Right, I really should talk about something other than my Linux setup for a change

I picked up quite a few comics last week (by my standards). Countdown #51 was interesting. It didn’t blow me away, but it was a solid enough first issue. Largely I’m on board with it at the moment for Kyle and Donna. Although I’m definitely interested to see how they develop this new multiverse. I think its going to cause confusion having new worlds that are not the worlds from the original multiverse, but it’ll be interesting to see how its managed none-the-less. Key things I think I’m looking forward to are the inevitable JSA/JSA teamup, and also Kyle meeting the Jade on Earth-2.

Star Wars Legacy #11 was excellent. I’m not a huge fan of the Vong, as I got bored with the New Jedi Order books shortly before the halfway point. But I’m definitely intrigued to find out what they’re doing under the ruins of the Jedi Academy on Ossus.

Marvel Zombies: Dead Days was a disappointment though. Although not entirely sure about Marvel Zombies, I must admit to enjoying the first mini series, and the Army of Darkness prequel that’s currently running. However there’s something about Marvel turning them into a big brand that I find unsettling. At the end of the day, there’s obviously a demand for these products and Marvel’s in the business of making money. I can’t really argue with that.

But while I like the tongue-in-cheek tone taken by the two miniseries, this prequel took a more serious approach, and I’m just not sure how I feel about the Marvel icons being turned into monsters like this (of course, its not actually the Marvel icons we know and love). I think I definitely prefer the titles that are just indulging in some over-the-top black humour. Something about this one-shot just felt a bit unneccessary. We’d been told these things had happened. We didn’t really need to be shown it in wonderous technicolour.

Well, tonight I decided to install the i386 version of Feisty Fawn over my AMD64 version, and despite people thinking I was nuts, I’ve got it all up and running

For those that are interested, there were various solutions to my problems.

Graphics

Instead of using the default version of the Nvidia driver, I used the Synaptec Package Manager to download the nvidia-glx-new package, and ran nvidia-xconfig from the terminal. Job done.

Audio

This proved a lot trickier. It came down to two elements.

There was no default configuration files setup for my soundcard, even though the card had been detected.

Running aplay -l confirmed that the card had been detected (in my case a VT82xx card). I then had to run asoundconf set-default-card VT82xx to ensure the config files were created.

Finally, the intel_hda driver that is being used to run the card needed the following added to /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base:

options snd-hda-intel model=3stack

Now that that’s all sorted, my Linux installation is up and running great.

A triumphant Linux evening for me last night.

After spending just less than a week trawling the web in general (and the excellent http://www.ubuntuforums.org) to try and sort my audio and visual problems in Feisty Fawn, I managed to get everything up and running. I now have a working AMD64 system, with audio playing happily, my Divx and other codecs setup, and Beryl making my window manager extra-spiffy.

My only thing now, is the package availability for the AMD64 version of Ubuntu. While there are loads of them available, some (like Adobe Flash for instance), aren’t. So my question now becomes, do I nuke it and install the i386 version (saving my alsa and xorg configs first, just incase), or stick to my guns, assuming that the AMD64 version’s support will continue to increase over the coming months.

I’m unsure really. On one hand, it’ll be nice to stick with a version that’s tailored to my CPU. On the other, I’ve installed Ubuntu largely to keep myself in practice with Linux, since my main job is Windows-based. So from that point of view, nuking and starting again, and seeing if I can get everything running more quickly now I know what I’m doing, is appealing.

Well, I’ve been trying all night to get sound working after the upgrade to 7.04. I’ve gone through all the posts on UbuntuForums.org I went through last time, and it still doesn’t work.

Now I’m basically trying to decide if I want to try a clean install of 7.04 or just reinstall 6.10. I’ll probably try the 7.04 install first though, since I’ll be wiping everything anyway.

Words can’t describe the relief I feel whenever I boot back into Windows and hear that startup sound though.

Nuts, got an email from my host today warning me of excessive processor usage. Turns out the video player plugin for wordpress I’m using had an exploit in the slightly older version I had.

Deleted the folder, and installed the new version, so hopefully all will be fine now. I’d hate to lose the ability to embed flv videos. Its kinda neat

So, this morning with some time on my hands, I thought I’d upgrade my Ubuntu installation up to the new release, 7.04. Boy, do I regret that decision.

At least X and the Internet are still working. X was killed off badly last time I got a kernel upgrade. However, this time I can’t coax any life out of the sound drivers, and my super-swish Compiz window manager is toast.

I’ve really got to learn to leave these things alone.

B7Media have got a trailer to the new Blakes 7 audio adventures up on their site:

http://www.b7media.com/Assets/Blakes7-TheTrailerMAY.mp3

I’m really looking forward to this. It was only fairly recently I was introduced to the original series on DVD, but I was quickly a total convert. Hopefully this version does it justice, and the cast is certainly promising.

My original hope for this week had been to get today (Friday) off, so I could stay up throughout Thursday night and watch the election results come in. I’ve never managed to do so yet, although I do find the coverage very interesting. Sadly my request for the day off was denied, so once again, I’m stuck waiting until the next election.

So, I did my bit, voted, and then went off to bed, expecting to wake up this morning and find out who was now in charge. Wow, was I in for a shock.

Admittedly, piloting any new voting system is always going to go wrong. The Government’s record with IT projects is legendary. But its gone spectacularly wrong. An unprecedented number of spoiled papers, counts abandoned during the night and general chaos. And all this with a vote that’s too close to call.

Whoever wins, it’ll surely be a hollow victory, with speculation as to whether or not the spoiled papers (currently they’re predicting they could reach 100,000 spoiled) would’ve changed the results.

There seems to be a lot of questions being raised as to whether holding the council elections on the same day as the parliament elections was a good idea. At this point, I’d think its fairly safe to say the answer is no. This is a sad day in Scottish politics.

The first official pics of the movie Iron Man armour have been released. I like it. Its very similar to Tony’s current suit in the comics, which I’ve slowly gotten used to.

However, I’d missed this previous shot that was released:

That rendition of his grey suit looks spot on to me. I must admit, with a director that obviously seems to care a great deal about the source material, a fantastic actor as the lead, and now these pictures, I’m really looking forward to this film.

Well, that’s another thing crossed off the list

We were pretty impressed with Bespoke Cakes, who we’ve ordered this from. Looking forward to tasting it come the wedding