Saturday, March 8, 2003

Blue Orb Installation -- 11:10 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Wow! I actually did it! I got my Thermaltake Blue Orb installed on my Visiontek GeForce3 Ti200 tonight. I even ran a few UT2K3 flybys so apparently I didn't break anything. A word to the wise: make use of a hairdryer. After removing the pins that hold the heatsink/fan combo on the card, a quick blast with a hairdryer causes the thermal tape to loosen so it can be removed in a quick Oreo-like fashion. That also helps getting the residual goop off the chip itself. The Blue Orb's fan plugs into my motherboard so I can monitor its RPM. When I first fired it up, I could feel a breeze coming from it. It's definitely moving some air. Hopefully this will keep my GeForce happy and healthy for as long as I have it.

Pondering the Imponderable -- 8:30 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Just for kicks, I decided to try and see if I could play Freelancer on my old box: a Celeron 400 with a TNT2 Ultra. It worked . . . sorta . . . with all of the options cranked down. I was surprised at how well it worked, considering everything. Hmm, I should try it in WineX . . . Or maybe I should just use more ellipses . . .

Friday, March 7, 2003

Urpmi Revisited -- 8:35 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

urpmi is a handy tool in Mandrake that adds apt-get functionality to rpm (in other words, it takes care of rpm dependencies automagically). The problem is that right around Christmas an updated package from Mandrake managed to mangle my urpmi settings. Tonight, I finally got it fixed.

First, I typed urpmi.removemedia -a to remove all the media sources. I also had to delete one by hand that was still in /var/lib/urpmi. After that I mounted the each of the three Mandrake installation discs in order and issued these commands:

urpmi.addmedia Disc1 removable://mnt/cdrom/Mandrake/RPMS/
urpmi.addmedia Disc2 removable://mnt/cdrom/Mandrake/RPMS2/
urpmi.addmedia Disc3 removable://mnt/cdrom/Mandrake/RPMS3/

After that I visited the Penguin Liberation Front site and used that page to add the information for the Mandrake contrib and plf packages.

Once I was through with that, it actually worked! It prompted me with whatever disc needed to be inserted and took care of mounting or unmounting the drive. Very nice. Hopefully they won't break it again :)

GTA For Free! -- 5:10 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Rockstar Games is now offering the original Grand Theft Auto as a free download. You do have to fill out a form for a download link. It's a 328M download. The page is very slow loading, but my download is going at a relatively decent speed. Thanks Blue's News.

Perens on the SCO Suit -- 3:37 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Bruce Perens has given his two cents on the SCO suit on Slashdot. Basically he feels that there is no way this suit will fly. In fact, he thinks that there are other motives involved:

So, I think the claims I've heard are specious, and not enforcible in court. Why, then, is SCO doing this? They want to be purchased. This is the exit strategy for their investors, Canopy Group. IBM can buy them just to shut them up. Or Microsoft can buy them to use them to FUD Linux. And Canopy Group management figures they'll play the two against each other to drive up the price. But IBM management is smart enough to poison this particular well, by bringing counter-claims against SCO.

This wouldn't surprise me in the least. It probably would cost IBM less to buy SCO outright than to fight the suit.

MS To Buy Bioware? Apparently Not. -- 3:35 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Computer and Video Games is reporting that Microsoft is in the process of buying Bioware, the makers of the Baldur's Gate games as well as Neverwinter Nights. I hope this is not what has been delaying the NWN Linux client . . . Thanks go out to Sir-Tez for the tip.

UPDATE! Bioware Communications Associate (P.R. Guy?) made this post on the NWN forums basically ending this rumor with a rather terse reply:

Microsoft is not buying BioWare.

Here's to hoping that's true.

Flash Player Flaw -- 11:01 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

CNN is reporting that there is a serious flaw in Macromedia's Flash player, potentially resulting in everyone's favorite exploit: a buffer overflow. Rah! Macromedia has a new version available and they are encouraging everyone to upgrade. Thanks Blue.

Past Two Days' News

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