMeeting. I hate dependency blah blah blah blahs. So I just downloaded like 6 different rpms, and hope I can satisfy them all. Is there a better way to do this? Be sure to leave a comment if you have nifty tips on this problem.

Oh… and I finally found out if you want to run NetMeeting on Windows XP… click on Start > Run, and then type in conf.exe. This will allow you to run it on Windows. I probably will never know how anyone figured that one out…

Yeah, so I expect to talk with Venezuela soon via free Linux. Hopefully the 56k modem will withstand the heat of zipping off 1′s and 0′s down to South America. I chatted with a dude from Texas tonight. It was okay, but quite a bit of interruptions… and that after he turned off his webcam. Before he shut the video down, it was like a slow motion video, and a little bit of broken audio every 30 seconds.

It’s definitely time for cheaper and more widespread broadband…

Oh, don’t really look for voice chatting anywhere else on Linux… unless you want to play around with Gyach Enhanced and the programmer’s attitude. By the way, be prepared to learn Python if you are serious about trying this out. Maybe I just couldn’t get it set up because I am not a programmer… I don’t know. And there’s another one out there developed for Windows but says it will work with WINE. I can’t… and don’t want to remember the name. Unfortunately it only displays with Wingdings on my WINE setup. I could either figure out the font thing, which I played with until nearly 3am lastnight, or learn to read in Wingdings…

Hence the reason I fell back on GnomeMeeting.

Iowa and Knoppix

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Denise just IM’ed a bit ago and said the Knoppix download is at 80%… I hope it’s done soon… We gave it a little extra time by not leaving this afternoon at 5pm. Well, we aren’t staying home another night for that reason alone… I guess driving all night long isn’t a big deal to me, but I didn’t want to possibly break down on the side of the road at 2am in the morning.

Our car isn’t doing that good… and we have to take all precautions. :-)

Tommorow morning… hopefully early… we are off. We seek to avoid major Labor Day traffic around Chicago, and are grateful that we are leaving the land of dreadful gas prices… $1.89 for regular unleaded.

Lamaze and Linux

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Oh boy… we are watching the lamaze videos. As opposed to taking the class. It was $50.00 even with financial assistance. So we opted for the videos from the library. :-) Tax payers dollars at work. Mine and yours!

So apart from my wife, pregnancy, and all of the other things of life… it seems I have found a new cool thing. Booting Linux off of a CD. Doesn’t change the hard drive… shows people how cool it is… and can be used as a complete system, or even a rescue disk. Okay… I’m a geek, I’ve been carrying a mini-distro on an 8cm cd in my wallet since yesterday. It isn’t that cool, but it’s neat to show it off to unsuspecting Windows users… HA!

The one I have been using is called LNX-BBC (Bootable Business Card)… it’s small enough to fit on one of those business card CDs. I’m bummed out because the web-browser that’s in it is way cheap. It’s called BrowseX, and it doesn’t do any modern web standards. Plus there aren’t many cool X-Windows apps… Definitely almost rescue-disk-only territory. So I have basically tuned out the idea of tiny distributions, and am downloading as I write this, Knoppix… it’s made by a German dude, and is supposed to be awesome. We’ll just see about that.

Alright… gotta go… more videos to watch!!!