Using Mandrake on 3 May 2004

	Again, back at it with preparing music.  EOG today ticked me off.  I was
renaming chord images, and I wanted to quick view them with EOG from Nautilus.
Trying to double-click the PNG's I had created or right-clicking and selecting to
open with EOG caused Nautilus to hang.  This is, by the way, an un-updated version
of Mandrake 9.2 (remember, no network connection, no internet at work).  Finally, in
desperation, I turned back on image preview (I had disabled it due to my machine's
slow hardware).  The PNG's are less than one 1k, so I set up everything.  The fun
thing, however, is Nautilus's shortcuts -- alt and a direction arrow.  Logical.
However, Nautilus runs the Gnome desktop, so this could potentially have caused me
problems with my desktop icons.
	I was about to write that I was sorry for sounding like I was harsh on The
GIMP yesterday (since I still love The GIMP), and my system reset as if someone
pressed the reset button.  It wasn't me.  So while I sit here, back in my desktop,
writing about this, I'm searching the logs.  Parsing syslog takes it forever, so I
decide to cancel that and go back to shell.  Logdrake produces the "force quit?"
dialog, so I tell it force quit and go to shell (since using tail to view the end
of logs is much easier on me and the system).  Here we go....  Didn't seem to find
anything (did learn how to use the grep, tail, and head programs more effectively).
I searched the heck out of these files.  I shut off APIC when I installed this, so
it shouldn't be that.
	Ok, thinking this is hardware (vendor drivers versus old hardware), I
decided to go with Xfree 4.3 drivers (after recording all events from today at
23:xx), let's see how this works.  I guess there was some patch for this that I
can't get because I'm not on the internet....
	Found something in the config -- OpenOffice uses OpenGL as a default
viewing configuration.  I thought to myself, "hey, that might be part of it", so I
put that and all other applications I could find at the safest, most generic video
settings possible.  OpenGL screensavers never liked this video adapter anyways, so
that might be part of it.  Set The GIMP to let the windowing system tell it the
resolution.  I wish there was some sort of snap-in for telling it to trim
unnecessary services, or to go with "safest graphical settings" globally, but alas
there is no such application, and I cannot find it in the documentation.
	The few gripes about OpenOffice are small things that make typing more
difficult.  At times, for example, you could have done a select all on the document
you're working on to change the font size globally, and yet you go to a line and
press the end key, and it changes to font size 12.  Minor annoyance, but for a text
document where typing speed is a necessity, it's not a fun thing.
	So far, no more hiccups.  I'm keeping my fingers crossed.
	Was reading most recent 2.4.x family kernel changelog, saw a ton of XFS
fixes, forgot which filesystem I was using, double-checked, and I'm using ReiserFS
(whew!).
	Readjusted desktop color gradient.  Hey, gnome developers, could we have a
couple more choices on the gradient color chooser?  That would be really cool, to
get a perfect gradient from blue to royal blue....  However, it does have an
eyedropper tool, which is nice because then i can take the colors from the default
Mandrake backdrop without the image, and it looks almost identical without my
glasses on :D.