I was thinking about starting a FreeGeek in Tucson. Then I discovered that something similar already exists here - only they're a Microsoft Registered Refurbisher, and they load their refurbished machines with Windows XP ( Read more... )

I've had my 1015T for about three days, and I'm super happy with it. I blew away Windows 7 Starter (and its restore partition) and installed Xubuntu 10.10 AMD64 before I even left the store.

The installation went off without a hitch. The folks at Hi-Tech Computers, where I bought the machine, kindly let me use their USB optical drive. Booting ( Read more... )

I installed Xubuntu 10.04 yesterday. I am in love with XFCE ( Read more... )

Firefox is increasingly bloated and slow, has a multitude of annoying tooltips that can't be disabled, and chokes on HelloQuizzy's JavaScript. Konqueror constantly segfaults, renders things badly, and has no option to never save passwords. Haven't tried Chrome or that other one yet... the one that starts with an 'O'. Whatever.

Meh. Browsers

I got MIDI working in Master of Magic! kingfissure's suggestion to add my user to the audio group solved the problem with dosemu and aconnect. Here's what finally worked:

$ sudo modprobe snd-virmidi
$ ln -s /dev/snd/midiC2D0 ~/.dosemu/run/dosemu-midi
$ aconnect 24 128
$ aoss dosemumidiC2D0 is the virtual MIDI device 24:0. MIDI device 128:0 is the timidity ( Read more... )

I may be a step closer to getting MIDI working in dosemu. I learned about aconnect, which sort of pipes data between two MIDI ports. I loaded virmidi and connected it to timidity, then used amidi to write a SysEx file to the virmidi device. It made sound, but it only played a couple notes and then continuously played one note until I ( Read more... )

I've been trying to get Master of Magic running in dosemu. After much hair-pulling, I met with partial success by double-wrapping dosemu with padsp and aoss, like so:

$ LD_PRELOAD="$LD_PRELOAD libaoss.so libpulsedsp.so" dosemu -D +SThis made dosemu see the sound card as a SoundBlaster 16 instead of a SoundBlaster 2.0. PCM output works with the ( Read more... )

I've been using Kubuntu 9.10 for a little over two weeks, and despite a few annoyances, it's been great. Sound and WiFi worked out of the box. My biggest gripes have been with Kopete and Amarok. I ended up replacing Amarok with an older version of itself, and Kopete with Pidgin. Also, Firefox seems sluggish when I have a lot of tabs open, and ( Read more... )

I got WoW running nicely on Wine, following the easy directions on WoWWiki. The funny thing is, the UI reports a lower frame rate than on Windows, but it feels much smoother. The character models look sharper in OpenGL, too ( Read more... )

A couple months ago I acquired three old computers on a dumpster-diving expedition, two P75s and one 486DX-33. The 486 was in a cute mini-tower with the keyboard connector on the side. Some of the drives and SIMMs were missing, but between the three of them I was able to assemble one P75 in a cute case with 32MB RAM and two NICs. It posts OK. ( Read more... )