Category: Personal Life

Posted on

I’m Officially a Debian GNU/Linux user now!


Debian Logo

I’m announcing now that Debian has become my official GNU/Linux distro. Previously I’ve use Mandrake (my first distro) as my official GNU/Linux distro, then Slackware, and finally SuSE. Fedora Core 4 actually was on my candidate list as my next official distro because it’s spiffy package management system, but in the end i chose Debian over Fedora.

Debian is more flexible than Fedora because I can download only one CD out of 12 CDs to perform complete installations. Well, people might argue that Fedora can do the same, but the way Fedora did it wasn’t obvious. And you apparently have to end up downloading the entire 4 CDs, which turn out not enough to fully enjoy the distro (Fedora people assumes that most people code in Java, and put a lot of java things inside the CD)

Well, Debian is a nice distro for me, it isnt too bloated, easy to configure, and it has a good package management system. I like Debian.

p/s: I’ve installed countless of other distros before this, but the “official” status is only given for distro that i use for my production purposes and usually meant to last more than 9 months on my pc.

Posted on

Configuring BSD as an average Home-user OS

Yup, you read that right, today i’ve finished configuring my FreeBSD 5.4-Releaseas an average home-user box.

Previously, I had only a minimal FreeBSD 4.6 (includes gcc) inside my pc to test out my apps before releasing to public, and I’ve no intention of using it seriously because I’m so used to GNU utils instead of BSD ones.

I’ve considered doing this as a challenge for myself, I’m getting bored of testing various GNU/Linux distro that i’ve decided to use FreeBSD seriously for a change.

Well, what would i do? Having installed a barebone FreeBSD system made me thinking, what should i do now?. Firstly, I jot down things that i like to do mostly with my pc, work from there.

That kind of thinking narrows down to coding with c, self-taught php-class, movie player (mpeg4,dvd capable), music player (mp3 player), cd-writing, p2p, and of course internet connection.

FreeBSD Xwindows environment setting change a bit from the last time i use it. Seems that now I need to configure xdm manually, which is not my area of expertise, Luckily the FreeBSD Handbook came in handy in these situation, although i had quite a bump at setting up my desired WM.

Next stop, was setting up my internet connection using PPPoE (that’s Streamyx broadband), which again left me clueless. I know that I can connect to the internet quickly by enabling dhcp-client, but hey, that’s not quite fun for me. Luckily, the “/etc/share/examples/” directory have the ppp.conf sample which I merrily configured my internet connection.

After i’ve settled up the internet connection, everything else is a piece of cake. I’ve surf the web for the Freebsd ports collection and install all things that i required there, again I only have minor hiccups here where I had to use “cvsup” to download things that i cant acquire from pkg_add command.

All in all, it was fun experience setting up FreeBSD box for my average home-user need. I cant wait to start using *BSD now for a change. ;)

Posted on

Yet another official announcement

This is yet another official announcement from me. As of upcoming month onwards, I’m announcing that I’m not going to update my blog on Saturdays and Sundays, because I’m declaring the weekends as my computer-free day.

This measure is just a way to avoid myself spending my time excessively in front of computer all week in a month.

Posted on

My Experimental PC Harddisk Layout

I’ve finished with my experimental PC (well, not quite) and done with partitioning of the hard disk.

Well I decided to put 5 Operating System inside my experimental PC and now they are coexisting fine inside the shared space of 80GB harddisk.

This time i determined to learn about Fedora Core 4 (i’ve never use Fedora or any Red Hat products seriously before) and FreeBSD 5.x (I only have experience using 4.x branch of FreeBSD and OpenBSD 3.5). So I’ve install both on the same PC.

I’ve put on Windows 98, to test out my home-made program how they react on legacy Microsoft Windows OS. And I also installed FreeDOS to play my old DOS game comfortably, the DOSBox is excellent, but i’ve rather want to relive my younger days with DOS :), besides my FM801-based soundcard is supported under dos, why waste it?

I really want to experiment with Cruxwall (results of hacking crux into easy firewall interface) so i’ve added one more Linux partition inside the hdd. I guess Xen would e suffice if I want to run another Linux-based system.

And why the Windows XP? well the experimental pc is shared by people who arent comfortable with Unix-like operating system in my house, so i’ve to include that. But my own personal PC is running SuSE 9.3 all the time :)

The bootloader? OK, I just use the plain-vanilla NTLDR (Windows XP) bootloader to boot Windows XP and Windows 98. The NTLDR can chainload Grub, which in turn can boot any GNU/Linux system as well chainload the FreeBSD bootloader. :)

I dont use any other 3rd party bootloader, because they tends to be problematic.

Here’s the partition map of my experimental pc

Partition Map, mypapit

And my experimental pc specs is :
Pentium 4 1.70 GHz (400MHz FSB)
Memory 512MB SDRAM
HDD 80GB
1 CDRW, 1 Floppy Drive
2 NIC

Posted on

Nvidia Riva TNT2 M64 32MB for sale!!

I’m broke and i want to loose my Nvidia Riva TNT2 M64 graphic card for only RM35 plus shipping cost (via pos laju). If anyone interested of having this graphic card, you can contact me via this blog or email me.


mypapit Nvidia Riva TNT2 for sale

Details as follows :

  • Bought in Feb 2003
  • 7 days personal warranty
  • Includes latest Windows XP/2000/ME/98 and Linux drivers
  • This thing works and support 3D rendering and last tested on 12 July 2005
  • Selling price : RM35 plus shipping via pos laju

Nvidia graphic card is a widely use and known graphic card. They have driver support for various operating system platform including Microsoft Windows, GNU/Linux and FreeBSD. Nvidia offers regular driver updates from their website and they give good 3D graphic performance.

I want to sell off this graphic card because I bought another graphic card and I dont have any computer to put this graphic card on.

If you buy this graphic card, I will include free Knoppix 4.0 LiveCD as a bonus!

Anybody interested?

Posted on

My Network card broke down!

My RTL-8139 based NIC card broke down today ! It broke down, just after one day I finished screenshoting my Fedora Core 4 Desktop for Internet Connection Sharing Guide.

The interesting part is, the RTL-8139 managed to bring down my Fedora Core 4 while spiralling down to it’s demise. I get a screenful of unexplained error message during the boot-up process, not knowing what when wrong at first time.

RTL-8139

Luckily i know a trick or two, i boot up my trusty home-brew KrazhBoX just to found out that an error has occured while the Linux kernel was initializing a PCI card. Which later turns out to be RTL-8139 Ethernet Card. I found this out by doing “cat /proc/pci” in my KrazhBoX.

So to counter the problem, I had to replace my Network card with a new one and reconfigure the Fedora Core 4 distro.

Reminds me to speed up my update on my home-brew KrazhBoX rescue Linux project to use 2.6.12 kernel.

RTL-8139 is the common chip used in PCI LAN card in Malaysia. If you bought a generic PCI Ethernet card, it’s most probably ship with RTL-8139 chip.