Maintenance
Jan. 3rd, 2008 02:28 amSo Mickey was over the other day, and said he'd like to see my Xubuntu installation. Well, good thing he did. In response to his question about whether Compiz Fusion worked, and whether Xgl was slowing things down, I installed both, to see what they were. I got a notice saying Xgl would now be enabled by default, and listed how to turn it off, but I didn't bother to write it down.
Well, when I showed it to Mickey, that was the first time it had been started up with Xgl enabled. The result? Nearly everything showed up as solid black, including the wallpaper. Couldn't see a thing. Somehow we figured that this was Xgl's fault. And so Mickey hit Ctrl+Alt+F1 (d'oh, I'd forgotten about that) and tried to remember how to disable it. He couldn't, so we looked it up. Wow, I'd forgotten that too: Actually going on the internet and looking up how to fix things! Mickey told me his mom had commented that he thought he had installed Linux just so he would always have problems to solve. Man, using Windows, I'd kind of forgotten about actually solving problems.
The machine really is slow. It can emulate a SNES at a good speed, but that's not exactly hard. In other respects it really is slow. Should I try installing Freespace? :) Somehow, I don't think it's worth it.
Also, Mickey was surprised to learn that Xfce does not have a volume control on the desktop. You may recall that I did not buy this computer, I won it in the spelling bee, so it wasn't exactly high-end hardware for its time. In particular, the speakers didn't even have a hardware volume knob. So I had to find and download one. (OK, I'm sure there's some command line way to set the volume, but I certainly never had to use such a thing under KDE, so I didn't know it. And this was also before I had really remembered about, you know, actually looking things up.)
Unrelatedly (except in time), we also watched about the first half hour of a movie simply called Z. If anyone else has seen this, explain to me how the hell it won the Oscar for best editing. So many badly-placed transitions!
-Harry
Well, when I showed it to Mickey, that was the first time it had been started up with Xgl enabled. The result? Nearly everything showed up as solid black, including the wallpaper. Couldn't see a thing. Somehow we figured that this was Xgl's fault. And so Mickey hit Ctrl+Alt+F1 (d'oh, I'd forgotten about that) and tried to remember how to disable it. He couldn't, so we looked it up. Wow, I'd forgotten that too: Actually going on the internet and looking up how to fix things! Mickey told me his mom had commented that he thought he had installed Linux just so he would always have problems to solve. Man, using Windows, I'd kind of forgotten about actually solving problems.
The machine really is slow. It can emulate a SNES at a good speed, but that's not exactly hard. In other respects it really is slow. Should I try installing Freespace? :) Somehow, I don't think it's worth it.
Also, Mickey was surprised to learn that Xfce does not have a volume control on the desktop. You may recall that I did not buy this computer, I won it in the spelling bee, so it wasn't exactly high-end hardware for its time. In particular, the speakers didn't even have a hardware volume knob. So I had to find and download one. (OK, I'm sure there's some command line way to set the volume, but I certainly never had to use such a thing under KDE, so I didn't know it. And this was also before I had really remembered about, you know, actually looking things up.)
Unrelatedly (except in time), we also watched about the first half hour of a movie simply called Z. If anyone else has seen this, explain to me how the hell it won the Oscar for best editing. So many badly-placed transitions!
-Harry
