OpenSUSE for 12 hours

Gentoo is nice, but I waste too much time with it. Especially with unstable overlays. After running it on my laptop for about a year, I’ve accumulated enough errors through old configuration, corrupt libraries, etc, that I decided to uninstall and install my old sweetheart (metaphorically speaking), OpenSUSE.

I must say, the installation didn’t suck. It recognized my IPW3945 driver out of the box so I didn’t have to worry about finding a network cable (This has been a HUGE issue in the past.) which meant the only thing I needed to worry about was the ATI driver (the X1400 is not supported by the open source driver) but fortunately there were plenty of instructions online. All I had to do was:

1. Install the kernel-headers and the latest kernel.
2. Restart (so the driver would build properly, it will fail on a fresh install otherwise).
3. Download the latest driver from the ATI website.
4. Run the program to build the RPM.
5. Install the RPM.
6. sax2 -r -m 0=fglrx
7. Restart the XServer.

See http://en.opensuse.org/ATI_Driver_HOWTO for more detailed information.

The XGL  starter doesn’t recognize the X1400 driver as XGL ready, so you need to run “gnome-xgl-switch –enable-xgl” manually (ignore the messages, they’re just there to confuse you) and restart the display manager.

Other than that and a severe lack of supported audio codecs (add http://packman.il-bremen.de/suse/10.2/ as a install service), things couldn’t have gone smoother. It is definitely the fastest and least painful install I’ve tried to do on this machine (including Fedora, Ubuntu, Gentoo, and SLED9 but those were a while ago so things may have gotten better). Bravo to Novell and the OpenSUSE developers.

TagLib#: Fire good, Ogg happy

I tagged this myself!

$ mono ReadFromUri.exe mac_pc_linux_2.OGG
mac_pc_linux_2.OGG
Title:      Second Novell "I'm a mac..." parody ad
Artists:    Novell
Performers:
Composers:
Album:
Comment:
Genres:
Year:       2007
Track:      2
TrackCount: 0
Disc:       0
DiscCount:  0
Lyrics:

Audio Properties
Bitrate:    56
SampleRate: 22050
Channels:   2

Length:     00:00:41.9000000

Embedded Pictures: 0

What I ended up doing is, on Save(), reading the OGG structure in an identical manner to the initial Read() (minus scanning to the end for duration information). Along the way, I store all the Pages I’ve collected, and by the end of the “Read”, I’ll have read all the way to the end of the taggable region. Then I dump the pages into stream specific Paginators which separate the pages into packets. After that, I take the stream specific XiphComments and use the appropriate codec to stick it in the packet collection. Then, all I need to do is Paginate (which could use some improvement), shuffle the pages back together, and insert the chunk where the old packets used to be. Wow, that could have been a lot clearer.

But anyway, the code is now in subversion: http://svn.myrealbox.com/viewcvs/trunk/taglib-sharp/ and if haven’t yet seen it, see “Blades of Glory”. It is not just Will Farrell’s funniest movie (which isn’t saying much) but it’s the funniest movie I’ve seen in a long time. I haven’t laughed out loud like this in a movie theatre since opening night of Episode III, and this one was actually supposed to be funny (but had significantly less gay innuendo)!

Starting a blog

Greetings,

My darling Edith just set up her very own blog so I am so inclined to set up my own. I’ve blogged before, but in no serious manner, so I’m going to try again on more focused topics, namely:

• Chemical Engineering at Arizona State University.
• Life with Theta Tau (although naturally most things about the fraternity I cannot post).
• ASU in general.
• Software development, namely TagLib#.
• Any other tangential ideas I come up with.

Bear with me as I get this blog on the road, for my skills as a writer have degraded through neglect.