Friday, February 24, 2006

Where as I FINALLY Get to See My Son and it is so Darn Hard to Configure Video Drivers in Linux

I got a call from my son last night about 6:30 or so. He had almost finished working on his money pit (AKA as his 1995 Mazda) and wanted to take a break to come over and chat for a while. He brought us up to date on his time table and what has been keeping him busy. He graduated high school early, so he has a lot of free time to work on his car. He does not have much money, but that is a fact of life. Every time he fixes something, he finds more things broken. Good news is that when he is done, he will have a like new (mechanically) car.

He finally got a phone, but he did not get the rate he expected because he has not completed AIT (which he hopes to attend in a few weeks). He has a pre-paid phone which is .15/minute so needless to say he does not use it much.

After AIT, he will get his enlistment bonus (the first half) which he plans on using to live on once he starts UTI in Houston in the late summer. Once all that goes into effect, he will be in school about a year, then he will move back to this area and see what he wants to do. He does not want to stay in the Houston area after he finishes UTI. Me might volunteer for a peace keeping mission overseas someplace, just to get some travel and "real world" experience. I will add that to the list of things I pray for concerning him :-) .

Our son has a German competition tomorrow in Austin as one of his last official duties for school. Not sure how he will fair, but he may do well. He placed 2nd in the region last year and 4th in the state overall. Not bad for a kid who does not like school. Part of the competition will be spoken word and the other part will be dance. Not sure if he is doing both or not. I have not heard him say he had been to dance practice in months, but we never know exactly what he is up to.

Before he left, my wife made him a care package and I gave him an old laptop I had. It did not have a battery or a floppy drive, but it had a bootable DVD player, power cord and a travel (DC) adapter for vehicle use. That should help. I Had to refrain from hanging all over him (I really miss him), so I sort of half paid attention to him and half worked on my Linux box.

He stayed about an hour and he drove off in his roommates truck. I will not see him again for at least 3 days. Before last night, it had been almost a month since I saw him last. I guess I should not be surprised. I was about the same way when I was 18. I lived at home but I was out of the house by 5 AM and did not come back until 11 or midnight. I saw my parents very infrequently. I was not very smart then.

On to my technical rant...

I have been tweaking my Linux box with eye candy for a week or so. I read a very interesting "how-to" on giving Linux the same type of effects that Windows Vista will have. I figured I could try them out. I downloaded, compiled, and installed the "latest" drivers (as recommended and btw was a CHORE). I then set all the configuration in the xorg.conf as instructed and restarted X. Rut-Roh! Upon reboot and just when X was going to start, the screen blinked and I got a half black / half white screen. I waited a minute or two and rebooted into recovery mode (no graphics, console only) and edited my xorg.conf file, one item at a time until X booted properly. I managed to get X to run, so I had graphics. I then tried to run xcompmgr ( a composite mgr to allow the Vista-ish effects) and the machine CRAWLED. Upon research, this was caused because the PC processor (not the video card processor) was doing all the work and that is not good. So I turned off the neat effects and now X works. My job will be to figure out if there are other settings that will allow me to use the effects or if I need to drop back into another version of the driver. All this because I want the card to do as much work as I can get it to do. It is a good mid-level card (Nvidia 5600 w/256 megs of RAM) and it should be able to handle the chore. The drivers that have been compiled specifically for my distro of Linux (Ubuntu) worked, but it hung on shutdown. That was not fun. There was an app that I found that allowed me to turn the effects on and off before I shut down, but I was afraid I would forget. I guess I could have scripted it, but I wanted it to "just work". Feh. I know I could post on a message board and get an answer (most likely) but my pride is kicking in and I want to figure this out. Why must Linux video drivers be so hard to work with?

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