We now have a twitter account!

If you are a fellow twitter-er, we now have a twitter account!

You can view it here: www.twitter.com/clintthewookie

Unfortunately, at the moment it is filled with my failures with the installation of the ext4 filesystem…

Upgrading Fluxbuntu 8.10 to 9.04 Alpha 6 (My Experience)

I apologize if the format is a little confusing, but a stream-of-consciousness-like format seems the most effective way of conveying my thoughts… Oh, and we are not responsible for anything you do wrong; it worked for us, but it may not work for you!

Today, I decided to take the plunge and update my Ubuntu 8.10 laptop to 9.04 alpha 6. Here’s how I did it and my experience:

1. I opened the update manager with the command “update-manager -d” (Note: you need the update manager to do this, get it by running “sudo apt-get install update-manager”.
2. I was notified that 9.04 is available, so I clicked the upgrade button.
3. I was then greeted by a distribution upgrade window which appeared to do the whole process for me.
4. Unfortunately, I did not have enough space. You need about 924 free mb to do the install, I only have 567. I have some work to do…After I ran the command “sudo apt-get autoclean”, I removed about 500 mb of partially downloaded packages on my system. That’s a lot of wasted space that I desperately needed! (Don’t worry, I believe most of the space required for the install is freed after installation, it’s for all the files you have to download)
5. Now I tried to update again… and it seemed to pass the test, notifying me that I will be removing 12 packages, installing 76, and upgrading 687. Let’s go…
6. I almost forgot, for an upgrade, it needs the Fluxbuntu 7.10 CD. It looks like it got some files from there. What I don’t understand is why; it’s 2 years old! Not really an update if you ask me…
7. After downloading all the files, it decided to not read my fluxbuntu disc, so it canceled the whole thing. I will be trying again once I clean the CD.
8. This time it worked and it is installing packages with 2 hours and 30 minutes remaining. Looks like my laptop is pulling an all-nighter.
9. An important note! The process is not all automatic! Your experience may vary, but I had to allow the install to replace custom files about 3 times. So the install stopped at about 2 and 22 minutes remaining. So it just wasted all night waiting for me.
10. Luckily, those 2.5 hours go by in about 20 minutes (on a really old computer), so *almost* it finished before I left in the morning.
11. Unfortunately, it had to ask me about a setting so my beautiful little “Ida” sat paciently waiting for me, for 10 hours.
12. When I returned home, I answered the prompt and it finished. After the restart, it took a little longer to boot (I think), but the laptop runs much faster. On a cold start of Sakura, my terminal, it opened almost instantly. That’s pretty incredible.
13. But because old technology is not cool, I decided to update the laptop to the ext4 filesystem (The install does not do this for you). I started the process by running “tune2fs -j /dev/DEV” (Note: DEV should be replaced with your primary partition, eg: sda1, hda1) At the current time we don’t not recommend updating to ext4, “Ida” died

For now, that’s my experience. Ida may be currently offline; but when she returns she will be 9.04. WITHOUT ext4.

First Starcraft Victory

Today I had my first legitimate victory in Starcraft. Since I got the game not too long ago, I had been playing as the Zerg (I liked them for some reason) and getting creamed when I used them.

I’m not the mass-produce-your-minions type.

So today, I tried the Protoss and actually won! I seem to play better when I control more powerful units strategicly.

So all you noobs who need to decide which race to play as, here is a simple guide:

-Zerg: you will be mass producing your weak units, so don’t get attached to any of them…

-Terran: middle strength units, middle price. Not as expensive as the Protoss, but not as strong. (I’ve played as Terran the least)

-Protoss: pricey, but powerful. Better if you like organizing your units, not just throwing them at your opponent.

However, the best way to decide is to try them all yourself!