Back on track

(originally published 2009-11-26)

It's 2 AM and I can't sleep (it seems to happen quite often lately) so after remembering I still have this blog and finally having a functional operating system on my ancient computer I thought it's time to write. I ditched Windows XP. My student license for XP got lost with the last disc formatting and since I had already activated Windows twice I downloaded a "lite" version of XP which obviously ended up updating itself with the Windows Genuine Advantage crap. Since the WGA notification pops up quite often and I don't want to spend about $150 on an XP license I downloaded and installed xubuntu 9.10. Welcome back to the world of Open Source! A world in which you get the benefits of 3d video cards if you are lucky enough that the drivers provided by your video card manufacturer get you an usable picture. In my case I ended up using the generic drivers so I kissed the 3d acceleration goodbye since the nVidia drivers turned my monitor into a 1980's black & white TV with "running" picture. I ended up ssh-ing into the machine and killing the display manager process then manually configuring the X server to use the generic driver. In the end I got what I wanted: my desktop up and running for web browsing, email, office, music and videos. One more thing I finally succeeded to do was to install the OpenVPN server which unfortunately doesn't work as planned. To be more specific, it hangs after the clients disconnects and subsequent connections are not possible anymore. To be investigated... Now I'm going to sleep.

ctrl-alt-delete.ro

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