Site Log

Date: February 24^th 2004
I just added the Linux Laptop Challenge, mostly since 2004 is the year of the linux laptop. This may sound like wishful thinking, but if enough people actually wish it, it can happen!
On a side note, this site is one year old this month! And it's had visits from about 70.000 individual ip addresses. Bring out the champagne!!
Other news: I've been busy with lots of things, linuxwise mostly with Mandrake 10 beta (and RC) testing; I should have something up not too long after Mandrake 10.0 becomes final. It's looking good, there are still plenty of bugs to squash, but I am using Mandrake 10 beta/rc since they became available, and all is well: kernel 2.6, KDE 3.2, lots of great things.

Date: January 30^th 2004
Added my new article, about my audio server project, combining LIRC, XMMS, GRIP, VNC and some BASH scripting.

Date: January 22^th 2004
UNfixed the html of the flash pages. IE could not read it. It was to be expected, somehow. So now the pages with flash are not compliant, but they do work on all browsers that I threw them at...
BTW I have found out that my USB2 can work at the true speed on an external harddisk, just not with supermount; I just mounted the drive by hand and all was fine. See also the 9.2 review page.

Date: January 13^th 2004
Fixed the html of the flash pages. Thanks to Darkelve from Mandrakeusers.org!

Date: January 10^th 2004
Added the flash page about Copy-Paste the Quick and Easy Way (warning: size > 640KB). Somebody has to tell/show people, so why not me?

Date: January 9^th 2004
I have finally uploaded my Mandrake 9.2 review that appeared earlier at madpenguin; in my own version I have included my screenshots that were not used (but available) at the time, and I have done some corrections of the text.
Oh, and this week the site had its 50.000th visitor (well, it has been viewed from 50.000 different IP addresses).

Date: December 30^th 2003
Added the 8 Golden Rules and my view on the importance of that. And made some more minor changes.

Date: December 28^th 2003
Added the newsflash about the Linux+ Extra! Pack which this quartal sports the full Mandrake Linux 9.2 Download Edition; the New Years remarks and the wedding cake photos.

Date: December ^st 2003
A mail from a reader made me realise that my configuration page is not all that clear, so I changed wording a bit and added some screenshots. I have also added some flash animations, just for good fun. They are on separate pages (the size of the animations is over 200KB each, so I don't want to embed that into any regular page) that are linked on the configuration page too.

Date: November 30^th 2003
Forgot to mention: made some additions to the acquisition page, among other things I added the edonkey links for Mandrake 9.2. I have also added a page on the installation of the nvidia 3d proprietary driver, and the 9.2 configuration page.

Date: November 25^th 2003
Took down the newsflash for the arrival of Mandrake 9.2 (you can now find it just below in the October 3^st 2003-entry). Guess who doesn't know by now lives under a rock or is not interested in Linux whatsoever. Despite good intentions, I have not had time to work on that hard drive partitioning page nor the configuration page. Instead, I've been keeping busy with preparing a review of Mandrake 9.2. Basically, since I have 9.2 installed, I only twice booted 9.1: once to check my printer configuration (which was actually correct in 9.2 but I didn't realise), and once to see if my USB2 would work correctly; in 9.2 it works at USB1.1 speed, which is quite useless with an external harddrive if the files to transfer are in the 600+ MB range...
On the whole, for me, 9.2 is a clear winner in terms of looks. It still takes some time to set up properly, but I got the time down to less than 1 hour for the install plus less than 2 hrs for the configuration (excluding the time to download stuff that I installed from contrib and plf repositories -- over 280MB of downloads, mostly programs that aren't included in the 3 download cd's, not updates or so).

Date: October 3^st 2003
Just updated the front page to reflect the arrival of Mandrake 9.2 and my installation walkthrough (this is now moved just below starting with 'NewsFlash!'). I will work on the configuration page and create a separate page about hard drive partitioning (I have had some questions about that, so it is apparently a hot topic).

NewsFlash!

So what's new and improved? Well, a guy can't get married and leave on his honeymoon for 2 weeks or Mandrake releases version 9.2 (FiveStar) of it's popular distribution. After returning home, I downloaded (yes, I'm a clubmember so I have that privilege) via bittorrent (I will put up edonkey/emule links as soon as the iso's go public, and I have the corrected iso's) and installed it. You can read my install walkthrough on the install page -- that too is new and improved (note: about 500KB, mostly due to the screenshots).

Mandrake 9.2 --
The good: its looks and feel. It's a pleasure to use. BTW about the looks: I haven't even grabbed the fonts from my windows partition yet, and maybe I won't do that this time around.
The bad: easy urpmi is not functional for 9.2 yet. My guess is it will be soon, and with some figuring out with the links it provides for 9.1, you can actually set up your sources. Furthermore, you'll have to fiddle a bit if you have a webcam that uses the pwc driver -- unplug the webcam, or your system won't boot. There is a workaround that allows you to have it plugged in and use it, and there has been a kernel patch, so if you use that one you won't see this problem.
The ugly: Some LG cdrom drives will not survive the installation of Mandrake 9.2. Read more about it here. The new kernel (which also includes the webcam fix and other fixes) fixes this, even though it is actually a defect in LG cdrom drives (they are not really ATAPI compliant, and no shouting "we don't support linux" is going to make those drives ATAPI compliant). There should be new iso's out soon, with this new kernel. Naturally the new kernel is already available.
Something else: loads of people have complained that Mandrake hasn't included the kernel sources on the download edition, and that there are already 200MB of updates. I put this in the ugly section, and I'll tell you why. First, I also don't like it that the sources have to be downloaded separately. Second, all this complaining makes no sense. Clubmembers should vote to have the sources on the download edition iso's. And for the rest, to complain because you have to download 40MB of kernel source, or 200MB of updates (hey, do you really use all the software that these updates are for??) -- some use the argument of having just an analogue modem to connect to the net -- it all just makes no sense to me, the download edition consists of 3 iso's, 2GB in total, so if you can get hold of that, you can get 40MB extra of kernel sources, and 200MB of updates, if you really need those. Ah well, end of rant.

I am going to update the configuration page about how to setup Mandrake 9.2, but for now all I can say that it is mostly like configuring 9.1. I still have 9.1 installed, but haven't booted it in a while now. Actually, I'm not sure if I ever will again: 9.2 is here!

Date: October 30^th 2003
I updated the installation page; now it is a walkthrough for the Mandrake 9.2 installation, with loads of screenshots. Since people are most worried and curious about the diskpartitioning tool, I put plenty of screenshots of that.

Date: August 17^th 2003
As I mentioned before, I still don't have so much time (this will not change until: September 20th! ;-) and even after that....) to work on my site; I had the 23 thousandth visitor somewhere last week (counting individual ip addresses to access the site) which tells me I'm not doing all this for nothing. From the traffic info the webhost provides me I can tell that more and more accesses are from windows machines, with predominantly IE as a browser. I can only hope that those people are here to see how they might debute as a Linux user, and wish those who go for it a good start! If you like Linux, spread the word!
On a side note, I just slightly changed the look of the home-page (the page you're reading now), it now starts with the welcome message on one side and the article links in a small side column.

Date: July 13^th 2003
Well, my new article Learning to use GNU/Linux and being part of the OSS community got referenced on Linux Today, Desktoplinux and PCLO. Thanks to those sites for mentioning it. It got my site 2000 hits in one day. Maybe I should think of advertisements and banners.... gotcha! just kidding!! ;-)
I just added a "Google search" on this site, I'm sure you noticed it. The idea was from Anne Wilson who thought it would help people get to the info they need.

Date: July 8^th 2003
Well, my new article is up: Learning to use GNU/Linux and being part of the OSS community. Thanks go to people on the GoT NOS forum and on the Mandrakeusers.org forum

Date: July 5^th 2003
I've been very busy with other things, so the articles I was working on have been put on hold... I'm actually planning my wedding, so I will not be updating this site as often as I would have liked to... I did take the time (finally) to figure out how to get the IR remote control that came with my tv-card working. It's not very hard, but took some figuring out. It's on the configuration page. Also, I have been corrected in terms of what I though about SuSE Linux; it was always my understanding that you may only install from ftp if you don't want to buy a pack (try before you buy). One of the reasons for endorsing Mandrake was that you can freely copy it, download iso's from the web. Though you can't download SuSE iso's from their website, apparently it is fully legal to make a copy from or for a friend.
What else is new,.. Ah right, I know: I got a second harddrive for my main machine. It was fun and easy to install, I built it in, then booted, used MCC => hardware => select hdb => configure and partitioned the drive, formatted the partitions, mounted them and started to use them. Look Ma, no reboot! ;-)
Oh yeah, I have figured out how to use mplayer and mencoder with my tv-card, I can now use my pc as a videorecorder, it's (just!) fast enough to do tv/video acquisition and realtime compression to divx4 with mp3 audio in high resolution with de-interlacing and 3D-denoising. That info is on the Howto's page.

Date: May 25^th 2003
Updated the look a slight bit, added some links. Worked a lot on the next article about learning how to use your new Linux machine, and the OpenSource mentality. BTW Desktoplinux also linked my successful-switching article, thanks guys!

Date: May 8^th 2003
Rewrote part of the home page (the one you are reading now), changed the css code to include a font definition. After having PCLO and LT link to my successful-switching article, I had >3000 hits in a single day. Not bad after having a total of less than 2000 hits until then...
Things seem to have quieted down, but in any case I was happy to find that most people really agreed with the article.
So I wrote something else. Hope you like it.

Date: April 26^th 2003
Fixed many little things, finalised (more or less) the successful-switching story, worked on the links and howto pages.

Date: April 24^th 2003
Adapted the succesful-switching story according to comments from people on the GoT NOS forum. Thanks for your building criticism guys!

Date: April 23^rd 2003
Added the successful-switching article
Completely forgot to mention that I have added the spec of my system for reference, including some of the configuration files.
Also brushed up on the console page.

Date: April 11^th 2003
Thanks to Alex for some of the missing images of the installation of Mandrake 9.1.
BTW Alex, happy for you that your linux box is now functioning properly ;-)
Next up will be the link page to be redone.. categories and all.

Date: April 6^th 2003
I realised that some people may not know how or where to get Mandrake linux, so I added the "acquisition"-page. Also made some minor changes and corrections.

Date: April 5^th 2003
After some comments I realised that the size of the icons/images was larger than necessary due to the .png format, so now I changed most to .jpg, which looks a little bit less sparkling, but reduces the filesize remarkably. Also added plenty on the configuration page.

Date: April ^st 2003
Finished (more or less) my installation review/instructions for Mdk9.1, with screenshots of most sections.

Date: March 30^th 2004
Made quite a few additions, a page about the configuration of Mandrake 9.1, different background colour of the background image (hope you like it...) and a page with my systemspecs so you know if I have things working and you have the same hardware, then you can/could get it working too. Oh and I also added the subtitle "because the best things in life are free", thought it is appropriate.. :-)

Date: March 26^th 2003
Mandrake 9.1 is out, so I may just have plenty of updating to do... Or at least, find the links to sites where they explain the whole procedure of installing...:-)
Anyway, I have only made several small changes and added the info about mdk9.1. Get it - burn it - install it - and don't forget to share it!

Date: March 11^th 2003
Second uploading of this website; corrected plenty of things, still not all formatting is done, but anyway...

Date: March 4^th 2003
First uploading of this website; not all formatting is done, but anyway...