Andrew the Hopeless Techie

So I am making my first blog post in a few months. I have been pretty busy and as such not had a lot of time to post blogs. However I am going to try and start blogging more frequently.

Some updates.

1. I have almost finished reading the next series of books in Terry Brooks Shanarra series. I have one last book of the 4 to go before starting the next group. I will make a separate post soon with my review on the 3 books i have read so far of these 4
2. Fedora 9 is out and has been for about 6 weeks. Look for a few posts regarding the trials i have with this.
3. Various other small things have happened such as me playing some new games, cool new sites I have found, and reviewing some new Linux distributions i have tried.

These are just a few things i plan to post about in the near future. Stay tuned and look out for them

At the beginning of December I started reading the trilogy by Terry Brooks titled Sword of Shannara and recently finished all three books. I will have to agree with most people here that my favorite of them all has got to be the Elfstones of Shannara. This book just seems to have the right combination of action and adventure and just the right touch of drama to grab my attention.

What most people are not aware of is that this was probably the hardest book for Terry to write according to the forward in that book. I think that for this reason this book shines more then the others for the simple fact he put more effort into it. Now I am not saying the other two books were bad by any means, on the contrary they were both very enjoyable to read. However the amount of work that went into the second of the trilogy reflects in the book itself.

My second favorite of the trilogy would have to be Wishsong, this book had the most humor I have read in any of the three. The parts where Jair scares the living day lights out of the gnomes with his illusions of snakes and spiders made me laugh. Terry captured the reactions from these characters perfectly. Now this book was more layed back as far as action and adventure goes in my book but it definately showed more of what makes a fantasy book for me, magic.

That leaves the poor book that the trilogy was named after the Sword of Shannara. While I do enjoy this book it seemed very dry to me and not very attention grabbing at parts of the book. There was tons of action and suspense in this book as well as the other two but it just seemed to be all serious with no point of which one can come down from the peak of suspense generated by this book. This is the longest of the trilogy and a key part of it as it sets up the other two books. However it left me with a sense of completion at the end of the book, this is good but unlike the other two books it does not leave much room for imagining a sequel.

All in all I give this trilogy a 8 out of a possible 10 for closeness generated toward the characters and the many action packed scenes in the book as well as the little bit of humor in Wishsong.

I recommend this trilogy to any fantasy novel fan. I look forward to the follow up series of books the Heritage of Shannara and the two smaller books in between the Sword trilogy and Heritage.

If you would like to know more about Terry Brooks or his books you can allways find out more here www.terrybrooks.net    If you decide you like him and want to jump over to the forums there be sure to look up member ajamison and let me know you came from my blog I would be happy to discuss Terry or other books with you there.

Well I have installed Fedora 8 on all three of my Linux installs starting of course with the 64bit Laptop. I am happy to report that this went alot smoother then Fedora 7 and needed less configuration and setup then Fedora 7.

Also when I installed the test releases of Fedora 8 I saw very little improvement over the previous version however the final proved to have some small but very useful improvements.

Probably the one biggest thing that it added that had been present in Ubuntu for some time was the ability to install programs through Yum from the install media. Before if you wanted to do this you had manually setup a repository that pointed to your cd/dvd the issue with this was that if you decided to use a CD or DVD that you did not use to install from such as a Re-Spin then you had to change the repo file to point to the new location. The new method from what I can tell updates the media in the repo file automatically which saves alot of time.

Aside from that the out of the box support for some of the most popular devices present on laptops and desktop computers the support for native resolutions with the default graphics driver has improved as well.

Some small security things also have been added to increase over all security. Also improvements to SELinux were added as including a new GUI tool that allows for custom policy creation.

Over all I am very satisfied with this distribution release and I think those of you that were waiting for hardware support to increase in Fedora before using it that you will be happy with Fedora 8 as about 98% of my laptop hardware worked out of the box.

Well I know I am a few days late on this entry but I loved this episode it was so much fun to watch.

I also waited because I wanted to talk about key points in the episode and wanted to make sure enough time passed that anyone who may read this and wants to see the episode has had a chance to.

Ok So as most of you may have remembered that in my last entry I said this episode looked to be interesting right? Well interesting was not the right word. The correct way to describe it was hilarious and very very action packed.

The episode opens up with Clark and Lana riding a horse through the farm land adjacent the Kent Farm. When they reach the fence on the edge of the farm them start walking toward the house and Clark keels over in pain as Lana discovers it is due to the Kryptonite next to the Windmill he is leaning on. About that time Lightning strikes and jumps through Clark into Lana causing Clark’s powers to replicate inside Lana.

Now both are Super-powered and begin to race each other in super-speed. Clark gives Lana a boring lecture on the responsibilities that come with power of that magnitude and she trys to brush it off as him being to paranoid.

Ok that is enough of a summary now the funny parts come in. Both Lana and Clark now realized that the subject of Sex can be talked about now because Clark’s fears of riping Lana in half when she was mortal and he was Super-Powered are no longer a concern. So they end up doing it but they show tons of small earth quakes in Smallville at the same time they are getting it on. Chloe comes to find Clark and talk to him about the small earth quakes not knowing that he was the cause of them. Some funny banter goes on between Clark, Lana and Chloe and the scene ends..

The episode was just full of fun stuff like that and you get to see the real side of Lana and what influence Lex had on her in their marriage. Lana ends up letting the power go to her head and she becomes super evil. Clark sees that Lana is trying to kill Lex and that her aggression is out of control. I have been saying this since the episode Prognancy in Season 6 but Lana is no longer the sweet lovable girl next door, she is now 100% Lutherfied and no longer cares for petty things like kindness and decency.

Bottom line here is I think this episode is pivotal to show the because you now get to see Clark have the sheet lifted from his eyes to see the truth for once. The Lana Blinders have started to come off and he is one step closer to taking on his destiny.

Well in this episode they had mention of just what exactly was so special about the Crystal that Kara was looking for.

Apparently Zor-El stole some of Lara’s DNA and stored it in the crystal. Now based on what was said in that episode It would appear that Zor-El had planned to clone Lara if she did not agree to leave Jor-El to run away with Zor-EL. Well it turns out that Krypton exploded before he could make good on his promise. Based on spoilers posted on Kryptonsite it appears that this DNA is now some how going to call out to Clark in future episodes using his mother Lara’s voice.

It turns out Zor-El plans to try and use that crystal to take over the Fortress of Solitude and replace Jor-El’s will with his own. I am not yet sure what to make of this but it will definitely prove for a very interesting episode.

About this weeks Episode I think the whole angle of Lana gaining Clark’s Powers is a great Idea however I am afraid that they are going to have Clark just pass this off as nothing when Lana recovers and he regains his powers. Clark in Smallville is way to pre-occupied with Lana. I will definitely be posting an entry on my views on that episode so stay tuned.

Well well it has been a long time since I wrote an entry about Fedora hasn’t it?

I am going to change that now with this entry

As many of you may be aware I recently bought a new computer. Well this wonderful new toy was just sitting there and calling out to me “Install Fedora 7 64bit” so I naturaly caved in and did just that. Well it was not that easy as I ran into a few issues along the way. I filed this entry in the Hardware and Software trials categories because the issues I ran into involve both of these. Ok enough of that on the the meat of this entry.

Step 1

I booted up my machine and went into Vista’s Computer Management to shrink the main Hard Drive partition.

ISSUE 1: Well at first this did not go over very well my computer locked up and upon forcing it to restart I ran into an issue where the computer seemed to think it could not resize the main partition due to some weird error  :shock: . So I pulled out my trust backup (taken 8 days earlier) and restored the Laptop. Repeated the first part but this time it worked. So now I have my hard drive partitioned with Windows on a large partition and a smaller 45gb partition carved out for my Linux install.

Step 2

I proceeded to place the installer dvd into my laptop and restart it.

ISSUE 2: My computer seems to not like working with linux because one the installer did not see the correct graphics drivers.

ISSUE 3: Two the computer then decided the DVD drive was not going to work with the installer so I was left with two options 1: Do a network install and wait forever to download all the files for a single install or 2) Reboot into windows and download a respun image of the dvd containing updates to Fedora 7 up to Sept 12th. I opted for the second one

Ok so I began to download the image using a program called Jigdo which I am not to fond of but was required to download this special respun image. The download proceded perfectly until.

ISSUE 4: all but 2 files downloaded successfully. I reran the downloader 4 times with the same results every time. So I became frustrated and decided to go check out the forums for solutions. Bingo I found one that required editing a file and easy task right? Wrong.

ISSUE 5: I opened the jigdo file and made neccasarry edits only to find that when saving it adds a hidden .txt extention to the end of the file which I could not get rid of. So I restarted my desktop into the Linux I had on it and successfully edited the file. Downloaded the image and burnt the DVD.

I now determined that nothing else could happen put the newly burned DVD into my laptop and restarted yet again only to find that issue 2 was still present but I was not able to complete the install using a text based installer. However after the successful install I ran into a few more issues.

ISSUE 6: No graphics I was taken straight to a text prompt for a username and password. I used the root username and password. Success it logged in but would not load the graphical server.

ISSUE 7: No Wireless support yet and I forgot to plug in the cable so I had to plug that in and restart once more.

ISSUE 8: Once I managed to get the grpahics drivers installed and updated Fedora I was forced to scour the internet to find out how to make Fedora start into the Graphical environment and not the text mode. I had to edit a file called Inittab located in /etc/inittab and change the run level from 3 to 5.

ISSUE 9: apparently this text installer does not create any other user then root so I had to login to root and create a new user then log off and back on as the new user  :mad:

ISSUE 10: My last major hurtle to over come was getting the wireless networking to work. I had to load the network manage then I had to erase the Wireless configuration and recreate it and began to enter WEP key followed by the PAM key ring password.

Once I solved all 10 of those issues I began to toy around with the 64bit version of Fedora but I am not so far seeing many differences from the 32bit version. I will post here as I find anything major that may be of intrest to anyone here.

For now I am done with this entry Please post comments tips tricks any thing you think may help and as always no Spam please.

Well tonights episode was one of the best I have seen in a long time.

For example they had several referenced to Superman in this episode both from the sub-plot line revolving around the filming of a “Warrior Angel” movie.  If you pay close attention you will notice that the first scene shows two way radios which have similar logos to that of the famous Superman “S”.

Alot of talk is going on the forums at Krypton Site (a popular site for Smallville fans) because several elements from this episode seem to poke fun at user forums such as K-Site. Such threads there as this one talk about ways in which that user forum may have inspired the directors/writters of the show.

It is revealed that Lionel Luther is infact being held hostage by Lana. Clark jumps off a building catches Lana and lands destroying some poor guys car. All this it is no wonder they call this episode Action.

If you have not yet taken the time to watch this episode but have recorded it on a DVR like most people do then I strongly recommend you sit back and watch. You get to see the real Lana and her intentions (she is so evil). Also you can see some other references to Superman here  and see how this episode relates to the rest of the superman mythology.

I know this entry is a little scattered and unorganized but I am just so excited about this episode I am not really sure how to organize my thoughts

Ok so I am done rambling on for now If I can I will edit this post and try to make it more clear and concise later.

Well a friend of mine stumbled the other day across a really cool program for Windows that allows you to install Ubuntu from Windows and not harm your windows data or partitions.

It is called Wubi and basically what it does is downloads the ISO from Ubuntu then it makes a virtual HDD based on one of the preset sizes you chose in the installation wizard. It will then allocate this space so that it is all used and place the file on your HDD when the ISO is done downloading it creates a Boot Loader entry in the XP or Vista boot loaders and asks you to restart the machine. Now the cool part is now that that is done the only other interaction on your part needed to finish the install is to simply select the boot entry during startup and it finishes the rest on its own.

While I do not think this option is recommended for someone that is serious about using Ubuntu as a second OS or replacing Windows, I do suggest it to anyone that is curious about Linux and does not want to possibly mess up their windows install and data by messing with repartioning. Now I have seen allot of cool things but this is just by far one of the neatest and coolest things I have seen. Now Linux can be tried by a curious Windows users with only a few steps.

Oh did I mention that this installs a Full Native version of Linux no running it inside a bulky program like VMWare. Check it out if you want the link is here!

Well I received my new Laptop (finally) on Tuesday but immediately ran into issues when trying to put Linux on a separate partition. I was able to load the installer after resizing the Vista partition however it gave me a sort of odd error something to the effect of “No Suitable device found for this type of installation”. Now I am not a Linux guru but that does not sound good to me anyway.

I have been trying to get some help for a while on the Fedora Forums and the Ubuntu ones as well but so far every one seems to be baffled.

I also tried Ubuntu as you can tell by the comment about the Ubuntu forums. If any of you out there have any ideas on how to get my Dell 1520 laptop to work and play nice with Linux installations then by all means leave me a comment or better yet send me an email at adromidon AT gmail DOT com.

Other then the Linux issues I love this laptop sure it has a few quirks that I am not so fond of such as the speakers being on the bottom of the front of the computer. I mean I am sure there was a reason for this during the engineering phase of the laptop design, but it makes the sound coming from the computer sound like it is coming from one small speaker. I would have designed it so the speakers rest just under the monitor on ether side of the power button. This would allow for more of a stereo sound and realistic feel.

On a scale of 1 to 10 10 being absolutely satisfied with my laptop and 1 being I hate it I would rate this computer a 8 because of the errors and issues I have had with this computer.

Recently I have decided to start writing some fan fiction so far it is based on the tv show Smallville. If you care to read them you can download and read them from my SkyDrive account but you will need Open Office to read them as they are writen in .odt format