Upgrades & Updates

Has it really been a month since my last post!?

Since then and now, Christmas and then the New Year has been and gone. All the turkey has gone and the Christmas chocolates have been eaten, and the last few Christmas nibbles and pickles are still being shared around!

My sister has moved out and is renting a place with her boyfriend. We’ve not noticed much difference, because before she was hardly home anyway!

 
Last week my trusty 17 inch monitor gave up the ghost, so I had to make do with an old CRT while my new 19 inch wide screen monitor was delivered. Interestingly, the screen is just a little shorter than the old one, but boy, does the width make a difference! 1440×900 pixels baby!

Also, after a forced upgrade to my monitor, I also decided to bite the bullet and upgrade my operating system. I went from Fedora 7 to Fedora 10 in a matter of two days!

After going down the doomed upgrade current installation path, I then tried the old delete-it-and-install-a-fresh route, and it worked!

But like all new things there were teething problems, I would loose network connectivity if I tried to assign a static IP address, but I had no problems getting onto the Internet if I used a dynamic IP address. I found a solution on the Fedora forum, which didn’t work, but I did find a solution that works.

I had another problem with Firefox, or more specifically with Fast Dial. When getting a website preview, it would cause the whole system to just hang.

My problem with Pidgin was solved by setting my public IP address, or I could of solved it by configuring a STUN server, strange how this didn’t affect the last version!

I still haven’t been about to mount CD’s, but I’ll work on that when I get more time, I just need to edit the fstab file, I don’t know why it wasn’t set automatically!

Other than that its been great, KDE 4 looks and works great, I’m still getting used to the changes, the main menu set up is a little weird, but it’s cool!

I have a spare partition on the hard drive which I was going to install Windows XP, but I might install another distribution I was looking at, Foresight Linux.

 
I have also updated my website, last year in December I upgraded my installation of WordPress to 2.7, and moved a few things around so that (eventually) the whole website (will) run on WordPress. The only two pages not currently running on WordPress is links and photos.

I have also updated the design, but there’s still a couple of areas that I need to sort out, like the home page, comments and the footer, but, overall I think the design is all finished, it’s not a complete redesign, but I think that it improves the overall look and feel of my site.

I didn’t decide to stay on holiday!

I should start this with a link to my holiday photos on flickr.
I know that its been over a month since i got back off holiday, and i haven’t posted anything on my blog!
But I’m going to now!

I was going to start this post with details of our holiday, but I’ll now leave that for another post!

What has caused the long delay on posting? I don’t know really, but I think its time!
Ive been busy at work, and when I’m not at work I’m with my girlfriend, and I just don’t seem to have the time left to do anything else!
But I have managed to build myself a second computer! I am going to be using as a file-cum-web-cum-print-server.

A couple of years ago I brought a Via EPIA Mini-ITX motherboard from www.mini-itx.com which I was intending to put inside my old radio alarm clock.
I did put it inside the radio alarm clock, but I never got around to actually installing an operating system onto it, and ever using it, so its been sat on my desk gathering dust.

I’ve been wanting to change my main computer for something a little faster, and I thought now would be a good time to do something with the little computer!
So I brought a case, installed Fedora 7 onto it, and now I’m just trying to get file sharing going between it and an aging Intel Celeron (333MHz) via wireless, and two other relatively old computers (both AMD’s, a K6 500MHz and an Athlon 850MHz)

I’ve just brought 1Gb of memory for it, as when I initially got i, I only brought 256Mb for it!

I’ve already got the web server running, and webmin, now I just need to install the printer, and its practically done!

I’m typing this post up using the new computer!

I’ll post more details soon!
Until next time!
Bye!

Edit: I’ve fixed the type of my Mini-ITX motherboard to a VIA EPIA series motherboard, and I have updated the link to point to the correct url (http://www.via.com.tw/en/products/mainboards/motherboards.jsp?motherboard_id=21)