Wild-Heart.net

KDE4 was released yesterday. Yay! Not really. It’s lovely but still obviously not quite ready for prime time for those who like to configure their main panel. Even worse was an ATI driver update on the same day that hosed my xorg.conf. Got that straightened out.

As I recently told a friend:  I think I play with various Linux distros (read: torture myself with) is because they give me something to challenge my intellect with. Something to fuss and frett over that I can have that moment of victory that leaves me with that moment of having the feeling of, “Yes, bitch! You are mine! I won and you lost! Take that!” Life doesn’t provide me with very many opportunities to accel or conquer many problems and we all know how unappropriate those words would be if used when getting the upperhand in a parental situation. LOL

Tonight the youth minister whom voluntered to be Boy#1’s mentor for National Guard Youth Challenge is joining us for supper and paperwork. Tomorrow my sister in-law and her family will be visiting and Monday it’s up to ATL to the clinic at Emory.

Not enough hours in a day.

Yesterday was the first day of school for our household. Boy #2 and Baby Boy started their homeschool year and Boy #1 and Bonus Boy started their Public School year.

Already, OpenOffice.org is getting a workout. With the content controls enabled in IE7, Boy #2 cannot cheat when he uses OO.o for his various writing assignments. Yesterday he gave it a work out typing up definitions and sentences for his spelling words. This morning before 07:00 Baby Boy was at the desk and typing up his Creative Writing assignment for the day. He likes to find a coloring page and then write a story to go with it. He hates being corrected by adults but doesn’t mind the red squiggly line under misspelled words in a word processing application.

Boy #1 took to school his usual letter typed up by me for his teachers explaining his Other Health Impaired IEP seeing as the Special Services Department never gets the IEP’s to the schools prior to the start of the new school year. He seemed to really like all of his teachers and his homeroom teacher is male this year. We have a suspicion that will be a good thing as Greg responds much better to male authority figures than female authority figures.

Joseph called Bonus Boy’s mother last night and it would seem he also had an excellent first day. I wish I had pictures to share but Boy #1 has taken all of the batteries out of everything including my camera, yet again. Never fear. I shall be hunting their room for batteries out of RC cars later today (what goes around comes around) and will at least be able to take pictures of the two homeschoolers at work.

Yesterday evening was an amazingly early and quiet evening. We had all, except Baby Boy who was still sleeping, and Bonus Boy who had gone to his mother’s on Sunday, woke up at 04:00 so that goodbyes good be said and given to my mother as Joseph and I had to make the road trip with her to the Atlanta Airport and be there by 06:30. All of the children were asleep by 19:45 last night. Alas, Joseph and I were also so tired that we were both sound alseep before 22:00.

Here’s to the hope of another good day and beginning of what will hopefully be a fantastic school year!

*As a note. I apologize for leaving most of you on the blogroll neglected over the past couple of weeks. While my mom was here visiting it was just impossible to do much blog reading. By the end of the week I hope to get caught up with all of you as soon as I’ve finished upgrading to KDE 4. I’ve missed you all!

I purchased a new computer late this past May. It has an Intel Core Duo and is quite a bit more beefy than the computer I built 5 years ago. The going Intel makes me feel like a traitor to AMD. It also cost a great deal less than the parts combined to build that computer 5 years ago. It came preloaded with XP Professional. I had previously purchased a laptop but returned it as soon as it became evident that it was not going to make anything more convenient for me and it came preloaded with Vista Home Basic. What horrid experience that OS was.

As would come to no surprise to anyone who knows me I turned to my old faithful… Fedora Core, this time Core 7. I tried both the 64 bit build and the regular build. I had nothing but problems with my wifi. One day it would work, the next it didn’t. In the end I contacted a former college and Linux sys-admin about configuring madwifi. He told me the best advice he could give me was to try Ubuntu instead. But being the KDE whore than I am, I went for Kubuntu instead. I fought for 3 days to get  the wifi working with our router and to stop attempting to connect me to our neighbor’s wifi.

I’m still fighting to get samba to play nice with our household network. I don’t think Kubuntu was quite ready with their KDE modules. My smb.conf is forever being overwritten. By what? I’m too busy to find out. Currently I’m installing gnome just to be able to log in with to Gnome and be able to use their tools to configure samba. Yes I could attempt to find and solve the problem, but the time it’s taking me to write this is really more time than I can spare in a day until Baby Boy is asleep.

If that doesn’t work, I’ll download and install Ubuntu and then install KDE. But not w/out a full back up. I thought I’d be safe with the files from my 5 yr. old machine but the external hard drive enclosure we  have fried my 80 gig drive. 60 of those gigs were music.

In all it’s been kind of fun. And I really think with the advances being made by the Ubuntu community that now would be the perfect time for Corel to start doing the Draw Suite for Linux again. If Adobe’s Shockwave developers for the hopeful linux version would actually show us some progress, *Ubuntu Linux would absolutely perfect for every computer in this house. Even Joseph concedes to the bit about Shockwave.

So there you have it, the one confession of switchery that I didn’t make is that I am no longer an ATI whore either.

I’ve changed my brand loyalty three times over and I’ve purchased instead of built my own. Somehow, I feel a bit dirty and underhanded.