There’s some flicker and blue lines across the screen on this video, but that’s just due to my nonexistent video editing skills.

Buying a new APG graphics card would have been kind of stupid,I’d just have wasted a lot of money on a card that I could not use with any decent motherboard later. So what the hell, lets buy a new motherboard. Oh wait, my old AMD processor will need a socket 754 motherboard. No way, I’m not going to buy a new ancient system. Wait another sec, my memory won’t be compatible either… It’s not easy to upgrade a system that is friggin three years old! The situation would be slightly better had I three years ago invested in a socket 939, but only slightly I guess.

Anyway, I decided to go for a budget motherboard with an integrated GPU. I chose the Asus M2N-MX, only 58€ @ verkosta.fi, which fared well in hintaseuranta, and they had it in stock. Newegg reviews for this board are spot on – it’s good value for your money, it comes with everything you need, but it’s got some minor problems, such as:

• Very confusing labeling for DIMM slots, but OK if you read the manual carefully.
• No locking clip for the heat sink’s retention bracket lock to clip into – but IMHO who needs that anyway? The heat sink will stay on just fine without it.
• “No mounting points near where the power cable and PATA cable plugs into the motherboard. Plugging and un-plugging those into the board causes it to flex more than I am comfortable with.” – nc3d – I could not agree more, plugging in the power and PATA cables is pretty scary with this one.

I found a couple of additional problems:

There’s no PC-speaker on the mobo! How will I be able to play Space Invaders?!?

There was a really ugly white scratch on my southbridge heat sink. Overall the product does not look very polished…

Some more pics:

If you need more connectors than this, buy another motherboard. With the M2N-MX you get no DVI, IEEE 1394, S/PDIF… just the basics. <sarcasm>Serial port is there, which is all I need</sarcasm>.

The accessories are pretty basic too, nothing fancy, just the absolute necessities. There was a case sticker, which was nice

Here’s my AMD 64 X2 3800+ processor, not the fastest thing on the planet, but a great budget product. Got it for 66€ from Mikromaja, apparently the cheapest in Finland. Also bought some cheap memory from verkkokauppa.com. Here’s my updated machine:

Pretty leds all-over the case… Notice how the micro-ATX board is just ridiculously small for my huge case.

Everything works just fine for me with the Asus M2N-MX. Installing Ubuntu 7.04 was a breeze, although there were some problems with X settings after installing the proprietary Nvidia drivers, but not a big deal. More on that later, if I bother…

I was shocked today when I found Wanda the fish floating upside-down in its tank. Happy April 1st everybody!

The deal is that you have to share your WiFi connection with other registered users. That’s pretty cool, because if there are a lot of Foneros out there, then you have a good chance of using a Fon connection for free when you travel. You can use maps.fon.com to check out Foneros closest to your location. Tech.am has some “real statistics” of Foneros worldwide, claiming that Fon isn’t actually as widespread as they let you believe. Well I don’t care if there aren’t any Fon hotspots in Bangkok or Cathmandu, there are some in Helsinki and that’ll be enough for me.

The La Fonera is “free” as in “free beer for a limited time only”, but how “free” is it as in “freedom of speech”? (See “Gratis versus Libre” if you are still confused.) The La Fonera wireless router uses the open source OpenWrt firmware for embedded devices. It’s nice to know that my Fonera router is running open source software. If I want to, I can download the source code for OpenWrt, hack it, share my hacks with others, and install it in some other device. The Fonera router is therefore “sort of free” – but it’s not free for you to hack and do whatever you want with it. It’s like a piece of free software locked up in a cage. Anton Demartini writes:

“What I mean is that perhaps, leaving la fonera open, and freeing the possibility for anybody with skills to reflash it, to enhance it and, why not, to correct bugs along you, could be a great benefit also for FON business.”

I completely agree. It would be much smarter If I could just use my hardware of choice, install more features on the router and provide a better service for the Foneros that connect to my WiFi. It would be possible to create a free wireless network similar to Fon, which is open for all registered users, but gives the users more flexibility with their hardware and software.

The bottom line is, I got a free router from these guys and I get to use WiFi for free when I travel, so I should not complain. However, I do suffer from the “free all software” syndrome. I just hate to have a piece of free software on my device, which I cannot use as I like. Thankfully, there are some solutions. Jauzsi explains how to open up the device and attach a connecter to allow ssh on the device. As far as I know Stefan Datenbruch was the first to use shell code injection to free the device. The exploited weakness has been fixed by Fon, so that hack doesn’t work anymore, but it worked as inspiration for this hack, which works like a charm. Follow the hack and then just SSH to your La Fonera, enter password “admin” and behold:

Next it’s up to you what you do with your unlocked Fonera. If I come up with any hacks of my own, I’ll be sure to post them here.

Update: There’s now a third hack for firmware version 0.7.1 r1. If you’re feeling especially white and nerdy today, check out gelPlog’s instructions on how to recover a bricked Fonera.

A while ago I was hooked on Travian – a really addictive MMOG. I had to know what time it was around the globe so that I could attack my enemies when they were most likely sleeping. I installed gworldclock to find out that it was utterly useless for this purpose. In order to add a new time zone you first have to select a continent from a tab, then the country from an other tab and last choose the region (i.e. the city) from the third tab. It is really annoying to add all the time zones you are interested in one by one. Now check out kworldclock:

Just move the mouse on the map and you’ll know in one nanosecond what time it is in Los Angeles. The map also helps you visualize where it’s day and where it’s still night on the globe. Really simple to use and it *just works*. So kworldclock is yet another KDE app that I use with Gnome. So kudos to KDE – and Gnome. I love you both

This problem is just due to bad web programming from nytimes.com. It should be enough to just check if the visitor is using Macromedia Flash, because that’s apparently all you need to view the videos. It seems that a lot of sites are still making ridiculous demands from their users. “This site is best viewed with IE 4.0″ is a message that you’ll still today see on a lot of websites. Perhaps some companies add a fancy piece of script to detect the browser just for he hell of it, because it’s a common web cliche they’ve seen on so many other sites. But to tell the visitors that they have to install Windows XP in order to view a simple web page is just plain silly. Please everybody – just make standards compliant web pages. Now if the visitor’s browser isn’t standards compliant it’s the visitor’s fault they can’t view the site.

This may not be the worst case of discrimination in the world, but it is extremely annoying. So just give angry feedback whenever you come across sites that don’t like Linux users. It might not change a damn thing, but at least it’ll make you feel better.

There is one thing about Gnome that really bugs me though – oversimplified apps. They’re pretty and shiny, they do the job but have no configuration options. Sometimes the lack of configuration options even renders the app utterly useless. A good example is gnome-screensaver. Notice anything strange about this screenshot? If you look closely, there’s no button for settings. You can’t change an individual screensaver’s settings by right-clicking either. That’s not so bad for screensavers that just display some swirly things on the screen, but for a screensaver such as “Picture folder” it really sucks. You can’t change the picture folder, it allways looks in your ~/Pictures folder. Just drag and drop you’r favourite pics in there. But why can’t the user just choose the darn folder himself? Would it really make the app so complicated?

According to the gnome-screensaver FAQ the missing settings button is actually “a feature”. They claim that they’ve tried a different approach and that “There are advantages for the user. It demands that themes simply work and that the defaults make sense.” Well guess what? The themes don’t work and the defaults simply don’t make sense. A screensaver such as SlideScreen is supposed to grab an image of your desktop and then slide it around the screen. This would be a fun screensaver if it used the desktop, but now it just uses a default image of some kind and there is no way of changing it. The same thing happens with AntSpotlight – instead of crawling on your desktop with a spotlight, the ant just roams on top of a boring default image.

Another oversimplified app is gnome-screenshot (screenshot). It just sucks. You can’t use delay, or choose to select an area of the screen, or select a window, all features which are found in KSnapshot (screenshot). I need not mention printing in gnome. Lets just say that printing works fine for me (maybe that’s because I’m an ‘idiot’? Hmm….).

Overall I feel that Gnome is great, I find the oversimplification in Gnome less of a problem than the overKomplication in KDE. But that’s just me.

I updated my xserver yesterday. That’s what you normally should do when there are new updates available for Ubuntu. If you didn’t however download that update yesterday, you were actually better off! I had the update installed but didn’t restart my xserver afterwards. It was only later at night when I rebooted my computer that I found out that my xserver would fail. No biggie, I did the obvious thing and checked if there was yet another update available for the xserver and just typed “apt-get updgrade” from the command line. Problem solved!

This isn’t a big deal for experienced Linux users. But it is a major pain in the butt for noobs. And there are a lot of noobs using Ubuntu (which is of course a good thing). How many newbies know how to update their system from the command line? It’s easy, but if you don’t know that you should type “apt-get upgrade” you’re stuck at the command line. How many non-geeks know how to use lynx in case a gui isn’t available? Or even know what it is? So the fact of the matter is, the xserver shouldn’t break after an update. Ever. Shame on you, Ubuntu!

The good news is that the buggy update was fixed quickly. Just make sure you update to xserver-xorg-core_1.0.2-0ubuntu10.4 and not 10.3 which is the buggy one, it should be out there already, so if you haven’t updated yet you should be able to safely do so now. More info on this at Ubuntu Demon’s blog.

Update: The Register now has this story, like a week after it happened. Ubuntu issued an apology and provides idiot-proof instructions on how to fix the issue. I hope there’s nobody out there still staring at the green terminal not knowing what to do. But there probably are.

A great way to spread Ubuntu is to make a small box out of cardboard (a cerial box will do) and attach one CD cover to it (see illustration on the right). Write “grab a free copy here!” on the box and staple the box to a message board at your dorm, library, mall or local supermarket or where ever. If you’re brave, leave your phone number and offer free support When people see the text “grab free copy here” they’ll take it and hopefully even pop it in their computer. My old Breezy CDs all dissappeared almost instantly. Just hoping it wasn’t a Linux hater who just wanted to destroy them. Oh well.

As you can see, people are actually more interested in Ubuntu than in boobs! Way to go Ubuntu! What’s even more interesting, if you click on the regions link, you find that the most boob-obsessed people live in Pakistan! The Swedes and Finns however, actually find boobs less intriguing than Ubuntu… Sad Swedes and Finns…

Thanks to Kari Haakana for this idea, he compared “tits” with “computer” and “mobile phone” with interesting results (Finnish).