So I spent the day yesterday Trying to decided what to do about my video card (Nvidia 8500 GT), apparently it came with a dud and the warranty has just expired(I only bought this computer last February). But I regress, let me back up a bit.

My Computer started acting kinda funky, then I had a freeze, so I did a hard shut down (with the power button) but then it wouldn’t turn back on, Well it did but wouldn’t get past the BIOS screen. For the life of me I couldn’t figure out what the hell was wrong. I tried resetting the RAM and nothing, so then I decided too have a look at pulling the T.V. out of the port (which isn’t supported by Linux anyway) and nothing, the comp still would not start. As a last resort I decided to reset the video card and that’s when I discovered it. The fan had completely broken. I mean it was still sitting on the mount but there is no way that bad boy was gonna spin ever again. At first I tried just leaving the side off and running an external fan over it as a temporary solution until I can afford to get a new one. Well that was not happening, the computer still didn’t want to boot up. Well this computer, didn’t come with an on board video card so without a card to replace it, the computer is useless. In the end I pulled the Nvidia 7300 GT of my sons computer as a temporary solution, leaving him with the On Board Nvidia 6100 (It really kinda sucks for his gaming), and put it into my computer. Once I put in the card the computer booted right up with no problem.

Well after my experience with that you would think I would be ready to walk away from the computer for the day, but then I had one other thing I wanted to do. When I initially installed Ubuntu Everything was on the same hard drive space, well having heard how Distro upgrades tend to break I decided that I wanted use a separate partition for my home folder. So wanting a clean slate I just decided to back up and do a fresh install then create the partition. Everything on that side went pretty smooth as I followed Aysiu’s tutorial at his website. The one issue I did have is that after rebooting and Logging back In I received this error:

User's $HOME/.dmrc file is being ignored. This prevents the default sessin and language from being saved. File should be owned by user and have 644 permissions. User's $HOME directory must be owned by user and not writable by other users

So I googled it on my hubbys computer and came up with THIS post. Since gnome wouldn’t load I did a ctrl+alt f1 and dropped to shell to run the commands. Then I did

shutdown -r now

To reboot and everything has been running fine since. So that’s the story of my adventure for the day…lol

So I spent all day trying to get Guild Wars working with wine and then cedega. I installed and uninstalled it a whole bunch of times, tried tweaking the settings in both wine and cedega and nothing. I just kept getting a black screen, then my mouse would be trapped and the only way to get out of it would be ctrl-alt backspace.

In the end what worked and I mean just quite simply worked was Play On Linux. I had actually given up on trying to make it work, I downloaded Play on Linux and just wanted to check it out, and was surprised to see guild wars on the list. So I said What the Hell and decided to give it one last try. I clicked the install, and a little window popped up asking me if I had a dvd, I was slightly discouraged as I didn’t I had a CD. So I clicked no then it asked me if I had a cd (ah ha I thought) so I clicked yes. POL then asked me to put CD 1 in the drive, and I did. Then it asked me where the CD was located giving me three options to choose from.

cdrom
cdrom0
other

I chose cdrom0 as that’s where my disk was, and POL proceeded to copy files. Then we went through the same thing with disk 2. After that was done the guild wars installer popped up and POL’s window asked me to click next or ok when the installer asked me for disk 2. When it came to that point and the installer asked me for disk 2, I was slightly confused as the guild wars installer has an “OK” button, which I attempted to click a few times at first but that didn’t work. finally I decided to click the forward button on POL, then the installer happily continued on it’s way to completion. During the final bit of installation I took note of the fact that the POL window told me to close the game to continue once it automatically popped up. (Guild Wars opens Automatically upon install completion). So once the game opened up I closed it and finished the task of deciding whether I wanted Icon’s on my desktop, menu or both (I chose menu only as I like a clean desktop).

Play On Linux was simple and easy, and even gave me a nice update button so I didn’t have to wait for the game to update once it was loaded. I also was able to play in window mode which I like. I spent several hours tonight enjoying myself in Guild Wars 😀 😀 !

So that’s my success story for the day 😀 I hope this post in the least has entertained you, or at the most enlightened you to a very handy piece of software.

Well My Windows Partition Went corrupt on me, and I had neither the patience nor the want to try and fix it, so Instead I backed all my goodies up and then wiped the computer and clean and installed Ubuntu only. So now my computer is Windows Free 😀 😀 😀 !

I’m still trying to figure out why my microphone won’t work, I’ve tried everything, not even the helpful people here could figure it out. I’m holding out though hoping Intrepid will do the trick.

Angel

So today I figured out a bit about Gimp, I knew it would be a bit painful for me to transition when it came to photo editing as I always used Paint Shop Pro on windows, and I never liked photo shop. PSP just worked for me, and no matter what I couldn’t get it to work with wine. But I must admit though it’s a bit different I suppose it’s just a learning curve, “No Worries” I keep telling myself though. “You had to learn PSP also!”. But if you wanna see my first gimp creation (small though it is) click here 😉

So I spent the Past 2 days, formatting both my and My Husbands computers so I could make partitions and then install Ubuntu along-side our vista installations. It was actually quite simple, though a big pain the rear when it came to having to uninstall the unnecessary OEM programs and such on vista and then installing the stuff we need. But actually creating the partitions and then installing Ubuntu was a simple breeze thanks to this tutorial. So It took me about 2-3 hours on each computer to get vista back in prime condition. This includes installing all drivers, and windows updates. What a Pain I tell ya! But the good news is that both computers are now fully dual-booting Ubuntu on partitions and running like a dream. I’ll probably hardly ever use windows for anything except my T.V. Tuner (because it’s not supported by Linux) and gaming. Which means I probably won’t boot into vista very often.

So Ubuntu saved My sons computer from vista….lol. The computer originally came with XP Media center, then we upgraded to vista only to find he couldn’t play some of his games on it due to the tremendous lag by vista. So (since I only had a vista upgrade disk) I inserted the Ubuntu live CD used gparted to format the hard drive to NTFS and then was able to use my original system restoration disk which came with the P.C. to reinstall xp back on the system. It worked like a charm . I plan on installing Ubuntu on the second hard drive and dual-booting. Gosh I just love Ubuntu

So it’s been a while since I wrote anything, mostly because I’ve just not been feeling to hot. I’ve been going to the Chiropractor for my back and also been seeing a regular doctor trying to figure out what’s going on with me. Come to find out the thyroid medicine I’ve been on has been working to much it now has my thyroid too low. So she told me to stop taking it until I get in to see the endocrinologist and we can figure out something better to do about my thyroid. I also discovered that I have gall stones but that’s neither here nor there as they aren’t giving me any symptoms so we don’t have to worry about them right now. However I’m hoping it was the thyroid medicine which was causing me to feel this muscle weakness all over my body, and maybe now that will change. It’s made it difficult to say the least to perform even regular tasks like typing. Even now my arm’s feel exhausted from typing this little bit.

Kenzie is doing well as a matter of fact he’s lost even more weight and is now down to 182 we’re very proud of him. Wrestling season is now over and the poor guy never got to wrestle once at a meet this year either there wasn’t anybody in his weight class or he was sick. We’re now going to look into getting him into some kind of Martial arts class. He’ll be doing football next year, as well as wrestling.

I spent most of the last few days reformatting my new system and getting rid of the extra crap they always feel the need to install on new computers. This one came with a bunch of free trial stuff like gateway games, Norton anti-virus, Microsoft office student, and a bunch of other crap I didn’t need, like Google desktop and such. So I reformatted it wiped it down to bare bones, ran all my windows updates all the way through Service pack one, and now I finally have it set up the way I want it. I have noticed a difference in boot time now with service pack on it and file copying and such seems much faster. So Microsoft did indeed fix some of the speed issues with the service pack. I did order another gig of ram from crucial.com that I’m waiting for in the mail, that will give me a total of 3 gigs. I figure for $20.00 bucks why shouldn’t I get another gig. Well I’m off….

I would just like to add that using Ubuntu has made me love using my computer again, I hadn’t just sat in front of my computer, and said “hmmm what can I do??” just for the sake of using the computer in ages, but all the sudden I found myself doing it again. 😀

I have decided that my next pc purchase will be a ubuntu computer from the start, though that might not be for a while. Right now the only thing keeping me from wiping out windows completly is the fact that this computer is in my bedroom and I watch T.V. on it and my T.V. Tuner isn’t supported by linux. I don’t really even bother with gaming much anymore except some of the linux games I’v installed on Ubuntu.

So this week I’ve been trying hard to keep motivated about changing my diet and getting exercise to get on my feet again. It may not seem like much, but walking from the back door of my house to the front door is quite a feat for me right now, but I’m making a point to do it everyday. Also I’m trying hard to change my diet around. On the last grocery trip to the store I bought more fruits and veggie’s, and pretty much no microwavable stuff. What can I say it’s a start…wish me luck!

(Original Ubuntu System)
System Specifications
OS: Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex 8.10
CPU: 2.40 gigahertz Intel Core2 Quad
RAM: 2030 MB DDR2 PC2-5400
Display: Nvidia Geforce 7600-GS 512 MB

In October of 2007 I was perusing the web and came across Ubuntu, and found it quite interesting. It seemed like a neat Idea. I had considered trying to dual boot Redhat in the past but was always too scared for fear of screwing something up. Well for a while I just sort of read info and didn’t install anything. At income tax time (approximately February of 2008 ) I bought a new Rig the most powerful computer I had ever owned (Specs listed above).

Somewhere in between my Ubuntu discovery and rig purchase I had read about virtualbox so now that I had a system I could actually run it on without tremendous lag I decided to give it a go. I found an article which walked me step by step through how to setup virtualbox with Ubuntu. At the time I believe it was Ubuntu 7.10. I really enjoyed the experience and I’ve since installed numerous Linux operating systems on virtualbox just to try them out, however I always come back to Ubuntu. Eventually I grew tired of the limitations you have when virtually running an operating system and decided to give dual booting a try on an older computer, and I loved it. Actually it wasn’t a dual-boot I used Wubi and installed Ubuntu that way on my husbands computer. It was my first experience with compiz as you can’t run that in virtualbox. I love how I’m able to completely customize my desktop experience without handing over more money to some third party company. The availability of software is also another plus, I love how if I need to be able to do something all I have to do is search the synaptic package manager and/or Google to find the features I’m looking for

The only reason at this point that I keep windows is for games (I really hope this changes I would love to see more big name game developers give love to Linux operating systems). I can pretty much do everything else on Ubuntu. Including working on my websites with dreamweaver thanks to wine. I also enjoy the speed I have Even the older computer feels fast again with Ubuntu running on it.

My number one reason for loving Ubuntu though is this. I did have some hardware issues initially when first dual-booting Ubuntu and I all I had to do was a few Google and forum searches to fix them. The community support is phenomenal, and in all the time I used windows (we’re talking all the way back to the beginning here, my first computer had dosshell on it) I have never had the great sense of community and support that I get from the Ubuntu community!

So all in all I would say my experience has been quite positive and I look forward to many years of happy Ubuntu computing.