Category Archives: software

Linux on a stick

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This may not be as interesting as multidimensional spirituality, but it may be useful to some people for a few years. Of course, the world of computing changes so fast that this will have no lasting value. But then again few things have in this world.

Recently, the first reasonably fast USB memory sticks (memory keys) arrived. Before, it had been a handy but slow medium. And the capacity was not much to write home about either. Recently, we have got much bigger memory keys, and then we got a breakthrough in speed as well. The 16 GB Transcend JetFlash 600 dual-channel memory stick is noticeably faster, especially noticeable in writing speed, which is traditionally a bottleneck with flash storage. Actually, it is still a bottleneck, but it is a wider bottleneck than before. It is not all that useful to have a large memory that you have to leave overnight to finish writing.

With its speed and capacity, this was ideal for my experiment: To install Linux on a memory stick. I had already made a small (2GB is small these days!) boot key with Ubuntu 9.10, the most recent complete version. There is a new version in beta, it should be official any day now, but it was in beta while I tested this. Since it is still planned for release in April, it is called Ubuntu 10.04 (the format is year.month). I have tried both of these.

I started with 9.10. I already had this installed on one computer, and it includes a tool that lets you make bootable memory sticks. These work like boot CDs, except they don’t need a CD-ROM. This is handy with the new ultra-small computers, netbooks. (It won’t help with iPad, though, since it does not even have USB.)

So I first made a boot disk / installer on the small, slow key. Then I used that to install Ubuntu Linux, but to the Transcend instead of to the main hard disk. Both of the USB flash drives were on an Acer Aspire One, which is one of the earliest and weakest netbooks around. It does not even have a hard disk, only a flash disk, and a rather small one at that. Not having a hard disk or a CD-ROM saves a lot of battery power and weight, since there are no engines to spin, or moving parts at all. And since it already uses a flash disk, flash USB should not make that much of a difference.

It did not, at first. When I chose at startup to boot from the Transcend, it took a little longer to boot, but it was still tolerable. And once it was up and running, I could have a couple programs open simultaneously, like listening to music while surfing the web. The test seemed to be a success.

Seemed to. Having tested it with Ubuntu 9.10, I upgraded to Ubuntu 10.04. It was in alpha 2 at the time, a very early stage, even though the release was only weeks away. They sure have confidence. Of course, as with any large piece of software, it is sure to get a flurry of patches when a large number of people start using it for real purposes. With computer games, we call this phase “paid beta”, but Ubuntu (like most other Linux distributions) is actually free, despite the huge work that goes into it. Even so, if you are vaguely nervous around computers, you should wait 3-6 months after a new release before upgrading. With me it is the other way around, of course: I upgrade before it is even in beta.

It was fairly stable, although the new features related to social media crashed every day. This may have been because I ran it from a USB memory key on a machine that was weak even when it was first released to the market, but which I bought when it was already long in the tooth, and that again was a year or two ago. Ubuntu makes no pretense at being super fast – that’s its little brother Xubuntu. So it seems one of the programs was terminated when it did not load within a certain time, which had been decided by the programmers with no regard for extreme cases like my setup. This was later fixed, but there were still a couple related programs that crashed. Of course, the program was still not finished at the time. It is still not released as I write this, the final date is April 29.

Whatever the case, apart from having to start the gwibber (social media client) manually, it worked OK. Except that it grew slower and slower with each passing day. Then again each passing day saw me download perhaps a hundred or so updates to various and sundry programs and functions. I assume this was what slowed it down somehow, but I can think of no logical mechanism by which that would happen. Unlike a hard disk, fragmentation has no effect on flash drives. They don’t have a moving head – like the needle of an old gramophone – moving from place to place on the platter, like hard disks do. Solid state drives may write more slowly, but their read speed is unmatched. It probably reads as fast as the USB port and the processor can take it. Or should have.

I still don’t know. I know that when I took the stick to the HP Mini 2 (with 2GB RAM instead of 0.5 GB) it ran fast enough again. Unfortunately, after I installed that day’s updates, something went horribly wrong. It worked fine afterwards, but the next time I tried to start, it did not run on either the Acer or the HP. It did not even get so far that I could diagnose it and learn what was wrong. So I wiped it clear, installing 9.10 from start again.

I have upgraded it again, which took several hours as almost every part of the operating system was modified, or so it seemed. After this it runs fine again. I mean, it runs really well for a machine that is just barely more than a toy. Right now I have Opera running with 3 tabs, one of which plays streaming music. I also have a Terminal window open (same as a dos prompt in Windows) and the Ubuntu Software center where you can download innumerable programs for free. I am also in editing mode in an OpenOffice Writer document (roughly equivalent to Microsoft Word) and have open a movie player that has finished playing an Xvid movie that is stored on an external hard disk on my old Xubuntu machine. So that machine streams it over the local network to the USB stick on the netbook, which plays it. I played the movie with all these same programs open, except I did of course not stream music in Opera while playing the movie. There were a few cases of stuttering now and then through the movie when played in fullscreen mode, but not enough to make it unwatchable by any means.

The one thing I can’t do with it is install new programs in the background while working. But this is most likely due to the weak processor. In conclusion, it works quite well – as long as it does not suddenly crash forever, like it did last time. You should not overload it with a large number of open programs on a machine with little memory though. Writing to flash memory is much slower than reading, and if the system needs to swap memory to the stick constantly it will slow down, even with a Transcend JetFlash.

Technobabble day!

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To the left, the repaired computer. To the right, the one I have used since December 2.  In the foreground, the broken power supply unit.

Today, dear reader, I want to babble about computers and software.  It will get geeky. You are not obliged to read if it makes your eyes go round and round.  The good news is that my best computer is back up and running and I can talk to it. The rest is optional.

So let us start with the high point of the day.  On December 2 this winter, my best computer, Terra the Quad-Core, crashed overnight. I decided then and there to not try to send it for repairs.  Not only does it hold private stuff, but there is also the point that it is really heavy.  I literally almost killed myself getting it home, except an old friend suddenly showed up like an angel and drove me and it most of the way.   The post office at Holum is at least three times as far away from home.  Besides, I am not sure if it was still under warranty after 2 years and 2 weeks. If not, it could easily become expensive.  Even if it was, the cost of freight would go a long way towards just buying a new power supply and replace it myself.

But I did not actually do that until just recently.  I was busy with moving, but mostly I had opened it and looked at the many wires crisscrossing and  connecting here and there.  Could I recreate that without an actual job training in computer repair?  I was not at all sure.

But then one day I got a mail from Multicom, the company that sold it to me. Although this is a machine with Windows (one of the last desktops with Windows XP, intentionally since Vista was much slower and had other problems while new) … As I said, although this was a Windows machine, my loyalty to Multicom is partly because they habitually sell computers without operating system, so you can install Linux on them for free.  This is rare here in Norway, which is a very Windows-dominated country.  People here have lots of money, so free software is not as popular as elsewhere.  I want to support companies that break with the Microsoft-Apple duopoly.  So I subscribe to their customer mail happily.  This time they had a 650 W power supply on sale.

“Even if it should turn out not to be the power supply” I said to myself, “I still have the Oblivion computer lacking nothing but a strong power supply to come alive with one of my 3 precious MS Office licenses and one of my 5 precious iTunes licenses, plus some data I had added since the last backup. So it would not be all in vain.”

It was the power supply.  I fetched it yesterday at the Joker convenience store, which happens to also be the post office, although they hide it well.  They even don’t have a sign with their name (Holum Nærkjøp) which the post office uses when sending the collect slip.  I actually spent some time looking for that other nonexistent shop.  But eventually I asked them and got my package.  In addition to the power supply, I had bought a fast 16 GB Transcend JetFlash 600 memory stick. This dual-channel stick is quite a bit faster than the industry standard, yet works plug & play in any USB 2.0 connector. Whee!

Actually, I took that first.  I had used a cheap, slower 2 GB USB memory key and converted it to a startup unit for Ubuntu Linux.  When I boot from that, it acts like the install CD, except it also has some extra storage to save settings and a few extra programs like the Opera web browser. Unfortunately, it does not have enough memory to install language files, because once I did, it decided on its own to unpack OpenOffice in pretty much every western language and perhaps some more.  I did this several times over the past week, each time crashing the key to the point where it had to be formatted anew.

This time I used the small key to install Linux on the big, fast key.  It worked quite fine, although of course it took some time.  I can now use this install of Linux on any computer that lets me boot off a USB key.  The one I had in mind however was the cheap little Acer Aspire One that I bought last year (at which point I broke a tooth).  This little thing comes with its own excessively user friendly version of Linux, but it is quite restricted compared to Ubuntu. Besides, I am used to Ubuntu. There has been rapid progress in Solid State Disks since then, but the Aspire One I got has actually noticeably less disk space than the USB key!

After installing and checking out, and downloading a couple favorite programs, I decided to upgrade the Transcend key to Ubuntu 10.04 (nickname “Lucid Lynx”) which is supposed to come out this April.  I was mildly surprised to see that it was still in Alpha 2, less than two months before release.  10.04 is a Long Term Support version, and these tend to have less focus on innovation and more on stability. I wonder how stable they can get it if they aren’t even ready for beta by now.  We’ll see, they usually make it somehow.

The upgrade was actually much slower than the initial install.  It told me it would take 8-9 hours.  I eventually left it on overnight, but it stopped with a question some 7 hours into the process, so it was still not finished this morning.  It did finish, however.

I was not pleased. They had for some reason decided to change the buttons at the top right of each window, the ones you use to minimize, maximize or close the window. These were moved to the top LEFT corner, and minimize and maximize were swapped around, while close was still the rightmost of the three, not the cornermost. They also had made them into small circles instead of squares, although this can be changed simply by switching to one of the other built-in themes, or download a new.  I spent probably a quarter of an hour before I found that I had to edit it with the gconf-editor. To the best of my knowledge that is not in the start menus, so I typed its name in a terminal window. Actually I first ran it as sudo, which meant the settings only applied to programs opened as superuser, not very useful.  Anyway I eventually got it right, opening ->apps ->metacity ->general ->button_layout and changing the line there to swap around minimize and maximize and move the colon to the front.  The colon symbolizes the divide between the left and right top corners, so any buttons placed before the colon appear on the left, anything after the colon appears to the right. Yes, if you are insane you can have buttons on both sides, but even Mac does not have that. I think.

That was that really, but seriously? You don’t kill holy cows, you milk them.  This placement has been industry standard for 30 years or so.  I am pretty sure it was in the top right corner on GEM, an operating system for home gaming machines back when the z80 processor was the way of the future and PacMan was state of the art video gaming.  I would not mind if they asked during setup where I wanted my buttons to be, or if it was an easy-to-find setting in the menus.  I might even have ignored it if it only showed up on new installations and did not mess with existing machines that were just being upgraded.  But this level of presumption is what you would expect from Microsoft or Apple, except they probably don’t have a gconf-editor.  But seriously, how many of you even knew this editor existed before today?

Harmony is restored though.  I can’t say I notice much other change. The OS supposedly starts faster now, but how often do you start your computer from zero when you have a stable operating system that does not reboot itself because you installed a new program or worse, because it installed a new program without asking you first?

Now, getting an entire computer back from the dead is something you really notice.

It was a bit unnerving to disconnect the old wires and cables and trying to remember which went where and finding them on the new power supply.  But amazingly it worked at the first try. And I only got two screws left over. ^_^ I also emptied the machine of a lot of dust…

I am quite joyful to have my best machine back. Not only does it have 4 processor cores instead of Trine’s 3, but each core is also faster. And it has Windows XP instead of the slower Vista.  (I could buy Windows 7 for the Vista machine, but I refuse to pay an extra Microsoft tax to reward them for making a botched operating system in the first place.)  It also happens to have the third and last MS Office license, not that I used it much, and the fourth iTunes. More importantly, it has DRAGON NATURALLYSPEAKING.

You have not forgotten Dragon NaturallySpeaking, have you? The speech recognition program that actually delivers. You may remember Microsoft being ridiculed when they tried to demonstrate the speech recognition in Vista and the computer wrote garbage all over the screen in front of everyone. I hear the speech recognition in Windows 7 is better, but at the moment Nuance has the only reliable speech recognition for personal computers. Yes it costs extra, but it actually works. It is on average as reliable as speaking to a college educated human. I say “on average” because they can both make mistakes, only the mistakes are different when the computer makes them. The computer is very good at listening, but very bad at understanding. It does not make typos unless you manually override it, but it may use words that sound similar and yet make no sense. Or, more commonly, make a different kind of sense.

The previous paragraph was dictated with Dragon NaturallySpeaking and me correcting a few hours. This paragraph is dictated with Dragon NaturallySpeaking but without error correction at all. As you can see, it is possible to dictate several sentences before it goes astray. Of course, I did not actually correct hours as in 60 minutes, but adults as I missed takes. Frequently when you press the “spell that” button, the current text we come up as an alternative. The problem is a spot in the mistakes in the 1st Pl.

Anyway, this is just what the doctor ordered. I mean that literally. When I visited my doctor about not being able to speak more than a few hundred words a day, he recommended that I try saying something every day. Perhaps, he reasoned, I may be able to train my voice back up without surgery, if (as was his theory) my vocal cords have simply fallen into disuse over the years. (I seriously doubt any one in my birth family will agree with his theory, or anyone who went to school with me. Then again, they do not know the Scriptures nor God’s power…)

OK, I better stop dictating.  I have speaking to do tomorrow at work, Light allowing.   And this should be enough technobabble for anyone I can think of that may read my journal. And then some.

Doctor visit and Google

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Being alone is scary for neurotypical humans.  Obviously their vocal cords never fall into disuse with that attitude.  Not so us porcupines.

Yes, doctor visit and Google are connected, even if just a little.  It all started like this:

For years, I have not talked much. Well, hardly at all outside work, and not much at work. After all, I work with computers. I also help people with their computer problems, but for years I mostly did so for the dozens of people in the same house.  Looking back, I did not know how good a time I had!  Not that it is all that bad now.  But back then, there was little reason to say more than a few words when someone had problems. I would go to their office and see for myself.  If they talked to me, they could see that I was listening, so there was no need for me to talk except for essential questions and the occasional reassurance.

The years passed, and my voice fell into disuse. There may be other reasons why my throat now gets sore after five minutes, but it is hard to know.  After all, it is not easy to track the development of a voice problem if you don’t speak!  I was happy with it that way. “Where there are many words, there is no lack of sin” as the Bible says, and indeed the constant talking of people seem to me a hallmark of their superficiality. (I was a massive talker myself when I was a child, and at least a ways into my teens. Possibly longer.)

Lately my work has changed so that user support is now mostly on the phone. This is very nearly the worst kind of talking for me, as I have to speak fairly loudly and clearly.  (Talking in a noisy place is even worse though.) I have been allowed to do mostly non-talking work after I explained the situation to my boss.  But the work at which I am competent is slowly being phased out, and despite numerous requests I have not been formally taught anything new.  For obvious reasons, I cannot just ask my innumerable contacts inside [Himitsu Corp.] since I don’t have any, not speaking to people.

So in the end, after talking (painfully) with an old friend about the matter, I called the rural clinic where my “fixed physician” works (that is a literal translation of the Norwegian word “fastlege”, although the concept itself is hard to believe for the American reader.  Basically you are assigned a doctor from those who have a deal with the State, but you can apply for another if you feel the need to.)  I got an appointment for today at 11AM.

This morning I got a mail from Google, since I had added a mail alert to my appointment.  (I am horrible with appointments, especially doctor and dentist.) This ability to add mail and on-screen alerts is nifty enough, but what impressed me was the extra service:  The name of the rural clinic, which I had added in the location field even though I knew where it was, was now blue and underlined. Yes, it was a link to a local map.  It is not like I needed that, but I was impressed that Google had located the address on its own, without me needing to ask.  Since the name was unique (probably in the world, given that it contains a special Scandinavian letter) it was probably easy for Google to find, but it was still nice of them to do it without being asked.

I, for one, welcome our new robotic underlings.

The doctor visit went well enough.  The doctor jumped to the same conclusion that I had at first, that the symptom was probably caused by inactivity.  It is not something a doctor comes into contact with every year, I bet, since all humans except monks are chatting like their lives depend on it. Which it well may:  Dolphins in isolation die in a matter of hours or a few days at most, while humans take longer but usually go more or less mad after a fairly short time in solitary confinement. It is in fact classified as cruel and unusual, if I remember correctly.  I am no big fan of confinement myself, but given food I would probably be happy to spend a few weeks alone in my house. So I am not exactly normal. (Thank the Light…)

Speaking of which, at some point the doctor suddenly asked if I felt fear when talking on the phone (or “angst”, which in Europe means something more like panic than the trite teenager navelgazing the word refers to in America). I was a bit taken aback by this, although I do live in the nerve pill belt of Norway.  No, I certainly am not afraid of my fellow humans, I assured him.  I don’t like to talk to them, or I would have done so on my free time as well, but I don’t fear them.  (Now, traveling by car, that I fear. You are locked in a small metal box hurtling away at tremendous speed, surrounded by other such boxes also at extreme speed, controlled by humans of on average not very high IQ, not very stable emotions, but grossly inflated self-confidence.  What is not to fear?  That I am even still alive is a miracle of Biblical proportions, is how I see it. Telephones though?  No.  Not until they start trashing about at lethal speed.)

There is no pill for the affliction, as expected.  (I have peeked around online after all.) Again, this makes sense if it really comes from prolonged silence, since this is so rare. The doctor promised to refer me to a specialist, who will send me a letter with the appointment in good time.  It will take at least a few weeks, thought the doctor. Having lived with this for years, I am OK with that.  There may be laryngoscopy though, if worse comes to worse. This may not necessarily prove fatal, but I notice that in lawyer-happy countries you have to sign a form that says it is your own fault if you die from it. We don’t have that here in Norway, as you can’t sue doctors anyway. They are partially employed by the  State and even if they accidentally kill someone, they only get a stern “Uff da!”.  If they just keep killing and killing people, they may eventually be asked to stop practicing, but this is exceedingly rare.  Of course, it is exceedingly rare that people die from this stuff anyway, but I just want to point out that Norway is not America.  Mostly we are thankful for that, of course.

But until further notice, if I don’t keel over from unrelated reasons, I should make sure to talk some every day, and keep water handy for drinking between bouts of talking.  This sound advice set me back a few dollars, the State probably pays another goodly sum for the doctor’s time.  I think the fact that we have to pay anything at all is mostly to discourage people from showing up with random insignificant stuff.  Of course, we do that anyway, we just don’t know it is insignificant until at some point during the visit.

Now, back to Google.

There is something new out, called Google Buzz.  It is a kind of stab at the social media scene, FaceBook and MySpace and the gang.  Twitter too, I guess, but Buzz actually has some integration with Twitter.  Basically it is a microblogging software, meant to write short quick messages.  It shows up next to the inbox in Gmail, and if you have Gmail you becomes a member automatically.  It will add contacts that you have a lot of conversation with, or so it says.  It did not add anyone for me, but this may be because the one person who mails me does not use Gmail…

In addition to posting things on your Buzz homepage (like the “wall” in a certain competitor) it also harvests Twitter, as already mentioned.  Unfortunately it is one way only, probably because Twitter has a much smaller maximum post length. But even short posts are not relayed.  Another source is Google chat status messages. (Like, “Out for lunch”, “Meeting with boss”, “Busy making love” – not necessarily in that sequence and not necessarily right after each other.) Then it harvests pictures from Picasa Web and Flickr, videos from YouTube and blog posts from Blogger / Blogspot.  So much for microblogging.  It is clearly pretty open for Google-owned stuff, while few outsiders get in. No LiveJournal, no WordPress, and noticeably no FaceBook in either direction. Rivalry from first buzz!

So I have had this a couple days now, since it came out.  I turned off the option to show who was following me and who I was following. I don’t have a problem with telling who I read, or would read if they posted anything, but it is not my right to publish choices that other people have made.  They may have reasons to not want to appear online more than strictly necessary, for all I know.  Since you either have to publish both or none, none it is.

So I worked a bit on my Google profile (which is mostly hidden for those of you who are not my contacts) and there it was again.  I had typed in my address, and Google showed it in the map. OK, so it is two houses wrong, but it is really close.  Again, I did nothing to instigate this.  It just integrated Google Maps on its own.

This is boding well, I think.  Computers should not just answer our questions, they should also have the answers to the questions we didn’t know we could ask.

This is not the only invention that makes life easier for computer users. For instance Windows Vista introduced Superfetch, which keeps track of what programs you use and load them while you don’t use the machine.  This would have been an awesome idea if people used computers with lots of memory at the time Vista was released, but most only do that now that Microsoft has switched to the more memory-frugal Windows 7. Still, it was a good idea, in principle, especially if you don’t have users like me who gets deeply suspicious when the computer starts running the hard disk in my absence.  Is it perhaps a virus, is what I think then.  But eventually I drew the conclusion that it was Vista that was the virus.  Still, it works well enough now that I have a 64 bits processor and 4GB RAM.

In the future, if any, I hope to see computer programs that take advantage of extra information they have, to make life easier for the users.  I also hope to be able to talk, but even more I hope not to need to.

Intel Atom, Windows 7, Ubuntu Linux, patience.

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I am not sure when, where and how, but I somehow got the impression that the Intel Atom processor was a kind of cheap, energy-saving and slow processor.  Well, I was wrong about the “slow” part, although I suppose that depends on what you compare it with.  But the HP Mini 2 that I bought (“baby HP” as I think of it because of the tiny size) has an Intel Atom processor, and it is ridiculously fast both in Windows 7 and Ubuntu Linux.  I know this because I installed Ubuntu on it today. That was more of an adventure than I had expected.

I did not want to wipe out the fascinating new operating system from Microsoft, but on the other hand I don’t particularly want to have it running when I am online.  I mean, I already paid for it, and that is OK, I was curious after all.  But I have no intention to keep shelling out money for antivirus and related software to keep my computer from getting turned into a spamming zombie, not to mention the identity theft.  So I quickly looked to install Linux on it for use online.  (I tend to install ClamWin, a free antivirus from the highly reliable Sourceforge, on my Windows computers.  But it is the kind of tool that you use to actively scan your machine, or individual files, for viruses. It does not patrol the computer’s memory while you are online to stop any worms trying to crawl in.  (As a result, it does not slow down the machine either, but still, I prefer not having to worry about “badware” at all.)

Usually installing Ubuntu is a snap. I have a CD lying around with a fairly recent version of the OS, and it will then bring itself up to date over the Internet once it is up and running.  However, the HP Mini 2 does not have a CD drive.  I suppose I could take it home and try with an external CD & DVD reader I have here, but even then it is uncertain whether it would work since you cannot boot from a device that is initialized long after boot time.

If I had thought of this beforehand, I could have prepared a bootable USB memory stick to do the same thing.  There is in fact a menu choice in Ubuntu for making such a tool (you still have to buy the memory key of course).   But I wasn’t at home and not patient enough to wait till next day. So I used Wubi Installer, a program that downloads Ubuntu (or any of its siblings in the *buntu family) and installs it under Windows.  The program uses Windows’ file system to reserve a chunk of the hard disk, then sets up Ubuntu within that.  Despite Wubi itself being run from Windows, and the whole Ubuntu package being deletable from Windows, it does use its own file system internally and when you reboot the machine you will get the choice between the two operating systems. So it is only during the install that you actually need Windows.

Wubi went through the routine easily enough, and asked me to reboot. I did.  A black screen came up when the machine started, with an underscore in the upper left corner.  This is widely considered a bad thing.  I waited for a while, but there was no sign of activity, so I forced the machine to shut down with the on/off switch.  It booted again, with the same paltry underscore and nothing underneath.

This is where my tiny shred of patience saved the day.  Instead of getting overly excited in a bad way (and risking physical damage to the computer, as might have happened if I had been much, much younger) I decided to unplug the mobile phone that was charging over the USB bus.  Started again with no USB connections whatsoever – and the computer continued the install of Ubuntu as if nothing had happened.

I must admit I had first thought the problem came from installing the wrong version of Ubuntu. I had left that to the installer to decide, and it installed the AMD 64-bits version. Surely, I thought, Intel is not AMD and Atom is not 64-bits.  I still think I was right on the first count, although the machine did not seem to care.  I was wrong on the second though.  This particular version of the Atom is in fact 64-bits, despite its small footprint, low price and low power consumption. What is the world coming to?

After complete installation, the computer rebooted again.  Unfortunately, it did not boot up in graphical mode (with X windows), but in pure text mode, asking for user name and password in white letters on a black screen. And then rejecting it.  I had in the meantime connected the Western Digital Passport USB-powered external hard disk.  Rebooting without it worked.

As usual, Linux is even faster than Windows, even with a new install.  Both of them are really, really fast though. Compared to my old HP laptops this one is ridiculously much faster, even though it only has 1 GB of RAM, twice as much as the last of the old ones.  This processor is really something.  Small, cool, low-power, and fast. In the good old days you could not have it all, but now you can.  And it will still be some time, it seems, till I need Ubuntu for the speed. Even Windows 7 is delightfully fast for non-gaming use.

So patience paid off eventually, what little I had of it.  But I think I will recommend starting with more patience and an USB stick.

And now, I severely need sleep. I am tired and cold and queasy and achy and came home at 10PM after cleaning in the old house.  But I got Ubuntu loaded on yet another machine and got a journal entry written, “so all in all it was a good day”.

Windows has some catching up to do

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This old laptop is actually running a lot more programs at the same time than it looks like. It has four workspaces (virtual screens), three of which are active with a number of programs each. Then again, it is running Ubuntu Linux, not Microsoft Windows. Oh, and there’s an USB memory key and a 2 TB external harddisk tucked away behind it…

I am impressed by Windows 7, but already Ubuntu Linux is ahead in some ways, and it can be hard for Microsoft to catch up. On the other hand, there are ways in which Windows is better. If I were to say it in few words, Ubuntu is better for grandmothers and teenagers, Windows for those inbetween.

Ubuntu Linux is the most popular of several user-friendly variants of the free operating system. It is free not only as in free speech but also in the sense that you don’t pay for it. Just download it off the net or copy it from a friend or get it in the mail. (Not sure if you have to pay postage.) And it really is Grandma-friendly, if a computer can ever be that.

The program installs itself after some pretty simple questions, like what language you prefer and what timezone you will use it in. If there already is Windows or MacOS on the computer, you can choose whether to keep these, and whether you want to decide how much space to give each of them or if you will let the installer decide.

The computer has a couple start menus in the upper left corner (although you can drag the task bar elsewhere – I have mine at the bottom like I did in Windows). There are a number of useful programs installed already, like web browser and media player and text processor and spreadsheet. (Seriously, who uses spreadsheets unless their boss tells them to?) There are even small games. But the really nuclear feature that blows Windows out of the ring is the Add Programs feature. You want some more? Just open the Ubuntu Software Center, pick categories (or search if you have an idea of what you want, like “chess” or “Bible” or whatever grandmothers do these days). Once you find something interesting, you can read a blurb about it, and if you want it, just click. The software installs itself and will show up in the start menu in the correct category.

It does not stop there. Add hardware? By all means.  Plug in a printer, a camera, an MP3 player – pretty much anything that uses USB or Firewire and some things that don’t. It is very rare that you have to use the CD that comes in the box, the one marked “Windows”. Especially if you are online, but often if you are not, Ubuntu will just tell you what you have installed and that’s that. No whining that Oh Noes This Was Not Certified For Our Newest Brand Of Windows. Rather it just works. There are a few things that truly do need Windows to work, because they were made that way, but these are generally way outside the Grandma range. And for each passing month people are adding new stuff to the system.

That’s another part. Even more than Windows, Linux has a heap of downloads. It is rarely a day that there is not a small colored arrow in the task bar, hinting that new updates are ready. In case Grandma does not take the hint, a text box may appear the first time. You have to give your passwords to install those though, so if we’re talking about a great-grandmother she may be a bit nervous about doing that. You should visit occasionally. That said, unlike Windows you will not be forced to restart the system. (You should do this twice a year or so, when there is a major update to a new and better version. But there is no need to do it for daily updates.)

Another thing, if you don’t download the updates, you won’t get virus and worms and Trojans and keyloggers and spybots and adbots. If one particular brand of Linux becomes extremely popular, perhaps someone will write this kind of malware for it, but currently there is none, and the system is built up in such a way that the user does not have root access anyway, so it is limited what a virus can do. Theory aside, the fact as of today is that you just don’t get virus and stuff like that if you use Linux. Even if you don’t update. And on top of that, Canonical (the people who made Ubuntu) don’t take remote control of your computer and restart it in the middle of the night like Microsoft sometimes does if you leave it on.  To be a bit harsh, I say that it is sometimes hard to see the difference between virus and Windows, since they both suddenly start doing strange things on your computer without you touching it. Not so with Ubuntu Linux. It does its job and gets out of the way.

Unlike Windows, Ubuntu does not get slower as the months pass. Well, it may get slower over the years as you upgrade to new versions with even more features. But if you just run the same version, it won’t get slower as the hard disk fills up. This is because it uses another file system. (You can choose to format disks with FAT or NTFS, but Grandma sure won’t do that.) There is no need to defragment the hard disk, and you also don’t need to clean the Registry because it does not work that way. Even if Ubuntu had not been faster from the start (which it is), it would have been much faster after a year or two when Windows starts to slow down noticeably.

***

Now for the teenagers. Well, it is not literally restricted to teenagers. Anyone who has a lot of time on their hands and no pressing obligation, which means both teenagers and single college students… Anyway, if you have the time to go “under the hood” and tune up the operating system of your computer, Linux is the way to go. You can basically make your own operating system, bit by bit. Of course, this means typing a lot, most of it lines starting with “sudo”. But there you have it. Real computer geeks would not be satisfied with clicking a mouse anyway.

Let’s say, for instance, that you have an old laptop with a slow hard disk and only 256 MB memory, but it just happens to have a free USB 2.0 port. (I guess it must have been fairly early with USB 2, or perhaps it just was late with the low memory. Anyway, you are in luck.) So you rummage in your computer gizmo grab bag, or even go out and buy a fast USB memory key. The faster the better: Speed is more important than capacity here.

Once you have found a small memory stick, you plug it in and open it from the desktop to see what name it is given in the /media/ folder. You open a terminal window and go to that folder. Then you create a file there, making sure it is not larger than the actual capacity of the USB drive. For instance, sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=swapfile1 bs=1024 count=4194304 will create a 4 GB file (1024 * 4096) with blocks of 1KB initialized as zero. Obviously if your drive is only 4GB, you will want to pick a lower number so you don’t get an error message instead of a swap file. Make sure you really are in the folder of the USB drive or you will create it on the slower hard disk – if there is room there.

Once the computer has chewed its way through creating this file, you make it into a swapfile with the command sudo mkswap swapfile1 (you should get some message to confirm that this has happened.) Then finally you can start using it with the command sudo swapon -p 3 swapfile1 where -p is the code for “priority” and you can use basically any positive number afterwards. If you have more than one swapfile, the one with the highest -p will go first, then when it is full the next will get a go. You may want to run swapon -s afterwards to see statistics of use, but if you have lights on your USB key they should start blinking pretty soon when you start working again.

You may want to save the command sudo swapon -p 3 swapfile1 to a file with the .sh file extension, which you can run if you have to reboot the computer for some reason. Perhaps you already have a file with commonly used commands that you run on such occasions. If not, let us assume you just name the file “swapit.sh”, in which case you just run sh swapit.sh next morning or whenever. Of course, if you include the command in a file that lies in another folder, you must have given the path to the filename in the shell file, like this: sudo swapon -p 3 /media/MyUSBkeyName/swapfile1 (where the name will vary depending on a lot of things). Let’s just hope it stays constant from one day to the next. Then again, unless you are used to Windows, you probably don’t reboot your computer every day. It is probably busy downloading unspeakably secret stuff all night, if you are the aforementioned high school or college student.

Of course you could make the whole USB drive into a swap partition and edit the /etc/fstab file to set it up as swap at startup time. But this was just a demo, which incidentally works, and gives you 4GB (or whatever) of slow memory in addition to the 256 MB of fast memory. (Flash memory is rather slow to write to, but it excels at small random reads, which is what happens when you actually use the swapped memory, since you never know which part you are going to use. Especially not if you are a teenager.)

This in contrast to Windows XP, where you do it graphically:  Open Control Panel, System, and set the virtual memory page file to the desired size and location, reboot (because nothing happens without reboot, you know) and then watch as nothing happens, because the page swap file is created before the USB key is initialized… Shame, but at least you don’t need to use four-letter words like sudo on your road to failure.

Windows Vista is even simpler: It won’t start on 256 MB. But on a larger system, it can use fast USB memory to cache various files, speeding up the system response on computers with slow hard disks and low memory (low by Vista standards, like 1 GB and such). Actually, this “readyboost” feature was what made me think of it. But a teenager does not need to think: Doing crazy things is its own reward.

***

I expect Windows to keep its dominance in the workplace though. There is a lot of “legacy” software out there, which nobody wants to write from scratch again. In fact, in many cases the people who wrote it are dead or retired (or fired after a merger long ago) so you would have to think the whole thing anew. Until Linux runs all kinds of Windows software better than Windows (instead of just some of it), there won’t be much change there.

Windows also has a strong position in gaming. While some games written for Windows also run under Linux (such as City of Heroes) and even may run faster, other titles don’t run at all (such as The Sims 2 and The Sims 3.) In many cases the reason is as prosaic as copy protection that uses the Windows Registry or even undocumented Windows features.

With a free operating system now being neck to neck with the rather expensive Windows and MacOS, it may only be a question of time before free games also reach the same level as their commercial counterparts. But they aren’t there yet, so if I live, I am likely to own a machine with Windows 8 someday. After that, it’s anybody’s guess. Pretty soon, Ubuntu Linux may not just be a better operating system than Windows, but also a better Windows than Windows. Wait and see.

Teeth and laptops, again

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Long-time readers may remember that I seem to have discovered a cause and effect that is hard for science to explain.   Using the formula of a well known Internet meme, I have summed it up like this:  “Each time you buy a laptop, God kills a tooth.”  This has held true at least three times in a row:  I bought a laptop computer, and one of my teeth broke or came loose.  (Although two of the times it was an artificial tooth, of which I have two or three, I think.)

Well, we are about to find out whether it is a rule without exception, because I not only bought a new laptop today, I also went to the dentist.  Actually, I went to the dentist first.  This was a routine checkup that I have twice a year.  The dentist did not find any holes this time (yay!), although the still took some money for the time and the x-rays.   When I returned to my workplace, however, my laptop was broken.  Well, not literally broken to pieces, but it was not a laptop anymore.  The screen now showed 6 small pictures instead of one large.  It was not merely a driver issue either:  I got this picture already in GRUB (the loader where you choose which operating system to run) and even when booting straight from a CD.  So at the very least something was wrong in the BIOS (basic input/output system) or mechanically somewhere on the path from the computer to the screen.  I don’t know, I don’t do that machine-near work anymore and haven’t for many years.  The problem is solved by plugging it into an external monitor, but alas, that was not what I used it for.

So we have the opposite situation of the normal.  The laptop breaks, but the tooth is good as new! Obviously something was telling me, “Good job with those teeth! Go buy yourself a new laptop.”  God does not admit to having said that, but said, approximately “You’ll probably try to do it anyway.”  Which I did, of course.  So now we just have to see what happens to my teeth.

Besides getting a new actually portable computer, I was particularly interesting in trying out Windows 7 while it lasts.  I hear they have started work on Windows 8 already.  Of course, I am used to Ubuntu Linux, which comes with a new version twice a year, but those are free.  A new Windows version is quite an event, despite the relatively short shelf life of Windows Vista.  Windows 7 is supposed to be much better.  Well, what do you know, it is.  After the lengthy process of setting up the computer, it was quite responsive despite its low-energy processor and only 1 GB of RAM.  (Of course, five years ago 1GB was a lot of RAM and had to be ordered separately.)

A small disappointment was that it rejected my 4GB USB memory stick for use with ReadyBoost. It was not good enough, I was told.  (It was good enough for Vista, in its time.)  I guess with the new, faster and sleeker operating system you need faster accessories to add anything useful.

The lack of an internal CD drive means I cannot just install Ubuntu from the CD I used on the other machine, I will have to prepare a USB key instead.  But for the first days, I hope to use Windows 7 and see how good it really is.  I am sure I could find something to mock it for eventually. But it sure beats Vista, very much so.

The computer incidentally came with a 250 GB hard disk, despite its rather low specs otherwise. This surprised me, but will surely come in handy if I am to have two operating systems on it. In any case, I expect this to be my last laptop with rotating hard disk instead of SSD (solid state disk, flash disk).  SSD is more expensive by far, but the difference is shrinking,  it is faster on reading small files and it uses less power.  It seems like an obvious part of the next generation of laptop. Although I probably won’t be seeing any of those for a while, because this time I bought a Hewlett Packard.  I love HP and HP loves me, it seems:  My HP computers just keep going on and on, year after year, until they are just too slow even with Linux. That can take a while. If this one lasts as long as the one on the table beside me at home, there will certainly be many changes before I need another.  It came with Windows XP, and now we have Windows 7.  I wonder how long Microsoft can keep up with the competition – Linux in particular is improving at a ferocious speed – but Windows 7 is definitely a decent buy.  If you can do it without breaking any teeth, at least…

Ubuntu install, GRUB rescue error

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Xubuntu_screen

Obviously this picture is taken after the grub is rescued.

The subject line will make sense for those who desperately need this post.  I apologize to my normal friends for a line that looks like sheer insane babble. But such is life for us who dabble in the wild world of Linux, the free and rapidly mutating operating system for personal computers.

The version of Ubuntu that is realeased today is 9.10 (year 2009, month 10), nickname Karmic Koala.  I used the 9.10 RC (release candidate) that was available for download some time before release day.  It is stable and contains pretty much the same as the final version, with only a few downloads to bring it up to date after.  If you get it to run in the first place, that is.  I did not, at first.

It looked easy enough.  I booted from the live cd and chose install.  I answered some questions about localization and such, and then accepted its proposal to share the machine between Vista (which was installed on this laptop already) and Xubuntu (Ubuntu with a faster, smaller user interface).   It worked for a long time partitioning the disk, setting up the new and improved file system, ext4.  It is said to be faster and more secure than ext3, which is itself pretty good. Anyway, I wrongly suspected ext4 when things went bad. This happened when I rebooted the machine after the install.  Linux is much less hungry for reboots than Windows, but after a brand new install you still have to do it.  I did, and the operating system did not start. Actually, neither Xubuntu nor Vista.  Instead I got a black screen with the text

GRUB rescue>

I booted with the live CD, which lets you run Linux anyway but is fairly slow since it runs off a CD rather than a hard disk.  Still, I got online and could Google for  GRUB Rescue, GRUB install etc.  (GRUB is the programs that runs as soon as the machine starts waking up. It lets you choose which operating system to run, in my case it should have given me a choice between Vista and Xubuntu.) Unfortunately the sites I found were all extremely technical or did not work.  I tried to use the Find command to locate the existing Grub, but got an error message. I tried creating it in the most common position, but got another error message.  And of course when I rebooted I still got the Grub rescue message.

I looked through a couple technical-looking guides, and tried using something called grub-install, but it required information I did not have about the device names of the hard drives. There are no doubt ways to find this out, but then I would have to Google for that separately, and know the right keywords to search for.  Luckily I followed a guide that used fdisk -l (l for list, not the number 1) to create a list of those names.  And behold, the partition names fell neatly into two groups, that seemed to correspond to two hard disks.  But I had only one, right?

Turns out that Xubuntu had installed itself on my external hard drive, a WD Passport, which uses USB to connect to the laptop.  It was entirely on that drive, including the actual GRUB code.  The boot sector only linked to that … but it ran before the USB drive was connected, right after the machine booted.  So it linked to the empty void.  No wonder the machine panicked!

I ran the install again, this time without the USB drive attached.  This time it took a piece of the internal hard drive. I had to do it all over again, although it took less time than it had on the external disk.  Now it worked perfectly.  Of course, part of the Passport is now set up with a big Linux partition.  I will consider what to do with that when, or if, I need the space.  There is still plenty left.

I wish you all a happy new Linux!

Jammie Thomas pays my music

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di090619

In the trash they go. There will be no new ones.

Jammie Thomas, one of the most ordinary people in the western world, was just fined nearly 2 million dollars for having made 24 songs available for upload on the file sharing service Kazaa. (The songs became available for upload because she downloaded them – this is the nature of most file sharing systems.)

I get the impression that the court’s decision did not spark much controversy in the USA, and this seems reasonable:  Americans are used to farcical trials, where the best paid lawyers win more or less by default; so much more when the opponent does not belong to the ruling ethnicity. For us Europeans it seems strange, but once you get to know a number of Americans, you realize how little faith they have in the judicial system.  And if neither the particular crime nor punishment has any direct consequence for you, you just ignore it.  Mind your own small business.

The reaction here in Scandinavia is very different.  A wave of hate  and contempt is sweeping Norway (the homeland of “So sue me” DVD-Jon) and neighboring Sweden (harbor of The Pirate Bay). Particularly the younger generation vow to never buy a CD again. I am not sure they will stick to that always, but probably as long as they can effortlessly download the songs from file sharing sites.  Certainly whatever sting their conscience may have offered them before is now gone, nay reversed:  A deep sense of righteous glee filling them each time they get to stick it to the fascist recording industry and the corrupt governments that allow it to run rampant over the back of the poor.

My reactions are more mixed. I developed a pretty large software package for certain businesses a couple decades ago, and I remember the murderous rage I felt at the thought of people stealing it.  I would not particularly mind seeing them in debt for the rest of their life – actually how I felt at the time was that they were not really human and their lives worthless.  Of course, this is true most of the time for most of us, but I was still projecting much of that then, thus the intensity of feeling.  Objects and random strangers cannot incite such intense emotions, they always need to have an anchor inside us.

For the young and angry virtual mob, the anchor is no doubt the reasonable fear because they too have been sharing songs online, and probably more than 24 of them at that. The thought that their entire lives could be ruined any random day and that there is nothing they can do about it would be pretty upsetting.  (This does not in any way change the fact that this was a gross miscarriage of justice and should never have happened.) Personally I have bought and paid for my hundreds of CDs, which I am throwing away, except for the Japanese ones.  I am even more motivated to get rid of them now.  I do not really want to have physical objects in my house associated with the cRIminal Association of America and its lickspit running dogs here in Norway.

Actually downloading music used to be legal here in Norway, until the current mainly Social Democrat government changed it. Their minister of culture is still supporting the record label industry, whereas the state’s less political privacy watchdog is pulling in the opposite direction.  This is no great wonder, for the Social Democrat leadership is strongly in favor of the European Union, from which we got the current law.  This again makes sense since the EU is dominated by Social Democrats. As such it has an extensive bureaucracy with many leading positions that may be available to former politicians who have been good at wagging their tail, and with no more need for elections to maintain your status.

When I was young – in the 1970es – we had cassette recorders, which people used to play music casettes they had bought, but probably more often songs they had recorded from the radio or copied from one another.  This had been going on since the days of the spool tape recorder, about half a century ago.  Kids these days have probably not seen those contraptions, but I have one stashed away in a closet here, as well as a couple tapes with songs copied form Light knows where.  (Although by far most of my tapes are recordings of meetings at conferences in the Christian Church, popularly known as Smith’s Friends. I am keeping these for as long as the tapes may still last, or I do, lest they be lost forever.)

OK, that’s a pretty roundabout entry.  But I am currently working on getting Opera Unite running stably on my machine, so I can stream all those thousands of songs I have bought and paid to friend and family.  (Who else but friends and family would wade through a blog like this?)

I will come back to the actual address of my music streaming server if I get it to work stably. So far it stops working on my home machine with Windows, my old Linux machine is too weak to pull it, and the new Linux machine is only active a few hours a day.  But my intention is good, at least.  ^_^

Opera unite!

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di090616

This description (from the anime Hatsukoi Limited, btw) probably describes the average user of this new piece of free software. Ironically, it is called “Opera unite”.

On February 16, 2001, I wrote an essay about PC-to-PC networking and the future of the Internet. And then I did not upload it, because I decided to write about an anime instead and how it reflected my own life. So there is no way for me to actually document my prediction of the present event.

On February 10, 2003, I once again took a drive-by stab at the topic, mentioning that I would have liked to host the Chaos Node directly from my local harddisk, if standardized technology existed. It didn’t, so I didn’t. I still don’t, but the possibility suddenly jumped miles closer. Thanks to Opera, the Norwegian web browser which tends to come up with the good ideas first, then have them copied by IE and lately Firefox. This one is highly unlikely to be copied by Microsoft, however.

Opera just built a server into the browser. It is not quite grandmother-friendly yet, as there come up some lines that look like Javascript code when you set it up. But it is still astonishingly simple, and should only take a few minutes to get running for the parent generation. From then on, changing the setup can be done in seconds.

There is already built-in code for letting other people play your MP3 files, if you so decide. Or look at your pictures, but only those pictures you want to share. You can even share entire folders to the point where people can download anything they want from them. Obviously this should not be of a too private nature. Well, unless it is password protected. Any of this can be password protected, although each application can only have one password. (So you can not share your baby pictures with grandma and your porn work related documents with someone from work at the same time. You would have to run multiple instances of the same program, and I don’t see that supported.)

The big deal however is that programmers can add their own small programs. If I don’t like that the music players only handles MP3 files, I may make my own that plays AAC, the format used by iTunes. Of course, that requires me to actually program, which I stopped doing years ago. Whatever I think of, someone else is bound to do it, and thanks to Google I should be able to find them when they do so.

The folks at Opera Software are very excited about the new invention. They feel they have finally fulfilled the promise of the Internet. I agree. But I don’t think it will spread enough to really change the world as long as only Opera supports it. (You don’t need Opera to view such a site, only to make it available. So I can share my MP3 files via Opera, and you can play them in Firefox or Internet Exploder.)

The real revolution, I think, will be for illegal file sharing. The “sites” created this way are temporary, ephemeral , transient and don’t last long. There is no backup of them on any corporate server which can be subpoenaed by the Rabid Illiterate American Association or likeminded people. Operaunite.com only connects the giver and the taker, they don’t host the files. Your local harddisk hosts the files. And unlike a torrent tracker, Operaunite.com does not give any hint as to what is stored, or has been stored in the past.

The downside of this is that you can’t find these places on Google or The Pirate Bay or any of the other public resources. You get to know of them by e-mail, IM, certain chat rooms, friends-locked blog entries, someone else’s Opera Unite page, or other underground channels.

If the content is harmless and can stand the light of day, however, there is no reason why you can’t spread it more widely. But even then, you may not want to. Because most likely there will only be a few people in the world interested in your baby pictures and Abba collection, and you may just as well tell them directly.

If this really had come in 2003, there would have been a big unmet demand. But by now we have cloud computing. Pictures can be shared for free on Flickr and Photobucket. Music can be shared for free on Imeem and probably some other sites. Sendfile lets you send any large file privately, such as for instance a movie. There really is no reason to have your computer serving files directly unless you are a fanatic individualist (this program is made in Norway, remember, the only country where the distance between neighbors is measured in stone throws) or really, really don’t want anyone spying on what you’re doing.

Or, of course, you could be like me and do it simply because you can.  Join the revolution!

Age of Conan 1 year

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di090523

Sunset or sunrise for Age of Conan?

The Norwegian-made MMORPG Age of Conan is celebrating its first anniversary in Europe today.  For some reason it was released 3 days earlier in the USA.  Perhaps the Americans were used as guinea pigs…  Anyway, the game had one of the smoothest launches in the history of the genre (possibly less than City of Heroes, but better than the current top dog, World of Warcraft.) And then a  few days later, it all went down the drain.

Unfortunately only the first part of the game had been fully implemented and thoroughly tested.  The island where you play the first 20 levels is indeed an amazing masterpiece of storytelling and technology. After that, things started to fall apart, and the high-level areas were buggy and unfinished.  Lots of customers – most of them, I believe – did not renew their subscription after the first month that comes with the game.  The share value of Funcom fell, and the game was more or less written off by many gamers.

Be very careful about leaving a Cimmerian for dead…

Today, the game is earning a nice little surplus for Funcom, and there are new players trickling in by the day. It would seem that many of those who left, simply did not have the computers that could pull such a high-end game. Every month, a number of them get new computers for unrelated reasons. And thanks to Moore’s Law, the capacity of new computers double every 18 months.  If you had a three and a half year old computers last May – and that is not uncommon for casual gamers, especially if they are married – then by now a computer in the same price range is 8 times as powerful.  That makes a big difference with cutting-edge games.

In addition, Funcom has tweaked the game to run more smoothly.  And they have added content at the higher levels and fixed bugs left and right.  This is not exactly unique:  We say that the first year of any massive online game is “paid beta”.  Experienced gamers don’t expect it to be perfect right out of the box.

The game is still evil, though.  Vile sorcery, necromancy, demon summoning, even breasts. And it still splatters blood on the inside of your computer screen occasionally. Rumors have it that the game is less bloody in the German version, I am not sure if that is true.  But you can at least avoid fighting against other players if you want to (and not only in Germany).

In celebration of their anniversary, I opened my account again (it had expired along with my previous credit card when that was renewed for a few more years).  There were, as expected, hours of patches to download, since it is quite a number of months since last I set foot in Hyboria.

Once the patches were installed, I started the game.  I recognized the problem from last time, that my character was almost entirely transparent, only this time so was the terrain, except water.  I don’t remember it being quite that bad the first time.  I did remember however that back then, I had to pretend to change the video settings, even if I changed them back to the original. When I then returned to the game, the picture was fine.  Well, not this time.

I upgraded the DirectX to the March version, probably the last ever for Windows XP.  Still no luck.  I downloaded the latest drivers for my video card.  Still no difference.  I used Google and browsed a few forums, until I saw someone mention that you had to completely erase any trace of earlier video drivers before you installed a new one.  So I did, first uninstalling the last driver and then deleting all the nvidia folders on my hard disk.  I restarted the machine. Amazingly, it has a pretty good screen resolution even without the drivers, and without knowing what video card it has.  I installed the latest driver again, and restarted the machine.  This time the screen remained black. I waited for some minutes, but it did not change.  Then I checked the back of my computer, and yes: For some reason, the video output now went to the port that no monitor was attached to.  Before, it had gone to the other.  (The card has two, although I don’t use more than one.  It can display different pictures to different screens actually, but I prefer to have two computers for my two monitors, thank you.)

Anyway, the problem was now solved.  And the game does run more smoothly on higher resolution than before. Probably because of tweaks to the software, although I suppose the new video driver could be better too.

Right now I have finished playing, and am listening to a Cimmerian dirge that the game plays when not logged in to any of my characters.  It is awesome.  I believe I heard the same song in a valley in the game.  Anyway, I love dirges and lamentations. They rarely fail to cheer me up.  Perhaps there is still a drop of barbarian blood in me?   (Looking back at my younger days, I think that is not a maybe either, but maybe it is still influencing my taste in music, I mean.)  I know the melodies can be bought on iTunes.  (Or perhaps I should pirate it, given that I already bought the game.)  I wonder how my coworkers would react. I have a feeling that perhaps they don’t like wailing as much as I do… It really is beautiful.

I don’t miss the rest of the game much though.  City of Heroes is more my style, not to mention The Sims 2.  And in less than two weeks Sims 3 is upon us.  Believe it or not, I also have other things than games I want to have done while still alive, so… You probably won’t be seeing a lot of this.  I did secure some nifty screenshots though.