I'm Back

Much has happened since I last posted on this Blog.  I just moved back to Oklahoma after living in Maine for a while.  I was completely off the Internet for about 6 months.  My new girlfriend has an autistic son and he kicked my laptop over and broke the fan.  I put off fixing my laptop until I got back to Oklahoma and had the Internet up here.  We got here in December of 2011 and couldn't get AT&T to turn on the DSL until August of 2012.  A $13 fan fixed my laptop and I'm back on line.

I am really impressed with Sabayon 9.  I upgraded my laptop from 7 to 9 with out much of a hitch.  The only thing that didn't work was Compiz, so I set it up to run stand alone.  What most impresses me about Sabayon 9 is the Rigo  Application Browser.  It is a search style interface.  Just type in the package you are looking for, choose it from the results and install.  It is faster and more responsive than Sulfur.

(click to enlarge)

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Rigo Application Browser on KDE 4.9 Sabayon 9

I am also playing around with Wayland. Gentoo has the development libraries in Portage. However, there is no build for Weston.  Probably because there are several build steps, and I'm sure you would break an existing system to install it at this point.  So, I've set up a clean install of Gentoo in a Virtual Box.  Then I installed Wayland from Portage.  I setup Apache and Git.  Then I downloaded all the projects required to build Weston, Wayland Client Demos and the Wayland ready Xserver.

Now it's just a matter of writting ebuilds to install them and test them.  I hope I can get KMS and DRM2 to run with the guest drivers.  Vbox had a 3D acceleration option and Wayland will work with a software rendering driver, so hopefully I can jig that up.  If not, I'll just have to install it all on a live USB stick and install it from the repos in my vbox....If you would like to know more about that or get involved, click here.

Wish me luck....

Sabayon 4 r1 64bit

I just installed Sabayon 4 r1 64bit on our laptops here at home. I like it. It has some very cool features. For one it uses the Compiz Fusion Windows Manager. Compiz Fusion is a combination of Beryl and Compiz. The desktop can be rotated and viewed as a cube. It came with Open Office 3.0, FileZilla, a Chat Program compatible with Yahoo! messenger (and several other chat programs I might add), and some web development tools. I installed Opera so I have about 90% of the things I used in Windows over here in Linux-land.

Some of the things I couldn't get to work are:

1. Google Earth. I have an Intel based chipset and something appears to be wrong with the driver.
2. The 3-D games in the bundle. Again, I suspect the video driver.
3. The HDMI output doesn't work.
4. I haven't figured out how to get my windows to burn up in flames when minimized. I have set this up in the options, but no dice.
5. I can't get the rain drop on the desktop effect to work.
6. My 54Mbps wireless network card is only running at 1Mbps.

Aside from these few things, everything runs great. Even with the degraded performance of my network card, my download speeds are about 10% faster--330Mbps in Windows Vista 64 compared to 400Mpbs here in Linux-land. Although I can't switch over to Linux for 100% of my computer usage, I can dual boot and use Sabayon for my Internet use.

Jeff Green Throws Down

My dad had tickets to the OKC Thunder game and it was great. The best play of the night made the highlights...


Looks like the Thunder are playing more like a team now. What teamwork!

Wichita Mountains pt.2

Our next stop was at Meers. About 11 miles west of Apache, we stopped to look at the Blue Canyon Wind Farm. This had been built since the last time I was down that way. There are 45 towers powering 20,000 homes. You can also see the farm from the top of Mount Scott looking North. I don't know how I feel about the impact on the landscape, but I do like having digital cameras and the Internet and so forth so I guess it is a trade off. You don't get nothin' for free.

This is the barn at the intersection of State Highway 58 and Porter Hill Road, the road leading to Meers from the highway. There is also a shot of Mount Scott to the right of the barn.

Here is a panoramic view of the Wichita Mountains about half way down Porter Hill Road. I stitched this from 3 shots in Windows Live Photo Gallery. There is also a close up of Mount Sheridan.

Finally, here is Meers, home of the best hamburger in Oklahoma. I ate a Meersburger and Onion Rings. These Meersburgers are 7 inches in diameter and made from fresh ground Oklahoma Longhorn cattle. Man are they good. They are so big they are cut into 4 pieces. I always stop off and eat here when I can. For more information on Meers visit http://www.meersstore.com/.

Wichita Mountains pt. 1

Our first stop on our way to the Wichita Mountains was at Buzzard's Roost, a small rocky knoll near Cement, OK.

It is rumored that Buzzard's Roost was a hide out for the James Gang back when the area was considered to be 'No Man's Land' before Oklahoma Statehood in 1907. Now there are several oil and natural gas wells in the area. The landscape is littered with abandoned and operational well sites.

Buzzard's Roost is located just south of US 277 about 3 miles east of Cement. Cement was started as a gypsum mining town and still ships gypsum board. In the 1920's oil was discovered in the area and there was a brief oil boom. Cement is now a retirement community.

My mother grew up in Cement and I have several relatives living in the area.

A Journey to Bethlehem

I wanted to go to A Journey to Bethlehem tomorrow but I just found it is already over.  What a bummer.  Sissy didn't feel like going out so I just hung around town.  I guess it is a good thing.  Maybe we can go down to the Wichita Mountains tomorrow.  Not much happening today anyways.  I had a few new adds on Facebook and one on MySpace so I guess that is all going well.  I made alot of headway at making my Computer Questions searchable this morning.  I made a page for each question and a sitemap and submitted it to Google so hopefully a user can do a search before it all gets to big.  Just another boring day...

Here is our Christmas Tree, laden with gifts.  Such a bright and beautiful sight.  I just got a 10 Megapixel camera from Wallyworld so I don't have to wait on photos anymore.  This is gonna be the best Christmas ever.  Next year it's all back to what it was.  No more settlements.