Looks like Arvid's icon was finally accepted by the developers, or should I say by Ben Goodger. Mozilla Firebird is slowly turning into a polished end-user product, which of course is great!
My birthday today. And a good friend of mine finally took his driver's license! Congratulations, Hans!
Have anyone tried SETI@Home? I think it's an interesting idea. Basically, you periodically get a chunk of radio code data taken from a radio observatery and your computer analyzes it when it's idle, looking for signs of other life forms. SETI stands for Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence, so what you're doing is participating in something with extremely low probabilities. But with the help of hundreds of thousands of other computer users, the odds of detecting signs of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe increases, according to SETI@Home. Unfortunately, the client itself isn't a piece of engineering work. You have little options to choose from and it seems to be very resource hungry, not to mention ugly.
Another project where computers on the net are working together that looks more promising is distributed.net. Here you participate in solving more "down-to-earth" problems like deciphering strongly encrypted messages. This client is better and uses little resources. But the idea behind it is not as mind-boggling as SETI@Home. :)
I just installed a new hard drive and didn't had the energy to go through the pain of backing up the Fedora Core system so I'm back to Windows XP only again. I will probably install Fedora again when I get the CDs back from a friend trying to install it on his machine.
I'm currently running Fedora Core 1 on my AMD Thunderbird 800 MHz system. As always with Linux (at least on this machine), the installation didn't run smoothly. First of all, I managed to burn CD 2 on a damaged CD-R disc, causing lots of hassle. The installation stopped and left the Grub boot loader in an unfinished state, forcing me to reinstall Windows XP in order to even use the computer again.
After this first setback, I burned another disc and decided to test the media before installing. That CD also failed! I was starting to think that it was something wrong with the .iso file I downloaded, but after testing with a CD-RW disc, disc 2 finally worked.
First, I was trying a graphical install, using pretty much the standard options (Personal Desktop, Gnome, Mozilla, etc.). The installer successfully collected most hardware information except the monitor (Iiyama S900MT1), so I had to choose a similar model from the list. It also said I had a generic 3-button USB mouse, when in fact I'm using a Logitech MX-700 with eight buttons. I'm still not sure how to make Fedora utilize the mouse buttons properly to e.g. get the Back/Forward buttons to work in Mozilla Firebird. Any ideas anyone?
When I was finished selecting which packages to install, the installer started to transfer all the RPM's to the disk. Then came the most annoying Red Hat/Fedora (anaconda) installation problem of them all: a message box appeared saying that there was an error when trying to install a package. It said something like "This is a critical error and the installation will stop." How fun! The problem is, this error has occured in the Red Hat 8 and 9 installer too, and even with another CD-ROM drive. Is this a common error of the anaconda installer, or is this in fact a hardware error? Why can't the installer handle it gracefully and simply retry, or at the very least inform me exactly what went wrong?
After this major setback, I tried the text mode installer. I now chose a bare minimum install, unchecking most options except the first "X Window System" and "Gnome" options. Even this setup failed once, and it seems that it fails completely randomly, since it doesn't even fail on the same RPM's. Finally, I managed to get the installer to complete its task and Fedora was up and running.
Knowing that I had deselected all web browsers, I was forced to add these packages after the setup was complete, in order to visit web pages and most importantly, download Mozilla Firebird. So I clicked the Red Hat, chose System Settings and clicked on Add/Remove Software and then added "Graphical Internet", and more specifically, the Mozilla web browser. However, this addition also failed for some unspecified reason. The error message read, basically, "An unknown error occured while installing," and then the whole Add/Remove Software component shut down. Update: Appearantly, this is a known bug in Fedora Core. There is also a workaround described there, but I haven't read about it yet.
Lucky me, I rarely give up. I formatted the partitions again and made a new text based install, making sure I included Mozilla from the beginning. This worked! I have now managed to download and install both Firebird and Thunderbird, plus I've downloaded the source for mplayer and was able to build it! However, that wasn't without problems either. After building mplayer, the graphical user interface complained that the default skin was missing. And indeed, it was not there. So I had to download that separately, place it in the correct folder (using admin rights) and finally, after lots of trial and errors, it is up and running.
By the way, before I could build mplayer, I had to install the application development packages from the CD too. Of course, these RPM's wouldn't install either, and threw the same error message on the screen as the Mozilla RPM did. For some reason, though, the autorun script on the first CD started that Add/Remove Software component differently, and I was able to install the RPM's then.
But, not without problems. :) The packages were scattered on both CD 1 and CD 2, and the installer was stupid enough not to sort the packages, so I had to switch discs at least ten times during the heavy software development install!
After all these problems, and after manually altering the /etc/fstab file to automatically mount my Windows drives on startup, I now have a system that I'm comfortable using. But, the bottom line is that Linux (and specifially Fedora Core 1) is not the operating system for anyone.
If you're tempted to try and experiment with it first hand, be sure to have lots of time, lots of patience and lots of computer knowledge, or you will find yourself crawling back to Windows in no time.
Hopefully, the Italian translation will cause less fuss than the Macedonian...
Mozilla Firebird Help is now available in Macedonian. I just got mail from someone (let's call him AP) who states that there is no such language. Here's an excerpt of our conversation:
AP: I have to remind you that it is not Macedonia but FYROM , Former Yugoslavic Republic of Macedonia.
Me: I'm not even mentioning a country; I'm mentioning a language: Macedonian.
AP: There is not such a language mate!
Me: According to the ISO 639 standard, there is.
I haven't heard from him since, but what's the status on this, anyone? Surely there must be a language called Macedonian?
On an unrelated notice, it looks like I'm finally going to succeed in catching up on my overloaded Inbox. I have now less than 20 unread messages!
I bought djst.org too, just because it's so cheap and because I know that I'd regret it if I didn't and someone else took it. I'm still not completely sure what I'll use the domains for though. :)
By the way, using Visa on the web is really convenient. I didn't think it was this easy.