Mircea Bardac /random_thoughts

My Linux frozen today (something very unusual) when I tried starting Win4lin.
Rebooting showed me that the root partition is corrupted. Unfortunately, the /home partition is also corrupted. Both are reiserfs3.

There is a tool reiserfsck which is said to repair corrupted reiserfs partitions. I won’t use it though, not until I backup the partitions first. Unfortunately, it seems I need another HDD, since my home partition is quite big - 40 GB.

Let’s hope for the best. My activity is extremely affected by a not working system.

I think I found myself a new hobby.

Somebody on the ArchLinux forums created a package for Stellarium. Curiosity made me have a look over the project’s homepage. Due to the clean way programs get on and off my ArchLinux installation using pacman, I’ve told myself it can’t hurt.

My first impression: WOW.
I have never seen OpenGL used scientifically so well. I didn’t know much on astronomer terminologies but using that program is so much fun, I quicky understood them. Zooming in and out on stars, watching Jupiter and it’s sattelites move (& spin) in fast forward motion, watching the sun rise, watching eclipses, watching the constelations rolling on the sky… believe me… it’s incredible. This program is done so well… it’s absolutely amaizing. Even if astronomy might sound geekish, this is not true. Stellarium makes it so fun.

You have to try it. Stellarium is freely available for download for all the major platforms: Linux, Windows, MacOS.

Believe me, you’ll enjoy each and every corner of your on-screen night sky-view…

Installed KDE 3.4 beta 2 today. I should make my computer ready for the next release ahead of time.

The options I went straight to: “Use translucency/shadows”
Well, first impression: KDE is getting close to a nice MacOS-like experience.
XComposite (comming with X.org is not really bug-free and it has some annoying behaviour here and then.

I filled up today (more like… “tonight”) @ KDE Bug Tracking System:
- 8 bug reports on transluncency/shadows (one got fixed up to now)
- 2 bugs on KDE PIM, specifically in aKregator - the news reader comming integrated in Kontact.
Edit (Feb 20, 12:57): +1 bug report on translucency

I tried to be as specific as possible, hoping that KDE will benefit from a close-to-perfect user experience in the next version. I hope the devs will manage to fix most of them prior to the release of 3.4.

In a moment of nostalgy (for the old computer days, EGA screens… C64) you might put your penguin to work Penguin Blood Ninja Fiasco().

Better get your dosbox running also… you never know what old Game might cross your mind.

Some of you might be aware of the Windows XP capabilities to sync the time with different time servers around the globe.

In order to get the same effect under Linux, I had to read the following things
[1] Newbie: Intro to cron - I have learned some basic crond configurations - this helped me set up automatic updates every 6 hours at x:15+max(10 sec) with the folowing crontab lines:
# Sync clock: every 4h at :15
15 */6 * * * /usr/bin/sync-clock
[2] NTP Configuration - I actually used the ntpdate configuration because I didn’t want to run a ntp daemon just to sync my computer clock. nptd (ntp daemon) is run only on Time Servers, running time based critical processes (for example, some routers use it). I have used the sync script mentioned there to update the clock using crond