~ the angry red planet spent yesterday afternoon at the ‘mies, in effect’. though the man’s name was invoked a few times ny the moderators, few people on the panels seemed interested in talking about mies. the day moved slowly on to a couple of western europeans getting their asses handed to them by georgia tech [w] alumnus jeff kipnis.

~ we have turned our back on redhat [w], and have made the switch to debian [w]. not only has the installation and configuration been a completely successful operation, but we feel better to be using the fruits of a truly collaborative project – a project more in the spirit…

~ this is our first update from linux-angry! viewing this site on linux has been a demoralizing experience; we have tried to be marginally conscientious for various platform and browser scenarios, but never imagined that netscape would appear so differently in linux. also, this update is being written in emacs; we are more familiar with vi, and we hope to dig it up soon.

~ linux update: for some reason, every command in mandrake takes about 5 minutes to execute; we hope it is just the video issues making it difficult to refresh the screen – otherwise, windows 9x is a more efficient os for this piece. so, tired of waiting mandrake, we reinstalled redhat 6.2 [w], which seems to run a little faster. Xconfigurator seems to be quite a gyp; there is no place to insert your own sync rates, even though the dialogue box says it is ‘ok’ to do so. all we are left with are the ten or so specified choices, none of which match our monitor perfectly. we tried about 15 configurations, and still had no luck, so we decided to push on without worrying about the screen. our broader hopes include a new monitor, so fooling around with the configuration of this one seems to be wasteful. despite the garbled screen, we managed to configure the network with planet and reach the internet. immediately, we downloaded and installed gaim [w] with resounding success; we moved on to m16 [w] and axyftp [w], which is such a duplicate of ipswitch that we again became shaken in our certainty of what the true benefits of being a linux user are…

~ linux update: the garbled and fragmented display still appears the moment we ‘startx’. our video card (s3 virge gx) is supported under xfree86 4.0.2, so we have turned our attention to the ‘dot clock’. assuming the specs on compaq hong kong’s website [w] are correct, we have ascertained our monitor’s rates as such: hsync: 69, vsync: 50-90. there is the issue, of course, that our presario mv700 monitor is not from hong kong and is not engineered for their power cycles. nevertheless, we are fiddling with the sync rates, setting them higher and lower, according to screen resolutions. however, this is exceedingly difficult, when our terminal window appears the way it does. we know that we are not the only people to have issues with this monitor or card, but we have yet to see documentation on a resolution; if we have, we didn’t understand it as such. if by chance you’ve managed to achieve success with gnome or kde using this hardware, please get in touch.

~ looks like our hopes went too high too soon; our display is still equally un-viewable under both mandrake [w] and redhat [w]

~ after a 60 hour download, we find ourselves with a complete copy of the mandrake 7.2 iso. after wasting two discs – once burning the iso onto a disc and once burning an image disc with the iso – we managed to burn an image of the iso on the third attempt. from these errors, we learned the following: if you are burning an image with adaptec cd-creator, select ‘raw data’; if you are using nero, do not select ‘raw data’. so, we dropped the cd into angry and began the install. we have to wait only 3 hours for a installation, which is 4 times as long as redhat takes, but so far, we have none of the monitor configuration issues, so far….

~ the road to linux* has been retread. while searching the planet hard drive for errors, we figured we’d make use of its monitor to try another attempt at a usable linux configuration on angry. back in january, when we swapped out the hard drive in planet, we temporarily stored some files on angry. in order to do this quickly, we had reinstalled windows 95 on a partition. now, we reformatted and fdisk’ed angry, and ran another redhat 6.2 installation. we found they same monitor problems as always during the set-up; we thought a ‘server’ installation might be fun, but this apparent occurs with no gui, so instead of the previous fragmented window, we find the first few letters of text appearing on the right of the screen. before the rest appear on the left.

*’the road to linux’ copyrighted rasterweb [w]

~ this would be a lifetime easier if each machine had its own dedicated display…

~ red, of course is doing – whatever it does – as fine as it can.

~ special thanks to sean michael finn from the office of queue llc [w] for the copy of linux complete. ‘1,000 pages only $19.99’!

~ machine updates:
   1) the angry red planet fleet mazda has been returned from the shop, now containing a ‘used’ air flow meter – a bargain at barely over $300!
   2)angry still has redhat 6.2 purring like a kitten under its coffee stained hood, but the linux has yet been fully explored as the monitor still waits to be configured properly. we have been directed to the proper config file, and have been brushing up on our vi., but we have yet to uncover the specs for the monitor. it is a packard bell 1020; there is no support on the packard bell website [w] (when it comes up, that is), and the support page to which we are redirected [w] seems to offer up nothing unless you subscribe to their pay service. so, if anyone has documentation or information on a 14″ packard bell 1020, please get in touch with our linux crew.
   3)planet has broken the 900 mp3 threshold.

~ lots of friends coming in these days, from our friends at star*1 [w] and from belligerent posts to various school [w] intranets and message boards. welcome aboard.

~ the angry red thesis is still languishing.

~ redhat 6.2 seems to be running with a limited number of flaws. we can not truly tell, however, as the monitor is not installed or configured correctly. it seems impossible to attempt to change the settings, for touching anything causes the screen to fragment until it is completely unreadable. during installation, there was not a choice for our monitor (packard bell 1020), and ‘generic’ does not seem to be cutting it. if someone can offer a solution short of reinstallation, please contact us.