artm

New fedora is out and caracolito was a mess for the last 4 months thanks to my numerous experiments in December. I also wanted to have windows in some sort of software jail for rare job related occasions I would need to port my software to it.

First I tried to install windows on good old thalamus just to see what windows installation feels like. Considering it’s some ancient windows version, installation feels like time machine. Add to that thalamus’ iffy power connector and batteries which when fully charged last 40 min but i never had a chance to fully charge them. Nevertheless I managed to install windows and put thalamus back on his dusty shelf.

I leeched a torrent of FC5 install DVD just to discover that my DVD drive won’t boot off DVD+RW (well, actually it can’t even read it), and my motherboard won’t boot off DVD writer. I could either go and buy DVD+R and see if that’d work, or download the CD images (yet another 3Gb). The shops were shut already, so I opted for the latter, which decision was rewarded with flashy new clean install at 3am.

With all the buzz about AIGLX I expected all sorts of goofy Mac-like FX but no, X11 is as strict as it used to be. If it wasn’t for desktop background and fedora logo screensaver (and overal stability, which is a temporary condition on computers that I own) FC5 lookes just like mutated FC4 I had before. After some browsing found out that AIGLX doesn’t work on nvidia anyway, thanks to closeness of the driver. I then proceded to install vmware workstation but it’s evil and you don’t wanna install evil stuff at 3am (prior to installation, while CD images were being sucked off fedora torrents I watched Exorcism of Emily Rose, a sucky 2005 mystery movie where 3am was one of the mystery elements, so I knew I shouldn’t tempt the demons) and I decided to call it a day. I went to System >> Shut down… and hey, there was a Suspend option there which I immediatelly clicked on.

This morning I turned the computer on and some 30 sec later was politelly asked to enter my password, and here I was in the session as I left at demon’s hour it with evil vmware installer asking me questions.

I had to install “kernel-devel” package to satisfy vmware installer, and after that patch vmware using vmware-any-any-update* from Petr Vandrovec. The whole spirit of installing the vmware smells evil: closed source software doesn’t port itself to “unsupported platforms”. I hope it’ll work in the end… (Update: it did, in the end: I had to install VMWare tools inside the VM where Windows lives). To install Windows on a virtual machine I had to make both of my optical drives available to it - because I have no idea which one is /dev/hdb and which /dev/hdc. Mouse doesn’t work properly inside the VM, probably setting type to “auto” wasn’t a good idea (it was default!). I hope windows installer can be controlled with keyboard… Fedora/Gnome and Windows barely fit in the caracolito’s tiny RAM, wonder if they still sell the sort of DIMMs it needs. The newer and faster DIMMs I’ve got in a closet don’t work ;-(

After having installed closed nvidia drivers I figured that the best way to run windows fullscreen was to use VMware Player. It doesn’t allot a separate virtual console for windows but it also has no problem using the same resolution / refresh rate as xorg.

Installed an additional gstreamer plugins (-ffmpeg, -bad and -ugly) from freshrpms. And tested it by listening mp3 from iTunes via DAAP.

Ok, it’s time to resume my ongoing projects, see how they behave on new installation.

Why is this picture tagged artm? Must be a typo, but it’s a nice addition to my online space ;-)