Monday, Monday

[altivo]

The rebellion first: got a cryptic comment in e-mail from the director of a neighboring library just before quitting time, to the effect that "the doo doo has hit the fan" at the Big Messed-Up Consortium. By that I take it that she means the letters of intent to withdraw, signed by the boards of multiple institutions, reached the rockheaded bigshots there. It will all come to a climax on Wednesday, when the delegates' assembly meets. I think we've already charted our course now, but we'll find out just how much it's likely to cost us to escape the clutches of these tyrannical know-nothings.

There was further amusement this afternoon when a librarian in Iowa evidently hit the wrong command in an e-mail program, and sent a message containing a list of anti-Bush bumper sticker slogans to virtually every staff member in the entire consortium. I'm sure she got some nasty replies from conservatives, because she immediately apologized, even before I was done reading aloud and chortling at the list of slogans, which contained things like "Impeachment: Not just for blowjobs any more" and "What we need is a President who speaks at least one language fluently."

I noticed on the way home that the price of gasoline in town has dropped to $1.99 for the first time in almost two years. I know it hasn't been that low since before Hurricane Katrina and I'm pretty sure quite a bit longer than that. This has nothing to do with politics, I suspect, but rather just a collapse in the commodities market. The price we pay for petroleum products is influenced more by a the whims of a bunch of yuppie scum trading in oil futures than it is by the actual cost/supply/demand economics.

The weather has been gloomy, but no more snow for now. The sun is up noticeably earlier and sets noticeably later, so the deep dark of winter is definitely behind us.

Oh, and I downloaded what may be the first "furry" Linux distro: Wolvix may not be intended to have furry connotations, but with that name and a logo that looks like a furry pawprint canted to one side a bit, I've decided that at least as far as I'm concerned, it's furry. It's primarily a Live CD type setup, based on SLAX and stripped down so you can run it from one of those little mini-CDs or from a USB flash drive. I tried it on several machines, and can say that it is properly put together and does have everything you need to get going. There's a caveat, though. It only recognizes a subset of the hardware that's out there. It failed to configure X properly for any of the monitors I had handy, for instance. This is easy to remedy, but you have to know how, and it comes with virtually NO documentation either on the disc or even on the web site. That's a nasty flaw. So... I give it a "not recommended yet" review, at least not for the beginner or the easily frustrated. If your machine and monitor are less than two years old, it may work for you. Then again, it may not until you tweak it. Sound configuration, which is not a show stopping issue but still is important to most people, failed on all the machines I tried it on. Again, I'm sure that's fixable, but I didn't try. I did succeed in getting X to run properly on all three, even the one with a year old Dell system attached to a 12 year old Compaq monitor, but as I said, not for the beginner or the faint of heart. (Thanks to vakkotaur for tipping me off to this new distribution.)

Comments

[quickcasey.livejournal.com]

Ooh, Wolvix. I bookmarked it. Thanks.

[vakkotaur.livejournal.com]

On my secondary "desktop" machine Wolvix seems to run fine. The machine is a few years old and somewhat cobbled together, but generally fairly standard cobbling... and sound worked right off on that.

I haven't even tried to get sound working on the laptop, as I have another issue there. I've made some progress on it, but not in a good way. I did manage to get a wireless connection, but not at the same time as a working WM. It's not a memory quality issue: memtest ran 10+ hours and found zero errors. Right now I have the wireless card out and am giving everything else something a run to see if Xfce acts weird at me otherwise. It could completely unrelated to the wireless card. I've seen some weirdness before I had a connection, too. I did manage to look at the Wolvix web site in lynx, at least.

Several years ago there was a distribution that never quite made it, Stampede, with a rearing/rampant horse logo. I was looking forward to running it when it was out of beta, but such was not to be.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

I never saw Stampede.

Wolvix runs fine here too. It's just the X configuration that's a problem. The default gives black screens on every machine I've tried. If you run xconf first, then you get a readable display, but not a correct one. Either it overflows off the edges of the monitor or it takes up about 30% of the screen with black borders occupying the rest. It seems to come up with bad guesses at the scan rates for the monitor. By going in and editing xorg.conf manually to insert the correct values, things work OK.

Rather than use bad guesses, they should go for a lowest common denominator, probably VGA 640x480 as a default, and prompt you to run a script or otherwise supply scan rates. The xconf does identify the video controller correctly, which is an improvement over past versions of Linux I've run. It just can't identify all the thousands of different monitors that are out in the field.

[vakkotaur.livejournal.com]

I haven't seen the black screen of confusion, but I have seen the incorrect guesses. Since I had a viewable screen, I could change things with the Wolvix Control Panel. That's what I do for the desktop. The laptop is a real case of the guesses not being good: If I just startx, it works fine. If I try to autoconfigure it, it screws things up.

[chibiabos.livejournal.com]

Gas here hasn't moved an inch in weeks, still $2.42/gal at the absolute cheapest in the area, most places its $2.60. :/

[altivo.livejournal.com]

That's odd. Normally we have one of the highest prices in the country. Partly that's due to taxes added by Illinois and the regional transit authorities, but it means Southern California and New York are about the only places with higher prices.

[chibiabos.livejournal.com]

Southern California isn't half as bad as Northern California in my experience for gas price atrocities, and one of the worst gas price atrocities was in Utah where it was something around $3.50/gallon in 1999.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Well, since I don't actually get to those places, I can only go by the reports that appear in newspapers or on the web.

[chibiabos.livejournal.com]

Tsk tsk tsk, that's like me fancying only the more well-known classical pieces of music such as the William Tell overture. :P

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Not quite. It's a lot easier to listen to a piece of unfamiliar music than it is to leave a farm full of dependent critters and go gallivanting. ;p

However they calculate the "average" prices that are reported in the media, the area around Chicago has been priced well above average for years. Only in the last two or three months has it been falling into line with the average. Possibly now it has fallen below, for whatever reason. Chances are that won't last, but it's really shocking to see prices below the $2 mark.

[chibiabos.livejournal.com]

We've gone the reverse route ... we were below the national average, now we're above the national average for gas prices.

[cabcat.livejournal.com]

Bah!, when you're paying $1.00 a litre not $2 for 3.8 litres give me a call :P *grumble grumble gripe grumble*

[altivo.livejournal.com]

We were at nearly $1 a litre after the Hurricane Katrina fiasco in 2005. It has been dropping back down by fits and starts since then.

I agree that higher prices would be better if that inspired conservation, which it appears not to do. But I oppose higher prices that consist largely of excess profits for the oil companies, giving them extra slack funds to use for suppressing competing and alternative technologies, which is what happens.