The Spam Thread!

[huckleberrypie]

Or better yet buy a PC that only comes bundled with a minimal OS or is shipped blank.

[cpd2009]

Or better yet buy a PC that only comes bundled with a minimal OS or is shipped blank.

That reminds me... I was doing a paid internship at my school during Summer 2004, and the school ordered a whole bunch of HP Compaq desktop computers. They were ordered with no OS on the drive as the school used their own network version of XP Pro. Every PC came with a MandrakeLinux 2-CD set. Most were discarded, while I was able to take one set home with me and discover Linux for the first time.

I think if one custom builds a home PC from a manufacturer, they can get no OS pre-installed so they can install their own clean version of Windows or Linux. I'm not sure if every company does that though.

[RAMChYLD]

Hungry.

[cpd2009]

Hungry.

That reminds me... here in the States, it's now Lent, meaning 2 for $3.50 Filet O' Fish from McDonalds! I happen to like fish myself.

[cpd2009]

Linux has been serving me well, sans lack of a true Adobe Premiere replacement. One thing about Linux is that there is bound to be a distro/spin that works out better than others. You might have to go through a few distros before finding one that truly works.

I'm thinking of switching from PCLinuxOS to Mageia. I have been trying PCLOS for nearly a month now, and while it works great, the 64bit version is a bit lacking when it comes to games. It also feels a bit rough around the edges at times, especially with the custom utilities and whatnot.

With the portable hard drive, I should be able to be back up to speed in no time.

[RAMChYLD]

I need to keep my anger in check...

[RAMChYLD]

Ok, so the GTX260-SP216es in Dongwa broke down again. Since these two cards are now over 6 years old, repairing them is out of the question. So I did a little bit of reshuffling- Dongwa now has the repaired GTS450s that belonged to Edison before. Sally has been moved back to her old GTS250s. Edison does lose a little bit of power- the GTS450s only have 192 cores as opposed to the GTX260-SP216's 216 cores. He loses about 48 GPU cores overall. But at least now his GPU runs much cooler.

Moral: don't play Borderlands 2 with everything cranked up to maximum on this card. Especially when the air conditioning hasn't reached the desired temperature yet.

[cpd2009]

I'll try to keep this short. Greta has been on quite a Linux adventure lately.

Mageia didn't work out because I couldn't get Bumblebee to work. I then tried to use an Ubuntu 14.04 spin with Trinity Desktop, but screen brightness wouldn't change, along with non-working Bumblebee. Also tried Kubuntu 15.04 Alpha 2, and learned why I shouldn't use beta releses of operating sytems. (beautiful KDE 5, but unusable after system updates)

I'm now trying stable Kubuntu 14.10. Unsure if Bumblebee will work on here, but worth a shot.

In the end though, it appears Bumblebee is just too picky with certain Linux spins. PCLinuxOS is the only distro that Bumblebee worked 100%, but I would rather use a far more popular and up-to-date distro like Kubuntu or Mint. If I can't get Bumblebee working with Kubuntu 14.10, I'm thinking just disabling Greta's Nvidia GPU in the BIOS. I would be stuck with integrated Intel graphics, but for games like Briquolo or Extreme Tux Racer, it works well.

If only Nvidia would get on the ball with full support for Optimus in Linux...

EDIT: Everything works now. Kubuntu 14.10 and Greta get along just fine.

[cpd2009]

The Trinity Desktop is in a sad state, I might add. It's like the KDE version of MATE, so to speak... MATE is a fork of Gnome 2, and Trinity is a fork of KDE 3.5.

Trinity flies on Greta and Audrey and makes Jasper usable. But it appears the project is in a sad development state. Not too many developers and the LiveCDs are extremely unpolished and buggy. Installing in a supported environment also leads to a slightly buggy desktop.

Maybe in the future, Trinity will get more support. Hopefully.

[RAMChYLD]

KDE is a memory hog. Consider using LXDE for Jasper.