Tuesday, November 3, 2009

Debian Squeeze Pt 2

Love Hate
A few days after having Squeeze on my machine, there were a few hates and a few things to love.
  • It is just so great to have wireless "just work" without having to worry about any other packages.
  • Everything I've thrown at the Gnome multimedia player has "just worked".
  • Grub did not cleanly install the first time.  Only Squeeze appeared on the menu, which was a little more flashy than previous, though irritating in other ways.  Still, "update-grub" worked fine and I regained my other inatallations.  For all that though, I still need to edit the menu so will have to investigate that.
  • I love the way Gnome automounted any extra partitions it found.
Video
One thing I wanted to do was to install the nVidia video drivers.  Unfortunately, the "Debian way" from the repositories failed for me for some reason, so I reverted to simply installing them using the nVidia installer.  There is a nice tutorial at "Pendrive Linux" that shows how to do this.   Any time a new kernel is installed, this procedure will need to be repeated, so it is worthwhile having the instructions printed next to your computer.

For all that though, I'll re-attempt the "Debian way" at a later stage.

Extreme Tux Racer
A silly game perhaps, but it is still fun for a little diversion.  Unfortunately, I could just not get the thing to work on my machine.  Any time I tried to start it, I got an "out of range" message on a black screen, and that was it.  I had it in my brain that this referred to the video refresh, until it occurred to me that maybe it was the screen resolution.  How to fix it?  Well, it so happens that the configuration settings are in a hidden directory " .etracer " in the user's home directory.  Open this and there is a textfile called "options".  All I did was to open this in an editor, find where the screen resolution was listed (default is 800 x 600 ) and replace these figures with my actual resolution.  Voila!!

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