Archive for June, 2006

Moving to Linux

Posted on Friday, June 30th, 2006

I have decided to uninstall Windows on my computer, and install OpenSuSe 10. This is because I don’t really have any reason to keep windows on that computer, and because I like linux. Windows also is really slow (its a Celeron 400Mhz with 192MB of ram). All I use if for is school work (word processing) and web browsing. I already browse the internet with Firefox, and I can use Abiword, Koffice or OpenOffice to do office stuff. It looks like my wireless card (Belkin F5D7000) will work with Ndiswraper, so that shouldn’t be a problem. I won’t use XGL, so my graphics card should be sufficient. The only thing that I think won’t work is my Sound Blaster 16, but if I can’t find a driver, I can get a $35 sound card from Umart.

I am already downloading the CD images via Bittorrent, so I’ll have the CDs burnt within a few days. I’ll blog about the process, and any troubles I come into. I am very optimistic that it will go pretty smoothly, as desktop Linux is rapidly becoming so much easier to use.

I really like KDE, and would like to use it as a window manager, but if that is a bit sluggish, I might use the very lightweight XFCE manager. We’ll see.

-Stephen

Posted in News | No Comments »

ADSL 2+

Posted on Friday, June 30th, 2006

We’ll be getting ADSL 2+ soon, because TPG is discontinuing their 500 free voip minutes a month soon. Although we won’t get the full 28mbps (as the speed decreases the further away you are from your telephone exchange) we should be able to get around 6 to 10 mbps, which is still a lot better than the 450 kbps we get on our 512k plan right now. The plan is 18GB a month for the same price that we are paying at the moment, but we might have to upgrade to 35GB a month for $10 extra later on. Another great thing about this would be that we get a static IP address, which would make running a server much easier. The upload speed should improve a lot too. We should get close to 1mbps, compared to the 218k that we have now.

-Stephen

Posted in News | No Comments »

Windows Vista Beta 2

Posted on Tuesday, June 13th, 2006

I am now downloading the second (publicly available) beta build of Windows Vista. It is a DVD iso, 4.01 gigabytes in size. It could take a while to download :P . I will install it on another partition on the sidewinder and see if it’s all it’s cracked up to be… I just hope that the interface isn’t as terrible as IE7. While trying to start downloading Vista, it took me a full 10 minutes to find the browser history…

I’ll post again if I get it installed.

-Stephen

P.S. 24 of 4106.24MB downloaded… Not long now!

Posted in News | No Comments »

Half-Life 2 Episode 1

Posted on Saturday, June 3rd, 2006

I just bought HL2 Episode 1! Steam is decrypting the game files as I post this. I can’t wait to play it. I am a bit annoyed that I had to pay an extra $10 for it, because I couldn’t buy it online, as I don’t have a credit card and my parents wouldn’t buy it for me, but it is much better than not owning it at all. And I also get a cool box!

I’ll post again after I’ve played a bit.

-Stephen

Update!

I have now played up to the third chapter (out of 5), and it is really good. The graphics are excellent, and there have been some great puzzles so far. It’s really great to have new challenges after playing Half-Life 2 so many times. It crashed on me a few times, but I downloaded an updated video driver, and now it works fine. I would play it all the way through in one sitting, but I want it to last at least a few days. Episode 2 isn’t coming out for 6 months!
Check out the screenshots here!

“Did Kliener just tell everyone to get busy?” -Alyx

Posted in My Life | No Comments »