29-Mar-2009

Busy weekend
It has been quite a busy weekend, in terms of system management.
First, I asked the hardware shop on the behaviour of the graphics card – it even crashed when closing a window. According the technician, it’s a sign the card in at the end of it’s lifetime. It’s not designed to work in a 1400 x 1050 resolution, AND running a heavy application like Google Earth, AND be able to handle the extra features that the ATI software could set it to, of the nice features build in the Linux environment, AND do anything fancy like fast changes in the background.
So I purchased a more modern card – this time, Nvidia based. It means a bit higher noise volume but way lower than the older card without adjustment by software. I could have taken a card with no fan – just a heat sink, but that would limit the abilities that I foresee I’ll use.
To built it in, required preparing both Windows installations, push the card in and load the software (drivers and utilities) in both. That took a few hours. Next was the Ubuntu installation, it was signalled that there was another driver needed, I had to redo some of the settings (screen resolution, fanciness of the screen and so on, but it was rather painless in the end.
Next year’s licenses
Next job was to install the new licenses on Diana. The file was stored binary, copied that way to VMS, and I edited the file to make it more readable. That alone was a nasty job, but with the aid of the “learn” and “repeat” facilities of TPU it was done in less than 30 minutes. Then, all new licenses have been installed and loaded.
Software update and new installation
Last but not least, there was an update to Soymail – the web-base mail client – and a new program by Mark Daniel, that I can use as a template for my own ‘blogging’ program – and to redo the website homepage more easily. But there are still some things to discover. It doesn’t exactly do what I would expect. Biggest difficulty: how to get started…
Well, it’s still BETA 🙂
Apart from this software, I think to update WordPress to it’s latest version (2.7.1) no matter the problems with the PHP engine. Using Firefox on the Ubuntu desktop works fine, even with these issues. I think part of the access problems are actually caused by Internet Explorer; at least, it looks like it: where IE (both 7 and 8) have problems accessing the admin pages, there is hardly a problem using Firefox, where it concerns passing information to the application.
Also, there are a number of patches to be downloaded and installed, and I’ll take a look to newer versions of Python and MoinMoin – the Python based wiki. Now it’s just a matter of finding time to do it all.