Tag: PC-Hurdles

Junkie of the Old Republic

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These past three days I’ve been hooked in front of my computer screen in a marathon of gaming I haven’t taken in a while. The source is of course knights of the Old Republic 2 which I took from the local video club on Friday as I was sitting bored.
What started as a way to pass the idle time ended up in a full blown activity that held me home even on Saturday night. I mean, I actually played from 4pm to 8 am on Saturday and then from 4pm to 1am on Sunday which amounts to 25 hours within two days, and that’s not even counting my Friday and Monday sessions…ugh!

However I don’t expect to be hooked for much longer, my short attention span will take care of that for me. If I haven’t finished it within the week (which I fully expect to do) I will probably get bored with it.

Monday was not so much of a gaming session (although I played for a full 4 hours as well) as a restore session on my PC. After failing in my tries to copy the game without needing a no-cd patch I ended up restoring my windows partition from the ghost image I took after I installed and everything seems fine now. I still didn’t make the perfect image with both Alcohol 120 and CloneCD but since this is just a single player game I don’t care as much.

Suse

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I finally found a system I could work with. I took another m/b from work and installed it on my system. I will return the older one tomorrow. This P4 m/b fortunately has DDR slots. Unfortunately it has only 2 and my 512 ram is fubar 🙁 It recognizes it as 512 but it kills the system in DT time.

I decided to discard the fedora installation to try something new and my original thought was Debian. Completely open and volunteer powered. Unfortunately, even though the original set up was done and I managed to find what to install with aptitude I was stuck at configuring the Xfree window system.
Until now I’ve been using x.org and xfree was kind of different and thus I couldn’t find the configs and even after I found them I coudln’t figure out why the system wouldn’t boot. After a few tries I gave up and tried OpenSuse 10.

Installation went flawlessly (although I would like a DVD version so as not to change installation mediums all the time) and I booted into my new system with all the bells and whistles on (even amarok 1.3.1, I was impressed at the cutting edge) with only one problem. The network would not work. At this point I had to leave to go and play board games with a few friends so I left it for the night.

At about 3am that I returned home, I tried setting up the ips, gateways and dns but nothing seemed to work. I tried disabling firewalls, switching cables, rebooting dsl routers but nothing. I knew that I was missing something because of fatigue so I left it for the other day. Fortunately amarok worked off the box (and finally without crashes) and I could hear some of my own music.

Today I found out what the problem is, it seems I had confused the default gateway with the DNS. I need to put the firewall as a default gateway (duh) and the dsl router as DNS. I can’t think why I didn’t try this before.

So anyway, now I’m in Suse and letting things work by themselves for a while. I’m tired of tweaking and prodding things to work and not know how to fix them so I’m taking a break from Gentoo (that still refuses to boot the kernel). Maybe when I have enough time to waste on my computer I’ll return again.
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Is this unbelievable or what?

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2 friggin’ days after putting another m/b on my PC and yesterday I come home after playing some warlord and find the system halted. No response to any key combinations so I restart only to find out, to my dismay, that the system will not boot and the speaker does a beeping sequence. I originally thought that was the sequence for RAM error, so I take out the two dimms and it does another sound. I change their position, put them in again and it does the first one. Not RAM error then.

I take out the VGA, boot, same beeps. Put it in, boot, same beeps. So I figure it’s that. I take it to my workplace, test it on another PC. It boots fine. FUCK! What is it then? It can’t be the M/B unless for some reason the AGP power feed has shut down for some reason and I can’t fuckin’ think how that would happen.
I plan to take a VGA from here to my PC to see how that works out.

What I really want to know however is it that has jinxed me.

Limping Back

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I’ve managed to get a system running for now.
Yesterday I took an old P4 apart while at work and installed it on my box. Unfortunately too late did I notice that the old-crap p4 motherboard used SDRAM dimms and DDR, that means of course that not only do I work at 1700 MHz but I also lost 133 MHz from memory.
Of course yesterday I did not have SDRAM chips available so I had to make do with Knoppix as best as I could (and It wasn’t much let me tell you). So today I borrowed some dimms as well (2×256 to be exact) that I plan to return when I gather the money for a new system and took them home to install.
Luckily that went fine.

Gentoo, as expected, will not start, it’s got the march=”athlon” flag and until I find how to override that I’m stuck at Fedora, which is not bad now that I see it again. I’ve forgotten of that GTK look. Anyway, some settings are not working correctly over here and I need to do some more tweaking.

If only I had enough money 🙁

Still off

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Computer @ Home is still dead. After some testing I have decided that the CPU has died and there’s not much I can do about it. What I tried is, I unplugged everything and left the MB only with CPU and Power and it won’t start (even the PSU fan), however the power led on the MB starts which means it is still getting power. I then removed the CPU and booted it again, the led still lighted which is the same effect as before. Ergo the CPU’s dead.

I’ve been using Knoppix on the Smoothwall Firewall to have at least basic internet access but it is dead slow. I mean KDE is unusable and icewm is only marginally better. How could we even work on these thing 6 years ago? Has our OS bloated so much? Anyway, problem is that my optical mouse is USB and that antique does not support that, so I settled for keyboard manipulation, which is fine if you know the shortcuts. Unfortunately I didn’t and it was hell…

At work now, I have taken an MB from work to test it. I hope it works without too much hassle because I do not have money for upgrades even at this time.
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Bootbootbootboot…nah.

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Crap, I came home yesterday and found my PC shut down. I tried to start it up but it refused. This sometimes happens when the power goes out in the house and back up again and until now, the solution had been to take off the power for a while (until the MB is uncharged) and put in back again.
This time however it wouldn’t boot at all. I would boot, the fans made a small jerk like starting the get power and then stopped. Another boot didn’t do anything until I removed power again. I tried a few things, mainly taking out all power except to the MB but it didn’t help either. I am afraid this might be an unrecoverable MB short-circuit and I’m seriously lacking the funds to have an upgrade at this point.

Now the error is either with the MB, the power supply or most unlikely, the CPU. All I can do at this point is change the power with one I’ll take from my job temporarily.

At least that made me do something else other than spend time in front of the screen which in my case was to sleep and prepare for the Evernight campaign.
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Finding the Doorman

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The past tree days at work I’ve been vehemently reading this blog. It’s written by a part-time bouncer with very good writing skills and a healthy dose of humor and sarcasm. It describes the events that occur on the job as well as commenting on various parts of night life. From this blog I’ve managed to completely despise the “Guido’s” as he calls them. Apparently they are similar to our own Greek “Trendy Boys” or as I like to call the Κάγγουρες; you know the look: Jelled spiky short hair, fit stretching t-shirts, shiny necklaces but fortunately not waxed eyebrows (at least not from what I’ve seen). They have also made me completely despise the word “Yo” as Guido’s they seem to say it all the time in a strange imitation of Black lingo. It just ends up sounding stupid.
I’ve seen our kind of Guido march around Ladadika like so many peacocks while I was going from one Metal club to another. They always seem so…poseur-ish to me that I never fail to laugh at them. Truly, I now cannot bring myself to enter the places of Guido gathering only to watch chicks shake their asses and not have one in 10 chance of meeting someone I can have a nice night out with.
In any case that blog is a great reading, I just couldn’t stop and he’s written quite a lot as well. I only wish I had his gift for written speech and I had some kind of experience to write about as well.

Which reminds me; 7 fucking euros for a drink at a small Rock Bar! Who the fuck do they think we are? I was expecting a max of five and I ended up wasting more than I would for drinking 2 beers. FFS!
This was the cost for going out yesterday night with a friend of mine and, just for the hell of it, ordering a B52. And to think that she was asking to go for a beer as well…

Monday I finally had my left ear cleaned from all that…stuff that had gathered inside. The experience was almost painful but luckily not. However I didn find out that I didn’t have to wait one fucking week to clean it out. It was just that the original doctor was old school and din’t know the modern procedures. Now that sucked! I had to go a week half-deaf because the friggin’ doctor couldn’t keep up with the times!

In [tag]Linux[/tag] news: At least I managed to find the cause for the back-right speaker not working. It seems that for some reason the alsa-mixer surround was not full up on the right (how that happened, I do not know) and by simply turning it up, all was back to normal. Gkrellm2 has also stopped segfaulting when I disabled the two plugins I use (which I didn’t use anyway) and [tag]amarok[/tag] does not segfault as long as I use the xine engine…dunno why.
Problem is that my /usr mount is running out of space (only 150MB left at this time) so I don’t know how many more progs can fit/update. I have no idea how I managed to fill up 4GB of space with programs…what the hell is in there?