A couple of weeks ago my DVD burner decided to kick the bucket. I was wanting to download Fedora 8 and burn it to a DVD so I could install it onto my computer. Unfortunately, that wasn’t going to happen. I decided that I would seek out a website that sold pressed copies of Linux distributions. I found DiscountLinuxDVD.com and am very pleased with their services.

I was only going to buy Fedora 8 but I wound up purchasing several others because they were a good price and I have been wanting to play with some of the updated distributions. I also prefer carrying around a pressed copy of some of the live Linux distributions that I use. People get weary sometimes of you putting in a home burned CD or DVD. I ordered the following: CentOS 5 DVD, CentOS 5 Live CD, Feespire 2.0, Slax 5.1.8 Live CD, openSUSE 10.3 DVD (i386 32-bit), openSUSE 10.3 (DVD x86_64 64-bit), openSUSE 10.3 (DVD PPC), Mandriva One 2008 Live/Install CD (KDE), Mandriva Free 2008 DVD, Ubuntu Studio 7.10, Fedora 8 (DVD PPC), Fedora 8 (DVD x86_64 64-bit), Fedora 8 (DVD i386 32-bit). All of that for $25.12. I thought that was a great deal to have pressed copies of all those distributions and different versions.

The other reason I enjoyed making my purchase at this site instead of the other sites out there was the fact that I did not have to order with a credit card. I simply ordered with my PayPal account and the funds were automatically deducted from my balance on PayPal. That’s how I like it and I greatly appreciate any company that allows me to do that.

If you’re looking for a easy way to play around with Linux and see what all the fuss is about I would highly recommend going over to DiscountLinuxDVD.com and purchasing a live CD. Slax, Puppy or Damm Small Linux (DSL) are great for older machines.

A couple of weeks ago my younger brother asked me to buy some songs for him from the iTunes store. So I thought this would be no big deal. Normally I buy, download and burn the songs to a CD and also put them onto his iPod shuffle for him. Well, that wasn’t the case this time. I had some issues and thought I would share them.

The music was bought and I transferred it over to my PC because the iBook doesn’t have a CD buner. No big deal. I get the tracks into iTunes on the PC and put them into a playlist and click on burn, no luck. There is an error that it can’t find a burner. The drive was being recognized by Windows as well as Nero. I got to thinking about it and I decided to disconnect the hard drive that was also on the same cable as the CD/DVD burner. Ok, first of all. I know it’s probably not wise to do that but I needed to connect the drive to the computer and it worked, so shush! Anyways. After taking my computer case apart, unplugging the hard drive and getting it all put back together again I turn the PC on and I still get the same error in iTunes. The drive is still being recognized by Windows and Nero but not iTunes.

I then realize that Nero is not displaying the drive as a CD or DVD Burner. I don’t know what the deal with that was. I’m still having issues copying CDs or DVDs. I’m thinking that I’m either needing to re-flash the optical drive, re-install Windows or buy a new DVD burner. But anyways. That’s not why I am writing.

Once I finally got the music over onto the PC and found out that I was not going to be able to burn the music using iTunes, I needed to try and burn it using Nero or something else. Of course you can’t do that without removing the DRM from the music! So I found myFairTunes, a Windows only application. DRM Dumpster does the same thing for Mac users but you’ll need a CD-RW drive and disc. Also, the software is not free. I removed the DRM, converted the tracks to MP3 format in iTunes and tried to burn the music using Nero. Of course I thought the music had burned succesfully because it went through the entire process and said it was successful. However, looking at the CD after it came out of the drive you can tell that there was nothing on the disc. When you put it into a CD player it makes the blank disc noise and when you put it back into a computer it says it is blank.

My point to this entire entry is that DRM is only making it harder for people who actually purchase music. We all know that. However the music industry still does not understand that fact. Thankfully, iTunes is now offering DRM free music. Also, fortunately, there are amazing companies like Magnatune who are against DRM. Magnatune allows you share the music you purchase with 3 people and they also let you license the music for videos, podcasts and other productions under a Creative Commons license.

The issue I had isn’t the only reason DRM needs to be sent to the dumpster. People want to buy music players and put their music on it. When a player is tied to one music store and one DRM format, you can’t do it. Maybe one of these days this will be a thing of the past and our descendants will look at us like we were crazy for using DRM (along with many, many other things).

A couple of years ago I found out about Creative Commons. I watched the videos on their website and I was intrigued by it. Everytime I would create something I would stamp a CC license onto it because I thought it was so cool. A couple of years passed and I got out of the habit of CC’ing everything until the other day. I listened to MikeyPod’s latest podcast where he interviews Joi Ito who is on the board of Creative Commons.

During the interview Joi Ito discusses Flickr and the benefits of having your images on Flickr having a Creative Commons license instead of the standard “All Rights Reserved” license. I would love for more people to use and see my photos. I don’t necessarily care whether I get paid for them or not as long as I get credit for them. I also would prefer that if people use them they have whatever they make be licensed under Creative Commons as well. I opted to change most of my photos to a Creative Commons Share Alike license. I didn’t change them all because I didn’t want photos of my family to be used by a commercial entity, they would not appreciate that. I changed a few of mine to CC, just in case someone decides I’m important enough for a Wikipedia article, someday!

During the interview Joi mentions the reasons people have really horrible pictures of themselves on their Wikipedia pages, that’s because a lot of images have copyright restrictions. I thought that was a really good point to bring up. A lot of people forget about that when they go to a portrait studio and have their photos taken and later on down the road want to have them re-printed but cannot find a photo copy center that will copy them because they are copyrighted by the photography studio. I know many people who have bought scanners because of this!

Also during the interview Joi mentions a plugin for WordPress for inserting Creative Commons meta information into your site. I have installed the plugin, I honestly don’t see where it has changed my source code. I don’t know if it’s suppose to or not. However. I just wanted to do my part of sharing my content to the world, just as long as I get credit and they share alike!

You should check out the interview MikeyPod did, it was really a great interview. Lots of valuable information. The interview has renewed my love of Creative Commons.

Last night I decided to go ahead and try to get the official Nvidia drivers installed for my GPU on Fedora 7. I was hesitant to do this because normally whenever I try to do this I break something and wind up having to re-install the entire operating system because I can’t figure out what I need to change in my x.org configuration file to make it work again. Fortunately, last night I had better luck.

I followed the instructions on this site first. When I’d reboot, the X-Server wouldn’t work probably. The text login screen would blink three times then a blue screen would come up saying that X was unable to be started. Eventually it would fix itself and I was able to login graphically. The driver was being installed but it was not directly rendering.

I then found this entry on another site that said SELinux causes the driver to not install correctly. I thought that might have been the issue so I disabled SELinux and the firewall, restarted, still got the same thing.

After about 30 minutes I finally found this entry on another site that made me realize that I was installing the wrong drivers for my video card. The GeForce2, 3 and 4 (including MX) cards are not supported by the 97xx drivers, you have to use the 96xx series.

I finally got the correct drivers installed and everything working properly, even the desktop effects work. I thought in case I have to do this again and in case someone else has the same card that I do I would make an entry about how I got the drivers installed:

• Open up a terminal window, login as root by entering su - and pressing enter at the prompt. Enter your root password and press enter.
• Enter the following command: rpm -ivh http://rpm.livna.org/livna-release-7.rpm and press enter.
• Enter the following command: rpm –import /etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-livna and press enter.
• Enter the following command: yum install kmod-nvidia-96xx xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-96xx and press enter. (Remember to put spaces between the two applications)
• Once everything has been installed enter the following command service nvidia-96xx restart

At this point, I rebooted the machine just to make sure everything was installed correctly. Upon restart you should see a green Nvidia logo pop up, it may fade up depending on whether or not the desktop effects were enabled during the installation.

I went ahead and posted my own instructions for doing this because I wasn’t able to follow the instructions on the last link the way they had it wrote out. I did link to them so you can see where I got most of the information from.

I’d highly recommend removing the Livna repositories from your YUM sources. I had issues trying to install other software while Livna was still in my sources list. To remove Livna following these steps:

• Open up a terminal window, login as root by entering su - and pressing enter at the prompt. Enter your root password and press enter.
• Enter the following: cd /etc/yum.repos.d/ and press enter.
• For me there were only 3 Livna repository files to remove, I used the following command to remove them: rm livna-devel.repo livna.repo livna-testing.repo. (Remember to put spaces between each file name). When you press Enter you will be asked if you are sure you want to remove the files, enter “Y” for each and press enter.

The only thing I’ve yet to figure out is how to get the TV-Out functionality to work. I know it’s possible, it’s just going to take some tweaking on my part. I got it to where I could see some text on the TV last night but it wasn’t readable, nor was the text on the default display so I had to kill the X server everytime (Ctrl + Alt + Backspace). Luckily it would reset itself back to the standard every time.

Hope someone finds this article useful. I know I will be appreciative of it in the future if I have to re-install Fedora.

On the post that I made earlier today I mentioned that I would be moving some things on AndyMelton.net to their own domains. Tonight I was finally able to purchase those domains as well as pay for continued hosting at GoDaddy. Let me tell you, just trying to purchase a domain at GoDaddy made me want to pay more for a domain elsewhere. I didn’t, but I wanted to. I can’t because I wouldn’t be able to afford one elsewhere with everything I was needing to purchase.

So, I’ll first tell you what I purchased and then I’ll give you the steps that I went through to make those purchases. I bought 2 domains, AndyNotAndrew.net, which will become my new Audio & Video Journal website. I purchased FatTrackBlog.com for the weight loss blog that my friends and I occasionally contribute to. I also needed to renew my domain for AndyMelton.net. Then, I also needed to pay for hosting for 12 months so I don’t have to worry about it for a little while.

OK! Let’s go and order a domain name. We of course are on GoDaddy.com and logged into our user account. We then do a search for the domain that we want to purchase to make sure that it is available. Good news, it is available. More good news. We can purchase the same domain with the following top level domains (TLD): .com, .info, .net, .org, biz, and .us! More good news! We can also purchase similar domain names. We can also purchase the domain with a TLD of .mobi, .tv, and .us. We can also purchase domains that aren’t quite what we wanted but are similar with an added word, like, “Sucks”. Don’t get me wrong, being able to show you the available options is great if the domain you are wanting to purchase is already taken, but, they just give you so many options!

So after you have scrolled through all of those options you find the “Continue” button. You click on it and you get a page that says “STOP! You’ve found a great domain. Now protect your name, increase your traffic and more!” OK! First of all, I don’t like the fact that you are telling people to STOP, it made me feel as if I had done something wrong and I am usually always nervous when I’m buying anything anyways. Come to find out, I have done nothing wrong, they’re just telling me that I can also buy the domain with a TLD of .net, .biz and .info for just a few dollars more! To top it all off, they have “Add these domains now for just $16!” already check marked. If someone was to accidentally click the green button below to add those to their order without knowing, the person would have to come back and go through the process again. SO, if you’re smart you will scroll down until you see a link, a link that’s not as large as the green button I might add, that says “No thanks. Continue to checkout.”

OK! So you clicked on “No thanks. Continue to checkout.” You should come to a page that has even more options and more places to add more stuff for super low discounts. The first row of information is where you choose how long you want to register your domain name for. Then you decide if you want it to be automatically renewed or manually renewed. Then you decided whether you want to spend $2.99 more to get the domain certified. Lastly, you choose if you want deluxe or premium email services added to your order. I might be wrong on this, but I do believe you already get email services with every domain your oder. Hmmm. They don’t tell you that on this page. You scroll down and you see a section that asks if you want to show exclusive offers to reduce the cost of your order or if you want to quit the checkout process. Your only option is to select the show special offers and click on continue.

Did you think I was finished, yet? HA! Hardly! Once you click on the continue button you are presented with another page that gives you options to customize your order even more. This page asks you to select a hosting plan, a WebSite Tonight package, MORE options for email AND a section for adding Traffic Blazer to your site. Oh, I thought I was done naming off the stuff you could add. I wasn’t: Quick Shopping Cart, SSL Certificates, Turbo SSL Certificates, High-Assurance SSL Certificates and finally, a 6-in-1 certificate. FINALLY, after you scroll through all that without checking any of the check boxes, you can click on Continue.

The next page again asks you if you want to make your domain name private. Granted, this is a great idea but I’ve already told you that I DO NOT WANT THIS! I DO NOT CARE! COME STALK ME ALL YOU WANT! (Ok, NOT REALLY!). I click on continue without clicking any check boxes.

OH MY GOSH! CAN YOU BELIEVE IT! WE ARE FINALLY AT THE CHECKOUT! This part is pretty simple. You choose your payment options, give a promo code (don’t forget Madge1, Madge2 and Madge3) and pay. I don’t want to pay just yet. I want to add the other domain name I am going to purchase and add the domain renewal. I had to go through the entire process again to buy another domain. To renew the domain it was slightly different and it kept asking me if I wanted to protect my domain name.

The other thing that I was needing to do was to upgrade my hosting account from Economy hosting to the Deluxe plan. I done this the other day, but still had some issues. I didn’t know if I was suppose to upgrade my account from within my hosting control panel or through the “front door” of GoDaddy. I emailed support and they said to do it from within the control panel. The other problem that I had was that I was not able to choose how long I wanted to upgrade for when I initially upgraded my account. I had to upgrade my account and THEN I could extend the length of my account.

So many annoyances. Why do I deal with it? It’s cheap! But it’s REALLY annoying.