Blue Sparks

Another quick entry. I attended FanExpo 2008 yesterday. I think I stated that the last time I went (2006) I was a little underwhelmed… well, this time it was even worse. Difficult to believe maybe, but it is true.

There were 3 booths selling tickets for the show, ending up in a lineup of an hour and half!!! Yes, I waited for 90 minutes in order to pay $25 to get in. I think this is utterly ridiculous. You would think that since they’ve been doing this for a while now that there would be some extra ticket booths open in order to quell the rush. Hell, make an automated ticket booth or something that I can stick my credit card into!

Secondly, the vendor displays were again a little poor. I used to remember a wide variety of different things for sale in these expos, but I didn’t see that. If you weren’t looking for comic books, action figures, or DVDs there was nothing really there for you. We tried to check out the gaming section to see if there was any interesting board games on display, but were underwhelmed. We ended up sitting down and playing ‘Settlers of Catan’ for an hour and a half. A game that several of us own and didn’t have to pay $25 each for the privilege of playing.

Maybe I used to be more into the stuff that was there… or maybe I’m just losing touch with my geekdom. Personally, I was happier when we went back to Matt’s place and played D&D for the rest of the night. I just wish we hadn’t wasted half the day doing other stuff when we could have been doing that!

Well, I decided to test out the new Alpha version of Ubuntu over the past few days. Unfortunately it’s been nothing but problems. That should be expected with an Alpha, but my main concern was with graphic drivers and sound… two VERY important parts of the system.

First off - the Video. Apparently ATI hasn’t release a version of their driver which will work with the new Xorg (version 7.4) that is shipping with Intrepid. This isn’t Ubuntu’s fault, so I won’t dwell on it. I will mention that ATI did just release a new driver about five days ago which we were hoping for support, but it didn’t come.

So to alleviate the issue, I switched to the open source Radeon driver. Not a real problem, since I’ve had to do this several times before. The driver works nicely, and I can get one monitor up in its native resolution (1680×1050). The problems start when I try to get the dual-head (two monitors) configuration going. The MergedFB method which used to work doesn’t. The Xinerama route does work, but my VGA monitor is EXTRA bright. It’s so bright that I can’t read anything that’s on a white background. Unfortunately that means this solution doesn’t work either. The ‘official’ way of doing this now is supposed to be with a tool called XRandR, but I’m not having much luck here either. Sometimes I can get the dual-head to work, but it will consistently revert back to a mirrored configuration showing the same desktop on both monitors. That makes this slightly unusable in my opinion.

Secondly there’s the sound issue. I’m not certain exactly what the issue was, but previously I had a USB headset connected to the computer for gaming and applications like Skype. Usually it defaults to the secondary output and I can select it in the preferences if I would like to use it. The issue seems to be that Ubuntu wants to use it as the primary all of the time! And, to top it all off I can’t get any sound out of the sound card (SB Audigy2) any more now that I have the headset unplugged.

So, as I type this I’m burning a copy of Hardy Heron (8.04) in order to reinstall. Not a big deal though, it’s one of those things that lets me get rid of all the extra crap I installed and don’t need anymore! This is actually made quite easy as well since my “/home” partition is on a nice RAID and everything else is on an 80GB partition of another HD.

Looks like it’s done… so time to format and start again!