Our basement remodel is done. We've got an awesome family room with bamboo flooring (bought at half price at the Habitat store - environmentally friendly!), recessed dimmable lighting (using CFL's – also environmentally friendly), and all the wires for speakers and such run through the walls! I also just ditched Comcast for Dish. I ordered a second Dish receiver just for the MythTV box.

Now I have the perfect place for my MythTV! I've purchased updated hardware for it and its going to be a really awesome family entertainment computer.

I've replaced my old MythTV guts and used it for the playroom/living room MythTV box. It still works great for all the basics, but it just wasn't going to cut it for my plans for the new MythTV box. It is going to be running all of our daily file and media server needs. I'm going to shut down our old file server to save the electricity. All of its functions (mostly file sharing and backups) will move to the new MythTV.

I've been messing around with some new hardware to replace my old "BubbaTV" MythTV box. It still requires a ton of tweaking to get everything to work right. One of the things that I have noticed (besides the fact that Adobe's Flash program seems to be getting buggier and less stable over time) is that there is a new beta 64-bit Flash client available. Because the existing one barely works on my new quad core AMD MythTV box (sadly, its slower than Flash on some of my Linux PC's that are 5 years old) I decided to install it.

I had already found a script that installs Flash 10 32-bit directly from the Adobe website and had edited it to install the  64-bit version. Then I realized that Alejandro Quervo had pretty much already done the exact same thing first. So I'll give him all the credit :).

The sad thing is that 64-bit Flash seems to run about as crappy as the 32-bit Flash did before. Maybe I'll look into upgrading to the latest Nvidia drivers and see if that fixes things. 

Thanks to Alejandro I also just read that Sun Java has a 64-bit Firefox plugin now too! I'm install that right away in my build as well!

I've been having the absolute worst Firefox experience in Kubuntu recently. I can't pinpoint the exact time that it started but it got a lot worse when I upgraded to Flash 10 (what a hog! Adobe seriously? Flash 10 runs about as well as a Microsoft OS does!).

Once Flash 10 was there scrolling in Firefox became impossible. It was as if my whole computer was locked for about 5 seconds. Then it would scroll... slowly. Painfully even.

After poking around in Google for a while and not finding much in the way of solutions, I decided to try some new video drivers. I uninstalled all of the Ubuntu Nvidia drivers and downloaded and installed the 177.80 drivers. 

Wow! What a huge difference. Not only that, but almost all of my issues with hibernation (it was intermittent, but sometimes it didn't work) are gone now too. 

One thing I did run into was that I didn't uninstall the Ubuntu Nvidia packages and just ran the Nvidia installer. After a reboot, the Nvidia drivers didn't load properly. the i2c_core module was not loading, unless I unloaded and reloaded the Nvidia driver. Once I uninstalled all the Nvidia related stuff from the Ubuntu repository and reinstalled the latest Nvidia driver all those problems were resolved.

So I've been fighting with Eclipse for the last 2 days now. Let me just say that installing Eclipse from the Ubuntu repositories equals a really crappy Eclipse experience. I wasn't able to add or update anything successfully from any of the Eclipse repositories. It was beyond horrible. I'm guessing that it was mostly because it was an older version. But shouldn't Eclipse be able to update even itself to the latest version? I'm not happy with Eclipse's package management much either. Somewhere along the line something has got to be able to update itself to the latest version and both products didn't work very well.

So now I'm installing it all manually. Never again to trust that Ubuntu can install correct versions from its repository and never again to believe that when an old version is installed that Eclipse can actually update itself properly either. Sometimes you just gotta get it done yourself!

Having a Presidential candidate that understands and uses open source is incredible. A friend dropped me an IM with this blog entry regarding the Obama campaign's use of Ubuntu. I guess this is just one more nail in Obama's coffin for people that can't hack having an intelligent person running the Whitehouse. But I, for one, will really enjoy having Barrack as President because his campaign used Linux in such a practical and vital way. Perhaps he will press the executive branch to run open source stuff more often to save the tax payers some money? Am I hoping for too much there? I think not. There are already some pretty large agencies that are using more and more Linux and open source apps. I wonder if Microsoft's lobbyists will react if open source becomes even more entrenched in goverment. Its happening in so many governments across the world at here at home. With the smart kind of leadership in Washington, I think it will spread like wildfire and really cut tax payer budgets all over this great land of ours.

I recently needed to bring up a java app that I hadn't used in quite some time. At least as long as before I had Kubntu 8.04 installed. Back then I was using Java 6 (1.6.x) as the default JRE on my latptop. Now however, the app was failing with all kinds of errors.

As with any OS that can use Java, just because you have a java version installed, doesn't mean that version is the one that is launched by default. I have Java-gcj, Java 5 and Java 6 all installed on my Kubuntu 8.04 laptop. Java-gcj was currently the default java version.

In Linux, the way the java default is setup is both elagent and confusing all at the same time (Linux in a nutshell if you ask me, and I love it!). In Linux the /usr/bin/java file is really just a link to the java version that you want to be the default. But /usr/bin/java links to another link to /etc/alternatives/java which in turn links to the actual java binary at /usr/lib/jvm/java-gcj/jre/bin/java. 

So my Pidgin has been without sound for some time now. I figured it was about time I figured out why. It turns out that Ubuntu 8.04 and its use of Pulse Audio is the culprit. If there was one thing about Ubuntu 8.04 that they really blew, it was the sound.

I'm sorry but there are just too many apps that don't handle Pulse Audio well or at all. Even some amazing sound utilities and apps. Hello? Audacity?

So how do I get around this issue? Well I noticed that under the Preferences | Sound tab I can change the method to "Command". So as a lark I put in aplay and the path to a wave file. Sure enough it worked just fine. The next problem was how do I get the individual sounds to play rather than the same sound for everything?

Simple! A Google search later and I find that you can just slap a %s in there instead. So the command I use is "aplay %s". Now I finally have Pidgin sounds again.

Ubuntu! Hey! Get going on how to get all this sound stuff working without having to tweak all of this stuff! Sure I understand that not everything is going to work with Pulse yet, but if there is a work around, then you should have it in your packages to use it. Perhaps it was a bit early to move to Pulse. Perhaps moving early will speed other apps to adapt faster. Either way its annoying while everything is caught in this transition. 

I saw this link to Launchpad on Digg and Slashdot today. Evidently its bad to constantly load/unload the drive and Ubuntu does this a huge amount of times per hour (like 180 times instead of around 5). This can lead to nasty wear and tear on the drive and limit its life to only a few months instead of 3-5 years. I've added the updates suggested in the launchpad entry. It seems like this could be nasty, or it could be much adieu about nothing. I'll keep track of this bung though and see what transpires. 

I've upgraded 3 machines to Kubuntu 7.10 already. I've upgraded all of them using the online method. My gaming desktop was the smoothest. That is also the machine that I've hacked up the least, so that is to be expected. I used adept_manager and upgraded to the RC version of Kubuntu a week before 7.10 was released officially.

My personal laptop was a nightmare while trying to use adept_manager. It was never able to really even start the upgrade process. It kept giving me an error about how some other process must be using the apt database. Which was total crap. I even turned off the auto download of security patches. I had read that some other people that got that error did that and it worked for them. Not for me. Finally after running "sudo dpkg --configure -a", few apt-get clean up commands and a reboot, I did finally get it to work... kinda. The process kept on hanging with adept_manager. Additionally my laptop was confused as to what Ubuntu distro it was (ubuntu, kubuntu, xubuntu). I reinstalled the kde-desktop packages to fix that. Then I finally just gave up and went all command line on its butt.

I recently put together an awesome new desktop machine for gaming. Of course I immediately put Kubuntu Feisty on it. When compiz-fusion came out I slapped that on there too. It worked great... except for the ccsm (CompizConfig Settings Manager) App. Just about everything in that application was black text on a black background. I thought perhaps it had something to do with Compiz. I removed Compiz, but then noticed that Kino had the same problem.

I thought that it must be a GTK app issue so I searched Google for "black menus gtk". Sure enough here is a post on the Kubuntu Forums.