I got my TV tuner card moved over to Athena, the Linux box yesterday.  So today, I installed MythTV on it; either because I was bored, high or both.  It's actually pretty cool, although there were a couple of drawbacks for me.  The first is that Athena only has an Athlon 550 processor, so it's not too fast.  The second and bigger one though is that I don't have cable tv right now and don't know where my antenna is to use regular tv.  I might look for it later and try that out.  But for anyone looking for a PVR box who doesn't mind using Linux, I would recommend it.

I came across a website for a web-based Tech TV network. They have a show called Systm where two guys talk about a tech topic for 10-15 minutes. They've got two episodes now. The first one talked about "warspying", where you look for those wireless X10 cameras that we all used to get lots of popups about. The second though, talked about MythTV, an open source DVR program for Linux.

My second monitor for my desktop died today, so I had to steal the monitor off the Linux box I had running. I was thinking though about taking my TV tuner, which doesn't work under Windows Server 2003 anyway, and putting it in there to hook up to the TV. If only I still had cable TV.  I might go ahead and do it anyway just to play with it.

Back when Pluto got a new OS, I didnt' have space to copy all the data from my 120GB file storage drive to another drive so I could reformat it using a linux filesytem. Linux will read the FreeBSD ufs, but it won't write to it, so I haven't been able to alter any of the data on the drive. This week, I borrowed an 80GB drive so I could finally reformat that drive. I finally got all the data copied to other disks, and Pluto is currently putting it back on that drive under a new resierfs. It's about time.

So the motherboard in Pluto died the other day. Pissed me off. It was troublesome when I put it in (it was used) and it seems to have gone back to the problem it was having before. I tried another motherboard in it, but it was also used and had some problems. I finally broke down and bought a new motherboard and processor (so I could speed the server up a bit).

After I got the thing installed, it didn't want to work very well, at least with the hard drives. I kept getting an Invalid partition message from the FreeBSD boot manager. I'd been having some problems because it was my first install of FreeBSD 5.x anyway, so I thought I'd try and reinstall it. That still didn't work.

I finally broke down and decided that a Linux install would make me a better desktop anyway, so I installed that instead. Two days later, I've got it up and running, almost completely. I've also got KDE using the multimedia keys on the keyboard. I just have a few more pieces of software to install and it'll be finished.

I've been playing with my Gentoo installation on my laptop today. I finally finished getting power management support setup so that it will detect if it's on battery power and adjust things accordingly. I'm fairly happy with the results for that. Also, I updated to a newer revision of the kernel and got the nvidia module for it and the driver for X running. It's amazing how much of a difference it makes in the performance of X.

I finally got Gentoo Linux installed and running KDE on the laptop the other day. Then I decided that I'd screwed up a few things during the install process. I'm pretty sure that was why I couldn't get the 2.6 Kernel running properly. The final verdict was to call it part of The Learning Process^TM and reformat and reinstall using the 2.6 Kernel from the beginning. It seems to be going a lot smoother the second time around. It's almost done again. It's currently compiling the last of KDE as we speak. It should be done in plenty of time for me to take the laptop to work in the morning.

After waiting foever for it to compile, I've finally got X & KDE running natively and under VMWare from Windows. I've even got it running at the same insane 1680x1050 resolution that I run Windows at. It's starting to come together. Have to get a few new styles to get KDE running the way I want it to. Almost there.

I've abandoned the 2.6 Kernel effort for now. On the bright side, I've got bootsplash working under 2.4. I think I'm going to tell the box to finish installing KDE and go pass out now.

I've got Gentoo installed on the laptop now. Since I got home from work, I've installed VMWare on the laptop as well so I can run both OSes simulatenously. I think I've decided that Gentoo really isn't too bad of a distribution. It's funny though that I've been too busy playing with base

So I've been playing with the idea of FreeBSD as a Desktop OS for a week or so now. I love X & KDE. I'm still running into a few snags along the way though. I think some of my biggest problems are caused by the fact that FreeBSD is designed to be a server OS. A lot of things, like Flash, are really designed to work on Linux better. I believe FreeBSD actually uses the Linux binary for the flash plugin. Because of this, I've decided to try installing Linux as a Desktop OS to play with.