http://qblog.remarqs.net the blog of »Q« Thu, 16 Oct 2008 02:27:54 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Since I started out with Gentoo, I'm used to colors in virtual consoles and terminal emulators. There's a small but vocal group of Gentooers who hate them and switch everything to monochrome, but I couldn't live with that at this point. Slackware sticks with basic white-on-black, so I ... http://qblog.remarqs.net/2008/05/25/colorful-command-prompts/ I have a GeForce 8600 GTS so I need nVidia's binary driver.  (Well, for values of "need" which include needing to run at full resolution and have a tolerable display.)  Just downloading and running the installer from nVidia has worked up to now for me with Slackware, but not this ... http://qblog.remarqs.net/2008/05/19/nvidia-drivers-pain-then-joy/ As it turns out, there's really very little to blog about regarding my Slackware 12.1 installation. Almost everything Just Works. Update: I gave up on the approach below and solved the problem by modifying the kdeeject script per comment 13 in this Gentoo bug report.  This seems a lot better ... http://qblog.remarqs.net/2008/05/13/usb-drive-annoyance-with-kde-and-udev/ I have a GeForce 8600 GTS video card. Grabbing the latest nVidia drivers (right now, 169.12) and following nVidia's instructions worked fine. I'd never let nVidia's installer autoconfigure xorg for me, but I gave it a shot this time, and it turned out well. It left the default ... http://qblog.remarqs.net/2008/05/10/nvidia-and-xorg-and-hp1020-done/ I'd been doing most of my work on my laptop. I wanted to play the most recent Half-Life episode on the desktop, which meant installing Windows. It was a huge hassle installing Windows XP, much worse than any Linux install this century, and part of it was ... http://qblog.remarqs.net/2008/05/10/back-into-the-slack/ I thought I would use this blog at least to document the details of installing Gentoo on my laptop and anything interesting that comes up on the desktop. I suck at documenting things, and I thought the convenience of the blog would get me to make this stuff available ... http://qblog.remarqs.net/2008/03/23/why-do-i-have-a-blog/ As we get more and more news about R.E,M.'s upcoming album, it's difficult not to get too excited. Luckily, getting too excited rarely does me much lasting harm. In other happy news, Richard Thompson is playing JazzFest this year. But it looks like the first Sunday is my must-go ... http://qblog.remarqs.net/2008/01/26/eleven-songs-in-thirty-four-minutes/ A couple of weeks ago, while looking for someone, I came across goodreads. Putting one’s bookshelf online is a nifty idea, and I’d do it if it wouldn’t be too depressing to notice all the books Katrina took from me. Instead of joining goodreads, I’ll spend a few ... http://qblog.remarqs.net/2007/12/28/europe-central/ I'm not very savvy when it comes to finding the best deals on air travel. I needed to book a flight, and my plan was to try Expedia, Travelocity, and Orbitz to see who'd give me the best deal and just take that. Expedia was down for maintenance ... http://qblog.remarqs.net/2007/08/04/travelocity-loses-a-customer/ Despite my hatred of web forums, there are some I need to visit fairly regularly. For example, while I generally use Gentoo's user mailing list if I have a question, searching the Gentoo forums can turn up a lot of good info. It also turns up a lot ... http://qblog.remarqs.net/2007/07/28/forum-avatars-reconsidered-evil/