Linux Mint 6 first impressions

Installing a new release of Linux about every 6 months gives me a good excuse to back everything up, which is not a bad thing.
However I hate all the tweaking that is then needed to get everything back to **just right**.

So it was a pleasant surprise when I installed Mint 6 Felicia this past weekend. I was expecting my dual monitor setup to be a big pain in the you know what. But I have to say I was amazed at how easy it was. It detected my video card and I told it make a large desktop and voila!

I thought to my self 'Hmm.. that was easy ...almost too easy'.

My first impression was 'Cool, this has improved a lot since Mint 4,' which
had me going around in circles for several hours trying to get dual monitor support.

I then went to open Firefox. Nothing. Tried again. Nothing.

When I looked at the hidden .mozilla directory it had a lock and an X emblem on it and when queried it said root only. I found I could run it as a sudo user in terminal.

It took me a while. My solution was to add my user account by using the chown command sudo chown : .mozilla (and then all its subdirectories and file).
I also had the same issue with .adobe and .macromedia directories that prevented flash working.

I am now in the process of adding all those other tweaks, but in the back of my mind I am wondering how can some files become root? Why does this happen and would this happen again?
Should I reinstall over again while I have not got too much time invested in getting it **just right**?

The day the earth stood still -A review

So we went to the movies yesterday and watched
- The day the earth stood still -
and I figured that we should see it in IMAX. So we paid our extra $3 (x2) and without giving too many spoilers the verdict was it was good.

The kid was annoying. There were certain bits left in for people who had seen the original, but in most cases changed to be only subtle.
It was entertaining, a sort of good story, an OK twist on the the original.
If you changed the robot to a different shaped thing or alien then removed the name GORT and Klaatu, Then you could call this movie anything.
The movie would stand on it's own as a good story.
I think it is a shame they called it the day the earth stood still.

You could pick it apart if you really wanted to.

I did not notice anything substantial enough to warrant the extra money for IMAX.
Go see it but save yourself the extra cash needed for the IMAX.


I am still continuing to build my Gort.

See inside my head

With 'The day the Earth stood still' about to be released it sort of took the wind out of sails working on Gort.
I started work on Gort long before they announced that there would be a movie.
I am sure the movie will be a different take on the story. I hope it does not suck.

We are heading out on Saturday to see this movie. I am a little afraid that if the movie is good
that classic Gort will be forgotten and if it sucks the whole thing will be a joke including classic Gort....

I have been working on my Gort at 1/10th speed (ramping up) and taking a good look at him and found that I am not 100% happy with my visor so this weekend I ripped open his head and pulled out the visor.

Doctor Who season 4 ...Finally!!!!

My wife and I being good little netizens, do not torrent files.
We waited until Doctor Who was finally shown by the CBC. However we're not stupid, and when the DVD set for S4 was released prior to the last four episodes being shown on the CBC we pre-ordered it and then watched all the remaining shows at once.

Which brings us to the the S4 finale of Doctor Who.
All in all not bad. It was nice to see all the companions together (even if some of them didn't have much to do) and Davros was excellent. Just one little niggle. Treating Donna the way they did was dreadful. Precious few people wanted Donna as a season long companion, but when we got her, most everyone was impressed with the growth and character development. To rip all that away, to turn her into the same vapid, gobby cow she was at the beginning of The Runaway Bride was mind-bogglingly cruel.

All the other companions got to keep their memories of their time with the Doctor, even if they didn't get to keep the Doctor. They were better people at the end than they were at the beginning. Here's how Donna's finale should have gone down.

Everything was fine until they were back in the TARDIS. When the Doctor informed her that she couldn't keep her super huge Time Lord knowledge in her comparatively tiny human brain.

How it should have ended...
He should just have taken that knowledge away, not everything that happened since she'd met him. Donna then decides that travelling anymore with the Doctor would be too painful with the memory of what she had to give up. At her request, he takes her back to Chiswick.
She mopes around for a day or two, until finally one night, out in the allotment, her grandad, says "I reckon it's time I gave you this." and pulls out a pocket watch.

It would have been a far better ending to have Donna revealed as a Time Lord.

Thoughts of Mandriva

So I have Mandriva 2008.1 on my computer. So far there are only a couple of annoyances.

1) Logging in
When I installed Mandriva I added a password. No problem.
Rebooted the computer. At the end of my session I had my password memorized and turned off the computer.
A couple of days later I turned on the computer, but it would not take my password or allow me to log in.
So I tried about 30 combinations, then by accident I typed my login name only to discover that numlock was
turned on. Well, when I typed my login name it had numbers in it. The keyboard is a mini keyboard with the keys laid out close to that of a laptop. It seems that Mandravia turns the Numlock 'ON' unlike Ubuntu, PCLinuxOS and Mint.

2) Mandriva and the vanishing MD5 sum.
If you downloaded Mandriva and got the MD5 sum without a lot of searching then count yourself lucky. It really is hidden away I even searched with Google and all I found were people asking where the MD5 sum was and strange cryptic clues from others who probably found the information by accident but wanted others to go through the pain of finding it.

3) Variations of Mandriva.
It's not clear (as in I am an idiot, and could not be bothered to look) what you get with the three different versions of Mandriva- free, one and Powerpack versions. I don't just mean lists of programs, I mean Powerpack number of seats / licenses, home, professional. What happens in 6 months when a new version comes out? Does everything stop working or is there a slightly cheaper upgrade path. I know that people need to make money, but $80 (from what I can see) each year is a little expensive.

Other than that it seems OK