Waiting for the beat to stop

So the years passed by, and I stopped to write…

This week has been terribly rough, so I didn’t even have time to write. Unfortunately, I’m taking the second term exams this week, so I won’t be around for some days.

Things went really bad this week. My Ubuntu Graphics Server died completely and I couldn’t fix it, so I’ll be installing from scratch. I’m already thinking in a complete format to install Ubuntu and Windows in a decent way. I have some ideas of posts I want to write:

1. A good dual boot installation, not the crappy thing I did to get Ubuntu running on my lap
2. yWriter, the software I’ve been using to write my novel
3. uTorrent client and web interface

I don’t actually remember everything, but I think this are the most important ones. If they come across my mind, I’ll update this post.

Later.

Hibernating like a bear

Or… the most stupid thing I’ve done in some days…

It was 9 o’clock. I was in class, and I was going out of my class and I had to go to math, so I press the “Off” button and chose “Hibernation”. I kept my laptop in its bag, and rushed towards the next classroom. I took class normally, got out of there with a friend, and then I went to the Physic lab with her. I took out my laptop, and I was really surprised… When I saw it On… It was extremely hot, so I didn’t put it again in the bag, I just carried it with me.

Now, I feel totally ashamed, as the CPU was working at 100%, my battery scarcely survived. I swear I won’t hibernate again until I solve this out.

Shame on me.

Setting up Compiz Fusion

Yesterday at 8 o’clock my post about my Ubuntu installation was published in the front page of tuxmachines.org, which brought 137 views at the moment I’m writing this post. I never thought so much people would read that post, specially because I feel it was a little bit incomplete. In the next series of posts, I’ll be describing in the most detailed way I can my Ubuntu experience.

In this post, I’ll describe the “installation” of Compiz Fusion. It’s a really easy thing to do in Hardy Heron, as everything is automatic, and it will definitely give the GNOME desktop an awe inspiring look.

After the installation of Ubuntu Hardy Heron, one of the things that most of us want to do, is start the Compiz Fusion. Who hasn’t seen those videos in YouTube where the desktop turns into a cube and goes round and round?? That effect is somehow old now, I remeber about a year and a half ago, when I saw for the first time the XGL server. In a year of develpment, it has turned into an awesome server which takes the maximum performance of the graphics card, and turns it into incredible eye-catching effects. In this post, I’ll describe the configuration to install it.

The Novelist Drama

As I said before, one of the things I enjoy the most, is writing. I love writing for this blog (actually I got pretty excited 5 minutes ago when I saw I had 25 visits in the last 2 hours) but I also enjoy pretty much writing stories.

In december of this year, I’m taking the CAE certification. I already took the FCE, which I scored an A.
Since I started high school, I’ve been taking extra English classes focussed to this exams. In this classes, I’m asked regularly to write about something, sometimes its a formal letter, sometimes its a short story about anything. The last week, I was talking with Mariela, my little “sister”. We have been friends for some time now, and we we’re talking about the movie “Wanted”.

After some joking, I told her I would write my composition about her, in a short story with a Matrix and Wanted touch. The result, was the best friggin’ composition I’ve done in some time. Everyone liked it, so I started to look carefully at it. I wanted all the feedback I could get, so I wrote in a document and send it to everyone who likes reading, and who are good enough to give a good point of view.

I’ve kept on writing since then, I still don’t know what will I do with it, but one thing goes for sure: I’m writing this novel. I’m completely in love with it. So, I’m publishing it here, so anyone can see it. I would really appreciate if you comment about it, if you like it or not, but also, what did you like and what not.

So, I present the Prologue of my untitled novel. Hope you enjoy it as much as I did while I wrote it.

Prologue.doc

As a side note, this prologue is protected by the Creative Commons License Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike. In other words, if you want to download this file, print it  a thousand times, give it to your friends and/or use it for non-profit activies or publish it anywhere, you’re perfectly free to do it, as long as you give a reference to this blog URL and you include my name (Gerardo Galíndez Barreda)

Ubuntu Installation

I’m probably the last person on Earth that does this… But I want to publish my installation of Ubuntu Herdy Heron.

In my last post I wrote about how I got the CD, and a bit of what happened with the installation. It was way faster and easier than lots of other installations I’ve done, the real problem came after it, when I had to configure my graphics and Wi-Fi cards.

Overlook

The installation was extremely neat. I was totally surprised.The first distro I installed in my life was Debian. The installation was in text mode, all done with the keyboard (obviously…) It took around two hours in an i486. I also installed Sylver in my Kurobox, it took around half an hour to transfer via FTP and around twenty minutes to uncompress. Apart from some details I had with the Kernel, it was easy because I had a wiki with every single comand I had to type. Lastly, around a year and a half ago I installed Ubuntu Dapper Drake (6.06) in my old laptop. It was a little bit tough as I had to partition my disk for the first time. The installation took a lot, it took around an hour and a half. When it was finished, it booted without any problem, with the graphics card at max resolution and with everything else working. It was a pretty limited laptop, it didn’t had a Wi-Fi module, the graphics card was integrated as well as the sound card.

This time, the story was different. The installation was pretty fast, it didn’t even took half an hour. It finished fast, without a problem, even though I had read about people who had problems trying to get past the installer. When it booted, I had 800×600, no graphics acceleration, wireless signal, webcam or microphone.

So… here’s how I got them working

Delayed…

Ok, so my great post wasn’t here for Saturday after all. Actually, it’s not even here. It’s still in my Drafts page, waiting to be finished. I hate pretty much delaying things, leaving things without finishing them is quite a pain in the ass.

The thing is that I was in exams, so I had to study the weekend along with these days. I had lots of work to do also, so its been a bit of a rough week. Even though, I finally finished my difficult exams, so now I have some free time which I will be using to finish my post, and… to finish more homework…

Only as a little preview, I’d like to tell about what my next post will have. I finally got my Wi-Fi module working, so I’ll be writing about that, along with the GForce graphics card, and a little explanation on how to get the Compiz Fusion server up and running. Also, I’ll be posting a list of software I installed in Ubuntu, which are the ones I work with.

I guess I’ll be posting all of this before the end of the week, as I want it to be a good post, and I need to get my homework finished before.