Linux suitable for every event

Today Kymberly and I had our engagement party. If you haven’t kept pace and I don’t blame you since I haven’t updated the blog. But yes, we are engaged. I asked Kym to marry me on the 16th of June, and she said yes. Romantic stories are for another blog far far away.

Anyway I really wanted to share our lovely Engagement Cake… If you know why you have an engagement cake be sure to tell me. But it kept the future mother in-law happy.

• I Checked my site visit statistics and noticed that I’m now on the Linux.conf.au planet, I don’t normally put my blog up for planets but it was part of the registration and was easy. so hello my extra blog readers from http://planet.linux.org.au/lca2009/
• Linux.conf.au, I have tickets to for the conf. Tiger airways are now on my list of banned airlines, In 1 year they’ve gone from alright to horrible. Basically they canceled our flights from Melbourne to Hobart. and put us on other ones but then we can’t get the Jetstar flights we have to connect us to the Newcastle to Melbourne Part. So more money had to be spent Tiger gave a less than expected refund.
  • Related on the 18th January we fly into Melbourne from Newcastle at 7:40 am our next flight to Hobart doesn’t leave until 17:55 so we have 8 hours in Melbourne to kill, please leave suggestions in comments if you have some ideas of what to do.
• Kym and Linux.conf.au. Not so good she is trialling her talk out at work the week before, but the robot isn’t ready yet… it was meant to be ready for her last year but the processor still isn’t inside the bear yet. As for the talk well the OO.o sliders aren’t finished yet either.
• Still looking for a new OS for my Acer Aspire looked at Kuki.me but it’s still not near production stage yet.

Anyway welcome to the new Planet readers

I decided on Kubuntu 8.04 Beta 1 with KDE4, my first problem was because I have an nvidia graphics card (8600) splash screens usually fail to appear and so did the disk check and ‘press enter to reboot screen’ before and after I installed 8.04, but after installing and updating I found the “Hardware Drivers Manager” which had the latest version of nvidia drivers; they were just one click away. Sadly my Dvico TV tuner card doesn’t work out of the box, but when 8.04 becomes stable I’ll reinstall that.

After installing nvidia drivers and restarting my splash screen came back! Sadly only in 640×480 so I changed the splash screen res to 1440×900 by:
sudo vim /etc/usplash.conf
sudo update-initramfs -u
I also changed the splash so it showed details of loading by changing
sudo vim /boot/grub/menu.lst
delete ‘quiet’ from the kernel line of the kernel you are running right down the bottom of the file then you will get all the messages under the loading bar of “filesystem OK”, etc.

I also installed Firefox 3. It looks horrible out of the box, BUT there is a package called gtk-qt-engine-kde4 which will put KDE4 themes on GTK. After the package is installed you go into system settings-> appearance -> GTK Styles and Fonts. I still don’t like the look of it, so I ended up installing Firefox 2.0 to get back to something that looked decent.

And my last problem that I have found so far is they took IRC out of Kopete!!! (bug 201732) So annoying… I may have to start using pidgin.
Oh and Adobe Reader doesn’t seem to appear for 64bit Linux, kpdf it will have to be.

Another random note Openoffice.org 2.4 opens nearly instantaneously