KDE & GNOME

And we have graphics!

I was able to run both Gnome and KDE on Athena yesterday. I didn't have an internet connection, so I couldn't install anything else. I put her in the living room and hooked her up to the projector, so I'm all set for when I have Internet... which should be sometime in July. I have Comcast scheduled to come in on the 9th, but I'm gone to Illinois and Iowa from the 8th until the 17th. So, it might be a while before I make any more progress (unless I can configure my wireless router to act as a bridge from some neighbor's WiFi). Hmm...

I went ahead and ordered this HDTV tuner, although the other one is more likely to support (unencrypted) HD cable signals (or so I think I read once on some forum somewhere).

Well, Here I Go

I tried switching to KDE, but X still wouldn't start up, so I'm switching to an athlon-xp configuration, and hoping for the best. One huge benefit of doing this is that I don't have to deal with having separate 32-bit libraries to link with all the programs that won't build under x86-64 (like Firefox).

Also in general everything should run more smoothely because of the large user base (and therefore greater testing visibility). Basically, under normal circumstances you wouldn't think of releasing something that doesn't work on an x86, but you might not consider whether your program runs (or even builds right) on some newfangled architecture that no one uses yet. Ironically, I may have to wait until 64-bit Windows makes 64-bit desktop computing common before real support arrives for my processor. Yeah, yeah, I know, the old "do it yourself" Linux mantra, bla, bla, bla. I don't think I'm at the point where I can reverse engineer my graphics card and write my own driver. Getting there though.

I just chrooted and issued the "emerge --sync" command, which means she's going to be compiling for a while.

I threw my old TV tuner into Athena. Apparently MythTV works with just about any tuner out there. Still, I want to get an HDTV tuner card, but I think I'll wait on that until I have a working graphical system with MythTV installed (and hopefully standard TV up and running). Boo broadcast flag.

It's Alive!

Well, not exactly as I'd like to have it, but I am writing this post on Athena using a Knoppix boot CD. I did this at RFH's suggestion (shudder). He kept insisting that I boot Windows to make sure the hardware wasn't defective, so this will shut him up. I haven't had much success with the graphics driver (not that I've been spending much time on it), so I had my doubts about the card's functioning. Knoppix boots to KDE just fine, though, so the problems I was having were due to the software. This is an x86 CD, though. I think I'm going to try a 686 configuration, thereby skirting all the 64-bit issues I was running into.