Evol

Merry belated Valentine's Day everyone. I'm really just procrastinating, but I'll update the old website. I found some cool things.

First off, the Nvidia 3D Glasses. I heard some commotion from CES, but didn't pay much attention to it. Then XPlay was demoing them on the show. You have to go on what you here because you can't see them through the television, without magic glasses. Anyways, NVidia's 3D Vision sounds cool. It turn your existing PC games, into a 3D experience. Over 350 games have been tested and supported. Here's [link removed] a complete list of all the games. HalfLife 2, WoW, Mass Effect, Unreal Tournament, and Mirror's Edge are some games that made the excelent list. Warcraft III, Crysis, Oblivion and Hellgate are some games that made the good. That's just a few. Check out that complete list if you have some games.

This has been tried before apparently. But NVidia is different because they make it so easy. They have it configured perfectly to suit the individual games with profiles. So you don't have to adjust before you start the game.

NVidia makes it sound cheap. $200 for the glasses and they work with any GeForce 8 series and up (they recommend a GeForec 9 series or higher though). The 9 series is pretty cheap. You can usuallyg a 9 series card for around $100. No software updates, or game updates needed, it just works.

But here's where it does get expensive. You need a 120 htz monitor. Those are expensive (i think the cheapest one is around 400 bucks, for a 22 in). So i guess that's not too bad, but add in a new card, glasses and monitor, you get a pretty steep price. You can buy a bundle of Glasses and Monitor (link removed) for $600. 22in Samsung monitor isn't bad. But yeah, that's the new technology that I want.

Another thing from NVidia, that just sounds cool, is the NVidia Tesla Personal Supercomputer. Yes, "Personal" is the key word there. More specifically, The Tesla C1060. It looks like a video card, in fact uses the same slot as a video card, but it's not. It's what seperates your workstation from a supercomputer.

Basically, this bad boy can be strung together with 3 other of these things, and be put into a system with at least 4 GB of RAM, and a quadcore processor, and a 64 bit OS (with the exclusion of Vista apparently) and it'll be better then a rack of supercomputers. Yeah.

Here's [link removed] a youtube video explaining it if you're interested. You can buy a computer with 4 of these cards in it for around $10,000. Not so bad for a supercomputer.

Gotta remember it's not geared toward the average computer user, but more towards scientists. I thought it was interesting so I thought i would share.

I think I'll actually get my home server up and running soon. I'm looking into operating systems for it. The server is just going to be a file server and my PS3 needs to be able to access the server too. So I've been working with some Linux distributions in VirtualBox.

On a side note, don't use VMWare, use VirtualBox. It's free and easy to use, and uses less system resources so the guest OS runs better. End side note.

I decided to try out OpenSolaris because Sun develops it, and Sun makes good produces like OpenOffice.org and VirtualBox. So I installed it. Oh my. Well that was a mistake.

First off, all their packages to install programs are named wierd. I was trying to install Samba, the main program to share files with Windows, and it took me a long time to find the right package. On most OS's, you type "yum install samba" or yum's equivalent. So I did the equivalent of yum in OpenSolaris, (I can't remember what it was. It was like pkg-get or something like that) and it didn't work. I went to "Add/Remove" programs and typed "Samba" in the search. Nothing. I finally just browsed for it, and found it. It was name SunOSsmba. What the heck Sun? So I installed it, and it doesn't create a config file for you. I just gave up at this point because it was too much work.

Next I tried Slackware. Oh boy... it didn't work out. It was fun installing though. To install, you don't get a nice GUI, so I had to use cfdisk to partition the harddrive. It was fun. I liked refiguring out how to do that. I figured it out. Create Swap partition, create bootable partition. Fun times. I got it. It took like an hour to install after that though. Yuck.

Then when it restarted I got a nice text based "Login:" line. So I logged in as root, because it was the only user created. Well now i'm logged in as root in the command line. So i typed "startx" which starts the gui. It did and brought be to the KDE based desktop. Yuck. I hate KDE.

I looked for the Terminal. Took awhile. Looked for Network settings. Took awhile. Looked for things that should be easily accessible, and it took a long time to find. I don't like KDE. I didn't even try to instsall Samba. I just couldn't. So I trashed Slackware. The only fun part of Slackware was partitioning the harddrive.

CentOS is next on my list. I learned how to use Samba and NFS using Fedora Core 10 for my Linux Networking class. So I tried CentOS, which is RedHat based, like Fedora, except better. Oh boy. I loved the install options.

After the timezone and creating a root password, I was greeted with the install packages menu. Categories included: Desktop GNOME, Desktop KDE, Sever, Server (no GUI), and some other options. I quickly selected Desktop GNOME, and Server, and hit Customize now. I selected the things for GNOME Desktop like office apps, webbrowsers, and the like. Then for Servers I picked FTP, Samba, NFS. I could have installed Apache and so much more for servers. So it was awesome. After installing, I had some network problems. I don't know why. After restarting like 5 times, and then hitting "Deactivate" then "Activate" for eth0, it worked. Whatever. As long as it worked.

I wanted to update the system, but "yum install update" said there were no new packages, and I couldn't find the GUI "Update System." I like the GUI for some things. Anyways, after like 15 minutes, I was finally prompted to update the system. So i did.

Afterwards, I configured Samba, and it worked! YAY. Now for the PS3 part. I tried Fuppes. I couldn't install it from Source for some odd reason. It said I didn't have a package installed, even though I checked for that package and it was indeed installed. Anyways, I found a some custom instructions for CentOS 5.2 and used his/her RPM and other commands. I got it installed, but it didn't work. So yeah. I'll try another program though. Looks like ushare is a good one for CentOS.

I bought House of the Dead Overkill. It's pretty good. It's hilarious. They went over-the-top. I didn't think I'd here that much swearing from a Wii game. Plus a bad guy slapped a cripple! It's a good time though. The only thing I don't like, is the gun they give you at the beginning sucks too much. It has a slow reload time, and not very many bullets. Although I only died twice in the first stage. So yeah.

I also ordered Onechanbara for the Wii. Apparently I bought two copies. I really should read the confirmation emails they send you. Oh well. My friend wanted a copy, and he said he'd buy one of them off me.

I'm going to leave on that note. I need to do homework.

Later.