I was pleasantly surprized the other day. While looking around on Distrowatch for some new distros to try. I do that from time to time just to amuse myself. Now this distro isn’t new, but it’s new to me and quit pleasing to use.
It’s called “Austrumi”, and it’s based on Slackware. The part that really set well with me was that it comes with Skype and some codecs already installed. Since I use skype nearly everytime I boot up, it makes this livecd quite usable for me.
But it has other pluses for a livecd. One it fits on a business card disk which will fit in your pocket. It also boots to ram and ejects the disk so you can use the drive for other disks.
I was booted up in version 1.8.5 and downloaded version 1.9.3 and burned it to disk. Because it runs totally in ram, it’s quit responsive, not like most livecds which are sluggish uncompressing and loading programs. Austrumi responds quickly.
Of course it has some faults, which distro doesn’t?
It seems to be built for Pentium processesors. And won’t work on AMD or even my Centrino M Processor, which is intel, that seemed strange to me. So it was a little disappointing after I had tested it on my low end box and then found it wouldn’t work on my Laptop, which is somewhat newer and stronger.
But all in all!
I still think it’s a great find and plan to keep a disk handy on my desk to run when I need to.
I finally figured out why Mepis 8 was playing a plan blue screen when watching videos. Even though I had all my codecs and system in full working order.
It’s rather simple! Or just plan stupid. Not sure which. And I’m also not sure who is at fault Mepis or the media player developers.
It seems that most of the media player developers have written those programs to run at a 24 color depth, and if the color depth is set to low, they just play a blue screen with great sound. And Mepis is installed at color depth 16 by default. So all it takes to get Mepis into full stream media compliance is to reset the color depth to 24.
No more blue screen media players!!!!
Now wasn’t that simple, or stupid on everybody part? Mine included.
I normally run my distros on 24 color depth, But then again, I don’t normally have to change them. So why does mepis have to upset my apple cart? By defaulting to a color depth that’s not normal.
On the other hand, why do the media player developers, build to play at one depth and not at others? Most videos are just 256 colors, so why do they build for color depth of 24 and not 16?
And my last big grip, It took several months of googleing off and on to even find the answer to this problem. And a lot of aguements on IRC channels about how I didn’t have something installed properly. I can’t believe I’m the only fool that this situation took for a long ride.
At any rate, due to this hiccup, I left Mepis behind and no longer use it as my main distro. Simply Because I had to have multimedia functions. Now I’m not a simpleton, nor a newbie. And yet this problem eluded me for several months. Just how many others tried mepis and went else where because of stupid simple mistakes such as this?
Or for that matter left linux all together because of lack in answers to simple fixes along these lines?
I don’t know if google will find this page for some future poor soul that is having that same problem but if it does. Here’s the fix!
After you’ve installed all the codecs you want and if Mepis is still just giving you a Blue Screen in you media player of choice. Then go to your xorg.conf file and change your color depth to 24, and restart your x server. That sould fix it for you. It did for all three of my installs.
August 17th,2009
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I don’t know if I’ve mentioned TiddlyWiki before, But I have just recently done some desktop spring cleaning. And found my TiddlyWiki to be a great assistant. It runs right in the browser and is the best note taking/making method I’ve found so far. And believe you me, I’ve tried a lot of them.
Most of your note making programs have major draw backs.
Frist and biggest draw back is portability, You make a note on one PC and there it stays. With TiddlyWiki it’s just a small html file which you can store on a thumb drive, which makes it available on all you PCs.
Second and next to the biggest draw back is related. Backing up your notes. Or restoring your notes. Most note software I’ve seen and used stores the notes in strange hard to find places and formats, Once again a TiddlyWiki is just one html file where you put it.
Third draw back is custom-ability, TiddlyWiki is very customizable, They have a lot of templates each can be changed to suit your needs, with little or no former experience. I found that, I like to use two or three different ones, but that isn’t really a must.
TiddlyWiki has one weak point, because it’s just one file, if you have hundreds or thousands of large notes, it can get blotted. But notes aren’t supposed to be that big. Or that numerous. Although some TiddlyWikies on the web have quite a lot of content to them.
I don’t use the TiddlyWiki on the web, but some have done so. It’s just my choice to use them private on my thumb drive. They put all my notes at my finger tips on which ever PC I set down to. For those of you which are interested here is some more related links to help you out with your new TiddlyWiki experiance.
A TiddlyWiki Help File For Beginners.
TiddlyTools presents Technologies, Techniques, Tricks, Tips, Tweaks and Tutorials for TiddlyWiki readers, authors and developers, using a combination of plugins, macros, scripts, templates, and stylesheets by Eric L Shulman/ELS Design Studios.
TiddlyVault is a comprehensive collection of plugins, macros, and other extensions available to enhance your TiddlyWiki experience. It is a sequel of sorts to a tutorial ( Tiddlywiki for the rest of us ) and also to ( TiddlyWiki in Action ), a showcase of others’ TiddlyWikis from around the world.
Happy Tiddling!
