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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Once more into the Night

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We’re once again in business, the Evernight campaign I had put on hold 7 months ago is starting once more.
One player has left (I do not want him back) and two new have arrived, Konstantis and Elena. This brings us to 5 PCs which is the optimal number for this campaign. Now I can feel a bit more secure that the encounter won’t be too hard.

Problem is that Konstantis has started working on an internet cafe which means he has a variable schedule, which means he decides the day we will play. Since that is the case I plan to make him be the “Game Crier” (the one who takes phone calls to schedule the game).
As always he decided to play the combat monkey, creating a Red Knight when he found out he didn’t have enough money to create the double sword, double gunslinging character he wished. I allowed him to take an edge when he couldn’t and I’m afraid it might disrupt the game, however I am a yes guy and it would make him happy (and shut up about those 3 exp)

Elena decided to makes a rogue-like character. I tried to dissuade her but she doesn’t seem to want to play anything else. There are two problems I foresee with this.
A. She is very inexperienced and tried to make a kind of jack-of-all-trades character. Unfortunately that is not a very good tactic for RPG, especially for heroic RPGs. The player finds it hard to shine at one place and thus get into the spotlight. The end effect is that she may get bored. Everyone needs his 15 minutes of fame.
B. She is also too similar to another player, who has the street rat archetype. I hope to give her some alternative ideas she can follow. Right now I’m thinking of a tomb raider archetype. It fits with the world and is rogue-like enough.

I also would like to have Sideris play as well but he asked me too late unfortunately. If someone drops out however he will be my first choice.

I noticed yesterday as they were making characters that I had forgotten the rules almost completely. That sucked.
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Staff Update

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I have been in contact with the guys from Firetoys for the last day, trying to see what will happen with my staff break.
It seems it was from an external manufacturer and that may be the cause of its bad quality. I don’t really know, the could also be bullshitting me in order not to look bad. I did make a post in their forums about my mishap.

Anyway, the original plan was for me to send it and they would send me a replacement. However the postal costs are a bit high for such a large item and as such they told me to email them pictures of the break which they will forward to the manufacturer as proof in order to send me a new one.
Image hosted by Photobucket.comImage hosted by Photobucket.comFor anyone interested, here’s what the break looks like

I took those with a friend’s camera. Mmmm, I need to get me one of those…

Lets hope everything works out alright…

I don't fucking believe this!

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My Fire Staff just broke.

For FUCK’S sake, the fuckin’ aluminum shaft broke! How fuckin’ unlucky can I get? I don’t even have it for a month and it broke! AAARGH!

I am so GOD DAMN PISSED OFF right now I could punch someone!

This ruined my whole night (and it looked promising as well 🙁 ) and probably tomorrow as well.

I just sent a mail to the company that I bought it from Firetoys and I hope for a quick response. I hope as hell they take it back and I also hope they don’t make me pay the postal cost. They’ll cost as much as the actual thing for fuck’s sake.

GOD DAMNIT! FUCKIN’ GOD DAMNIT!