I finally got tired of trying to get my ATI Radeon 9000 Pro to work properly with Linux. I had to jump through hoops to get Google Earth to work, I had to turn of stars in Celestia with gconf-editor to prevent it from crashing, Neverwinter Nights would crash at random, and I had problems with certain color-depth / resolution combinations.

Ever since I upgraded to my desktop to Debian Linux I have not been able to run Google Earth. It would freeze on the splash screen and never open the main interface. I used Google Earth on Debian before, so I knew it was just a problem with my machine. As it turns out, it was the new ATI fglrx drivers that were preventing it from running properly.

Apparently, all versions of ATI’s proprietary Linux (fglrx) drivers version 2.28 and newer will not work for Google Earth (at least on some systems). So here is how to get Google Earth working again:

The real question that is being asked here is how much can someone change Firefox and still be able to call it Firefox. But before anyone takes this article the wrong way, let me clear up a few things. I love Firefox. I respect the fact that they wish to have quality control over the product that bears the Firefox brand. I will continue to recommend Firefox to Microsoft Windows users without any reservations. However, I trust Debian far more than the Firefox crew to package and configure Firefox/Iceweasel in a way that meets the standards of my Debian system.

My D-Link router died and I bought a Linksys WRT54g thinking I could put Linux on it. Unfortunately, I should have checked a little more before I bought it because I got a v5, which has half of the RAM and flash memory and is not compatible with most 3rd party firmwares. I also found out that I could not forward packets to the broadcast address, which is exactly what I needed to do to get Wake-on-LAN working.

I have seen many, many discussions about how Linux is faster than MS Windows, or how Gentoo is faster than Arch is faster than Debian is faster than SUSE. Faster? Will I really notice a few milliseconds? Will my hardware have the same speed boosts as these other people are claiming? Will some things be faster while other things get slower?

The answer is yes/no/maybe. I can definitely say that Debian IS faster than Windows 2000 on the same hardware. I can also extrapolate that since Windows XP is just 2000 with some added features (bloat), that Debian is also faster than Windows XP.

One of Debian’s greatest strengths is the Debian Free Software Guidelines (DFSG). Among other things, it says that software must be free to redistribute in both binary and source code forms, and that people can freely make and distribute derivative programs from it. While this is one of the principal ideas of both Debian and the open source community, it does not help you if you want to watch a DVD on you computer.

I have always had problems installing sound cards in Linux, whether it was on-board or a Sound Blaster. I have tried several SimplyMepis LiveCDs and they always seem to get some sort of sound out of my cards so I figured it was something in my configuration. I recently installed Debian on my main computer, and this time was typical with my Sound Blaster only halfway working.

Attempt #1 - Sound Blaster Live! 24-bit

My hard drive crashed and I was again left with the proposition of re-installing Windows. I have used Linux in the past and have dabbled with Debian in virtual machines. I read a great book about Debian called The Debian System written by Martin Krafft which convinced me that Debian was the right Linux distribution for me (where is Ubuntu’s Social Contract?). I highly recommend this book for anyone who is even slightly interested in Debian.

Here are the directions for how to shutdown or restart in Xfce4 without a password. It will also enable the shutdown and restart buttons.

Open a terminal use visudo and add the following:

username ALL = NOPASSWD: /usr/sbin/xfsm-shutdown-helper

This could need to be /usr/libexec/xfsm-shutdown-helper on non-Debian based systems.