Report from the field, 2:
Mostly good news.
/end
Note : if you want to join the bluefunk hackers drop me an email. Project will probably be on sf.net when it’s nice enough.
So, we’re being taught Evolutionary Computing by a Creationist. Ironic, huh?
Seems kind of weird; but that is probably due to my complete disbelief in creationism rather than any real reason!
It seems that the problem with my computer is the PSU, rather than the hard disk. I say this because the 8-gig stand-in hard disk started doing the same thing as the old hard disk. This happened the morning after I installed Ubuntu on it. The CD-ROM then started repeatedly making the noise it makes on start-up. Careful listening to the hard disk revealed that it was repeatedly spinning up and down. This made me think that perhaps the PSU was doing something weird and cutting off power to the disks repetitively.
Bad things happen. This time, they chose to happen to me: my hard disk doesn’t appear to be in-tune with the definition for “working” that I hold dear. Instead of the usual grindings and whirrings, now there are strange clickings and windings. Worse still is the fact that nothing seems to be able to see the device (aside from the BIOS, which happily reports that the disk is there, just unusable).
I installed the Xorg 6.8 X server today. I changed over to Xorg from XFree a couple of days ago. All seemed to work fine — after all Xorg is just a fork of XFree — so I decided to upgrade from 6.7 to 6.8, a.k.a the Eye Candy Version.
Xorg 6.8 is more of a preview release than a fully stable release. The release adds new capabilities that many people want to try out, and so they decided to release 6.8 to sate peoples’ appetites. Importantly, 6.8 includes the Composite and XDamage extensions. Both of these are important improvements to the X server, especially for desktop usage.