Entries from April 2007 ↓

Thank farking Christ-almighty — I _finally_ got Beryl working with Ubuntu on the Titan! And let me tell you… it looks *great*. I’ve been playing around with these effects on our older computers (which were luckily running nVidia cards), and they worked, but they weren’t as fast as _this_…

For the past few months, trying to get it to work has been a _major_ pain in the ass — nothing seemed to work. Of course, I haven’t been the only one with this problem — practically anyone else trying to get any kind of advanced 3D effect to work in Linux with an “ATI”:http://www.ati.com card has been faced with the same difficulties. It all stems from ATI’s poor support of Linux when it comes to video drivers — they release one, but it hardly works.

Well, either they’ve released a new version, or the programmers at “Ubuntu”:http://www.ubuntu.com have done some tweaking with their new version (7.04), because it works now! “This tutorial”:http://wiki.beryl-project.org/wiki/Install_Beryl_on_Ubuntu_Feisty_with_XGL was a great help — pay close attention to the instructions on how to _downgrade_ the beryl-core to a version that’s released directly from the Beryl group. It turns out the version that’s included with Ubuntu is a wee bit buggy.

Hey, nobody’s perfect.

Take a look:

!http://threshold-zero.tmanime.com/images/4t.png!:http://threshold-zero.tmanime.com/images/4.png

Notice that? Wow, support for Linux! Now, on your Dell Laptop when you go for support, you can actually choose Linux from the list of available operating systems to get help with! Yay!

But look more closely at the results that it’s given you as available downloads… notice the BIOS updater program? Guess what form you get that in?

A windows executable.

Yeah, Dell is pulling a lot of this “oh look by the way we support linux now too hurr hurr” stuff just to piss of Microsoft. The word “on the street” is that OEM manufacturers do this stuff every few years in order to make sure Microsoft doesn’t try and charge too much for the versions of Windows that companies like Dell pre-install on computers for you.

Take a look at this:

“Even Michael S. Dell uses Ubuntu Linux at home!”:http://www.dell.com/content/topics/global.aspx/corp/biographies/en/msd_computers?c=us&l=en&s=corp

See what I mean? Oh noes! Even the leader of Dell uses Linux! Watch out, Microsoft!

While I would love to see Dell adopting big time support for Linux, it just ain’t gonna happen. They’ve pulled this stuff before, and then when they’re pressured by Microsoft, they back down.

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Well, I updated to ATI’s latest drivers, and then went through several days of wondering why the hell my goddamn video was so _slow_ until I eventually noticed that, for some damn reason, 2x anti-aliasing was on by default… -_-’

In the course of trying to figure everything out, I eventually uninstalled ATI’s drivers and installed “Omega’s Drivers”:http://omegadrivers.net, and just decided to keep them at the end of everything, since they seem to work just fine.
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In other news, Nina and I have a new place to live in and we will be in there by the end of the month, no matter what!

And next week, we’re off to see “My Chemical Romance”:http://mychemicalromance.com prance around the stage like a bunch of pixies! Yay!

…maybe he’ll look me right in my eyes… surely, time would stop, and the moment would drag on for what seems like forever.