http://blog.tc.dk/

This is TC ... closing /. journal...

I can't believe that there isn't a "google" topic...

Anyway. I've added google adsense ads to my book review site. The basic idea is that google already know what my page is all about, so it will be able to intelligently target ads at my site.

I seems to work - to some degree. My front page has some okay links at the moment:
* Free Sci-Fi News
* SF&F First Editions
* Free Reading Group Guides
* Robert Sheckley's Books

If I browse through my author pages, the Sheckley ad may or may not be there, but most importantly it in my robert sheckley page.

The not that great thing is that it isn't on my Dimension of Miracles page (it's a novel by Sheckley). Infact this page has nothing but charity ads, which I do not make any money of. I'll hold off my final judgement on this for a couple of weeks, and see if it changes as google (hopefully) gets to know my pages better.

Oh, boy am I going to make a killing on this? I think so! The last three days has given about 500 ad views, three clickthrougs and 18 cents(*) for me!

(*) no it isn't even euro's, but us$, so it's even more worthless...

Okay. I wiped the mandrak createde partitions, with Partition magic, thinking that I would start from scratch.

I moved the old "media" partition about a bit and made a bit more free space for Mandrake to gob up.

Took Partition magic about four hours to do.

After which my machine couldn't find the boot thing on my main drive (which shouldn't have been touched at all!). Strangely enough it found some strange Novell thing (which didn't get far).

So I quickly did a reinstall of mandrake, which installed a new Lilo, which luckily, could see both the old windows and the new mandrake partitions. Both booted fine and both could see my "media" partition.

Phew!

BTW: I tried to boot knoppix on my old siemens notebook (350mhz pentium) - didn't work. Seems to be somekind of "cardmanager" problem, but it didn't help to disable the pcmcia detection, so I'll have to work a bit more on that.

So I decide to give installing something a try.

After reading a bit on distrowatch.com I decide for a mandrake distro. The three CD set seems to have a fair amount of application and a fair level of newbiee friendlyness.

My machine has two harddrives, the primary (a 40gb) has to partitions (windows and applications) and the secondary (a 25gb) is used mainly as a cache between me and the internet. Downloaded stuff that can be downloaded again. All partitions run NTFS.

So I decide on the second harddrive and free a 3gb partition on it with partition maqic. So I should be ready.

Boot on the first cd.

Wait a bit.

So I get to a series of questions. I like my OS to speak english, so I select that. Which means that I cant select a danish keyboard, until much later.

Anyway. Wide selections of applications to select from. I select as widely as possible, making sure that there's a mysql and an apache. No option for php, but I'm hoping that comes with the apache.

Remenber to use the "select individual packages" option on the buttom of the screen, which lets you select what to install.

Selecting the right partion:

Well. It didn't excatly have to be easy, but does it have to be this hard? Couldn't some descriptive names be used to select between these partitions? Anyway, I survived.

My ATI All-in-wonder Radeon video card wasn't regonized, so I selected standard video.

The installation process went fine. Setting up Lilo (the bookmanager) was easy.

Reboot,
wait,
select stuff about desktop, that I know nothing about ("please choose one of these desktops - no we will not tell you the difference between them2). I selected KDE. Seems to be the thing these days.
Login

Desktop!

Hey it works. It seems fast. Mozilla works like a dream. It's definitly faster than on windows.

No sound, though. I've an onboard sound system on my crappy ecs K7S5A. Easily found a place in the config program where I could select another driver, which worked. Can't change the volume though. Will work on that later.

So things seem to work. I can browse the 'net (adsl connection configured it self, with out problems).

I can browse my NTFS partitions (read only) and play mp3 and divx files.

So I reboot to check that my windows is still working. It does.

Except that the NTFS partition on the secondary drive is dead. Windows keep on telling me that it's unformattede and if I would like to format it? Hell NO! I fool around with chkdsk and stuff for a bit, ending up with Partition magic, which sees the errors on the partition and fixes them.

Rebooting windows brings my partition back. Weew!

Rebooting back to Linux gives me... an error during boot. Something about the super-block in hdb7 (the NTFS partition on secondary drive). It thinks that the partion is something it calls "ext2". Do I want to fix it? No! Reboot and try again.

Same shit. Okay, this time I'm brave and answer yes to the "fix-it?" question. Automatic fixing procedure fails.

Reboot linux. Still no go.
Reboot Windows. Partition still good.

Hm....

I guess that I'm going to have a problem as long as linux thinks that that the partition is ext2 and not ntfs. It annoys me, no end that it, can't just boot and leave the stupid partition alone. It really is a rather unimportant partition.

As a last thing before I go to bed, I boot on a Knoppix 3.2 CD just to see what happens. Everything is fine and I can see all partitions, both the ntfs ones and the ones created during the Linux install.
So if I could only find the boot script or whatever it's called, maybe I could remove or fix the mounting of hdb7.... but I got no clue.

So that was interesting.

I'll probably give the mandrage distro another hour or so and then wipe it, unless I get it to work.

So what Distro should I try next? I'm kind of thinking Debian or Gentoo...

I'm working towards doing my main home workstation totally microsoft free.

The first step was chancing to OpenOffice, which I really enjoy. But I'm still running W2K.

What I need:

- A good email program. I'm currently using The Bat! and PopFile for spam filter.
- Mozilla
- Graphics program. Currently using PhotoShop and PaintShopPro.
- php Development enviroment. Currently using HomeSite.
- Borland Delphi
- Video/TV capture software. I've a All-in-wonder Radeon card.
- A p2p program that works. Currently using eMule.
- An IM. Currently using Trillian.

So I did my first testing today. I downloaded and bootet on a Knoppix 3.2 CD. That worked supprisingly well. Lot's of software on that CD with lots of options. Definitly a CD that's going to say in my toolbox cd box (that I always carry with me).

There was a few problems. Mainly no sound and when I tried to play a divx it failed after a couple of seconds (with out warning or error message the window disappeared).

As to my software need list:

- Email: There should be lots of options. I don't really need all the (extreme) number options in the bat, now I can use popFile to do most of the filtering.
- Graphics: This is going to hurt. I've tried The Gimp for windows and frankly it sucks big time.
- php Dev. There should be good things out there. I just havn't tried them. Most important is good editiong, syntax highlight and projekt management.
- Delphi. Yrh. I develop (at work) for windows and sometimes I need to work at home. Can't really see a solution in this. Kylix isn't a solution as rewriting all the old applications to clx is impossible.
- All-in-wonder support: I got no idea if this is possible.
- eMule: I think that this exists.
- IM: This must exsist.

More later...

I kind of pooped today, when I wrote a reply on the Star Wars online game thing.

Complaing about a game bring only for North America and writing "Europa" in the subject of the note, is kind of stupid, when you think about.

Sorry, rest of the world.

Okay, my first journal entry.

I'll probably only be using this journal for complaing about moderations on my /. replies :-)