Thomas Kobelsky's Blog

October 22, 2009

It's been a while since I posted anything here.
Halfway through my third term in VFS, I started using Linux on and off (mostly on my laptop as opposed to my PC).

The reason I started with it is because my laptop crashed pretty hardcore at the end of my first term and I lost all my files stored on it. It was so bad that I couldn't even restore it to factory settings, because the partition with those factory settings saved on it was somehow destroyed (even though the only way for me to access that partition is with the recovery disc shipped with my laptop). However, I was talking on some forums prior to this and learned about the LiveCDs that are popular with most Linux distros, and how Ubuntu 7.04 (which was brand new at the time) was able to access NTFS partitions with ease. Using that knowledge, I downloaded and created a LiveCD with that distro and popped it into my laptop. Within a couple minutes, I was able to find my files on my crashed laptop and salvage them onto my 320gb external hard-drive.
Since then, I've gone through a slough of different distros, mostly Debian based:

Ubuntu 7.04 Ubuntu 7.10 Ubuntu 8.04 Ubuntu 8.10 Ubuntu 9.04 Linux Mint 6 Linux Mint 7 openSUSE 10.3 slackware 12.1 Damn Small Linux gOS 3.1 Gadgets Gentoo 2008 Fedora 10 Debian 5.0.0 Mandriva One 2009

As you can see, Ubuntu is/was my distro of choice. That is to say, until I tried Linux Mint 6. Instantly fell in love with it, simply because it was Ubuntu, but improved. Pre-packed with codec packages, mintTools, Compiz, and much more, I decided to stick with it. Which is why I've formatted my computer into x64 Linux Mint 7 "Gloria" and haven't really regretted it (much). Sure, I have a 8800GT, 8GB RAM, 2.4GHz Quad-Core and 3TBs of HDD space running Linux... but this is where it gets awesome: VirtualBox. I've installed the x64 Windows 7 RC-1 as a guest OS in a virtual machine, which is supposed to give me the best of both worlds (well, I suppose it would be the best of three worlds, since XP Mode can be installed in the RC-1 as well). But before I get on that, it took me quite some time to get Mint 7 to work properly on my computer.

There were a few problems when I first installed Mint 7 on my computer, some of which can be attributed to my monitor (which is actually a 32 inch 720p Insignia LCD tv, connected with an HDMI cable). These problems included:

	Being forced into the native resolution of 1280x720
	Overscanning around the edges of the TV
	Mounting two 1tb SATA hard-drives automatically when system boots
	No audio from my sound card (Sound Blaster X-Fi XtremeGamer)

There may be a couple other small issues, but it seems they're too irrelevant for me to remember.
Fixing the first issue wasn't quite as confusing as I thought it would be. I had installed Mint 6 on my computer a while ago, and had the same issue with being forced to use 1280x720, when I was so used to using 1920x1080 in Windows XP. To fix this, I had to find and instal the nVidia Display Driver from the Synaptic Package Manager and set the resolution to 1920x1080 in X Server Settings > X Server Display Configuration > Resolution.



The second issue never was fixed, but I made a work-around that makes it hardly noticeable. I added panels to go around the peripherie of the desktop and increased their width so they just touched the screen where I could see them. This makes it possible to maximize a window and not have the edges cut off. I then set my TaskPanel on Autohide in the bottom right so as to not waste any screen real-estate. The red bars show where the panels are, and the green lines show where I chopped the screenshot up to make it smaller without scaling the whole image.

Mounting the SATA drives automatically never really got fixed either. I tried the NTFS-Config approach, but something went wrong and wouldn't let me mount my MediaStorage drive. I removed NTFS-Config and went the Terminal way:

$ sudo mkdir /mnt/MediaDrive ; sudo mkdir /mnt/StorageDrive ; sudo mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt/MediaDrive && sudo mount /dev/sdc1 /mnt/StorageDrive

Since this mounts them to the location "/mnt/MediaDrive" and "/mnt/StorageDrive" it's not very convenient to access them (MintMenu > Computer > Filesystem > mnt). That's why I then created a Launcher on the desktop which takes me straight to "/mnt" when double clicked. I also decided to put the ISO mount location (/mnt/disk) in the same place as well. Since this is something I'm going to have to do everytime I restart my system, I've created a script that does the mounting for me once I run it.

The last problem was a tricky one... Trying to get VLC to play audio so I could enjoy watching Star Trek and anime episodes. I tried 3 different audio drives that were in Beta stages from Soundblaster. I tried configuring my PulseAudio to what people said on the internet forums. I tried going the ALSA way and spend about 3 hours working on that. All of them ended in utter failure. I then decided to try the provided OSS audio configuration, and sure enough it worked. There went a good day and a half down the drain trying to "fix" my audio, when it was simply turned off the whole time.

However, I don't think it's running out of my Sound Blaster card, but rather my motherboard's onboard audio chip. Strangely enough though, my exterior speakers (Logitech Z4) are connected to the Sound Blaster's Audio-Out port, and it seems to be working fine.

Next up was trying to get some of my editing programs back. Since 3ds Max isn't supported in Linux, I decided to give Maya a try. After many headaches and several hours of debugging/configuring/yelling, I finally was able to open Maya and do some stuff in it. However, the button layouts didn't exactly work with my keyboard shortcuts that I set up for the OS, so there was a bit of a fumble there trying to work something out. After I got fed up with it all, I thought I'd give Blender a shot as well. I'm sure it's easy to use once you learn all the commands and where everything else, but I just could not wrap my head around how it works. I'll come back to these two programs at a later date.
After I had all that set up the way I was comfortable with, I wanted to get some Windows apps back, simply for familiarity and ease of use. To do that, I had to install Sun's VirtualBox, which was pretty straight forward, as they have a guide on their website. Next up was deciding which version of Windows to go with. Since I downloaded the Windows 7 Release Candidate when it was available for free, I chose that version. I was originally going to use my first install as a sort of test to make sure I could do what I wanted to with it, so I only gave the virtual machine 100gbs of hard-drive space to work with, as well as 5.8gbs of ram. Because I gave it more than 4gbs of ram, I had to use the x64 version of Windows 7 RC-1. No problems with the install, everything went through as it should have. However, I did not realize until after I tried installing some of my Steam games that Direct3D isn't exactly supported. I should have known this beforehand, since Linux uses OpenGL and not DirectX, and a virtual machine can't emulate something if there's no previous "knowledge" of it on the host machine. However, since people love playing their games so much, a method has been created to bridge the gap, called WineD3D. I still haven't finished getting it set up correctly as I'm typing this out, but I'm sure it'll come eventually.

/will edit more stuff in later.

-tk

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