Return to Buenos Aires

OK, it seems like a week or so, but I got back to Buenos Aires on Friday, at three o'clock in the morning.

Since then, I have had a welcome back asado with my family, have (wiping a tear from my eye) wiped out Slackware on my AMD64/SATA wonderbox (after a suitable dvdbackup), and put up a spanking new Ubuntu desktop. Got the nvidia card drivers in through synaptic (nvidia-glx - by the way don't forget that nvidia-settings is a broken package, it is actually installed automatically by nvidia-glx, just install the latter and you can do <alt-F2> and just run nvidia-settings)

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OK, it seems like a week or so, but I got back to Buenos Aires on Friday, at three o'clock in the morning.

Since then, I have had a welcome back asado with my family, have (wiping a tear from my eye) wiped out Slackware on my AMD64/SATA wonderbox (after a suitable dvdbackup), and put up a spanking new Ubuntu desktop. Got the nvidia card drivers in through synaptic (nvidia-glx – by the way don't forget that nvidia-settings is a broken package, it is actually installed automatically by nvidia-glx, just install the latter and you can do <alt-F2> and just run nvidia-settings)

After installing the nvidia driver, you have to edit xorg.conf so "Driver "nv" is changed to "nvidia" as follows:

Section "Device"
        Identifier      "NVIDIA Corporation NV18 [GeForce4 MX 4000 AGP 8x]"
        Driver          "nvidia"
        BusID           "PCI:1:0:0"
EndSection

 

It is now Sunday at 7 in the morning. Got my thunderbird mail going, just installed thunderbird then copied in .mozilla-thunderbird folder. Why am I not tired? Because I'm thrilled, that's why!

I am getting a lot of help from:

  • having used Ubuntu in Venezuela for a project I was working on there; and
  • the Ubuntu Forums , where you can find out just about anything; and
  • The amazing book Ubuntu Unleashed , by Andrew and Paul Hudson (which told me the name of the ubuntu module with the nvidia drivers, apart from holding my hand needlessly during flawless recognition of my SATA drive).
  • The amazing [[http://ubuntuguide.org/wiki/Dapper]]

For example, after installing sun-java (in any of its varieties), the latter reference tells you how to set the sun jvm as the default (useful for eclipse, etc.):

victorkane@mentor:/etc/apt$ sudo update-alternatives --config java

There are 3 alternatives which provide `java'.

  Selection    Alternative
-----------------------------------------------
      1        /usr/bin/gij-wrapper-4.1
*+    2        /usr/lib/jvm/java-gcj/jre/bin/java
      3        /usr/lib/jvm/java-1.5.0-sun/jre/bin/java

Press enter to keep the default[*], or type selection number: 3
Using `/usr/lib/jvm/java-1.5.0-sun/jre/bin/java' to provide `java'.
victorkane@mentor:/etc/apt$ java -version
java version "1.5.0_06"
Java(TM) 2 Runtime Environment, Standard Edition (build 1.5.0_06-b05)
Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM (build 1.5.0_06-b05, mixed mode)
victorkane@mentor:/etc/apt$

Well, on to getting everything… just like I like it.