Another Word for Nerd

I scanned some more historical UNIX-related advertisements from some early-90s issues of UNIXWorld Magazine.

Tonight I replaced my year-old Linksys WRT54Gv2 with a brand-new WRT54Gv3, running the Sveasoft Talisman 1.0.5 replacement firmware.

I’ve also got a WRT54Gv2.2 in the music room, bridging the systems in there (Mac mini, AMD Windows machine, Dell SC420 running Linux) to the rest of the network.

With the prior v2 ‘54G, I never got more than 1 megabyte/sec transfer rate between the routers. When I upgraded to the v3, that has now jumped to a rock-solid 2.2 megabytes/sec (tested with a 200M file).

I’ll probably make the old v2 unit another wireless bridge in the bedroom, for when I finally get the DirecTiVo in there connected to the network so I can dump shows to the Mac here in the computer room.

Got the new Dell system all setup and updated with Fedora Core 4. Today its new video card arrived, a Radeon 9250 PCI (128M) that was a “thank you” gift from a friend for setting up the website for his upcoming wedding.

After 1.5 hours of fighting to get the ATI card working, I’ve come to the conclusion that ATI’s Linux support still sucks as bad as it did two years ago when I had troubles getting FireGL 4 cards working under RHEL 2.1. I finally got things working properly with the Xorg drivers (ATI’s latest drivers won’t compile under the 2.6.12 kernel), but it should *not* have taken me an hour and a half to do so.

Next time I’ll ask for an nVidia card, as I’ve never had one take more than five minutes to setup with their binary driver package and installer.

I don’t really see the point of this one, since I got the certification already.. but I got this in email a few minutes ago.

I passed my RHCE certification exam.


Do I have to get a penguin tattooed on my butt now?

L1NUx 4 lyfE j0. hAD A 900d 71Me 1n CLaZZ 70day. cH1nEzE 7aKe0U7 f0R LUnCH. 7heY HaD 7H1z mY57er10uz ReD k00L-A1d. 17 7A57eD funNy, 8u7 1 DrANk a l07 0F 17. 1 7h1nK 1′lL 90 L00k F0R a red H@ 70M0Rr0w..

the morning has started off with everyone walking around like zombies groaning “COFFEE….”

Day Two of the RHCE certification class. I’ve had a couple more “oh!” lightbulb-coming-on moments, and learned things. So far, I’ve been drinking the Red Hat Linux kool-aid, and its not that bad. I still prefer Solaris, but Red Hat isn’t as bad as I thought.

Had the first day of my RHCE cram-and-exam course today. The instructor is nice, and the class is sixteen people. I’ve had no trouble so far and I think I’ll do well; I’ve had a couple of “Oh!” moments that clarified how things work, so I’m learning things.

As part of the course, everyone got a bag with the following goodies:

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux ES Media Kit (with 30-day update license)
• Red Hat-logo notebook
• Red Hat “calendar strip” for the top of a monitor or whatever
• Wind-up “Red Hat with feet” walking toy
• A red 3.5″ floppy diskette, to be used later in the course for an emergency boot floppy
• and last of all, a COFFEE MUG (its a really nice coffee mug)

You’d think that for $2495 they could give us more than a 30-day trial subscription to RHN…