HOWTO Install GoogleEarth with wine - Gentoo Linux Wiki
I did see this the other day as I was looking up resources for World of Warcraft and Wine… this is pretty slick also.
See also Digg
Monthly Archive for December, 2005
Tortoise: Hello, Achilles! I haven’t seen you since one of our last encounters discussing Godel, Escher, and Bach.
Achilles: That break has actually been quite enjoyable.
Tortoise: Really! Do I take that to mean that you do not enjoy my company?
Achilles: No, not at all; you are, in fact, among my closest friends. I just mean that all that incessant talking about recursion, logic, and the mathematics of paradox—well, frankly, it made my head hurt after awhile. I’ve been quite happy just relaxing and not thinking of anything even vaguely esoteric, thank you very much!
Tortoise: Well, that is understandable. I’m glad to hear that you do not tire of my presence, per se, because I have something on my mind which I’ve been longing to discuss.
Achilles: As long as it does not involve mysterious meta-mathematical ideas, I’m certainly open to the idea of a chat!
Tortoise: I don’t think it’s very meta-mathematical—a curious word, by the way; is the word “meta-mathematical” itself, meta-mathematical?
Achilles: That is exactly the sort of thing, Tortoise, that I’d prefer not to discuss. What was it that was really on your mind?
Tortoise: Well, I’m having a problem with my new year’s resolutions.
Achilles: That’s a relief! That seems like a very mundane thing to talk about, not meta-mathematical (whatever that means) in any way. What is the problem that you seem to be having?
Tortoise: It involves what seems to be a conflict between my new year’s resolution from last year, and the resolution I intend to make this year—perhaps “conflict” is not the right word, but to tell the truth, I can’t exactly put my finger on it.
Continue reading ‘New Years Resolutions with Achilles and the Tortoise’
I hate to say it, but Ubuntu has, so far, proven extremely unstable. It’s possible that it’s my hardware that’s at fault, I suppose; but since completely reinstalling Ubuntu last night, and not really having done anything really crazy with the system, I’m getting segmentation faults on some major applications (Firefox, anyone?) after only having the system running for an hour or so. After a reboot, the segfaults disappear for awhile.
This is somewhat less than excellent. I’m going to forge ahead a little longer with Ubuntu, but if I don’t find a fix for this, I guess it’s either
- Try out a new distro; Slackware or Arch Linux, perhaps? (A little risky; could be a lot of work just to find that I don’t like it).
- Go back to Gentoo Linux…
The major drawback to going back to Gentoo is the horrendously long installation process… I don’t mind so much, but my wife is not crazy about it. ;-)
The major advantage is that as long as you do sane things, everything works perfectly.
This is a persuasive argument.
The Register has this to say about Patrick Byrne’s recent statements. Apparently Byrne is prone to saying crazy paranoid things and alarming shareholders. Heck, I’d be alarmed, too, if the CEO of an investment of mine were publicly concerned about a “Sith Lord” seeking to destroy the company.
I mean, a Sith Lord? Unless the force is with them, they’re doomed. Sell! Sell!
It’s funny; if I were to mention that when I finally got Ubuntu configured more-or-less like I wanted it to be, some thoughtless configuration change I made caused the whole thing (modules, X, networking, everything) to break (more on this later), the reaction I would get would be dependent on who I was speaking to.
- A Mac user would probably tell me that it serves me right for not using a Mac.
- A Windows user would probably tell me that it serves me right for not just using Windows.
- Another Linux user would shake his or her head disapprovingly, as if to say that you shouldn’t be messing with things if you don’t understand what you’re doing, and would go on to extol the virtues of the Linux distro of his or her choice.
These are the stereotypical reactions one would expect, at least. The funny thing is, that if the platform shifts, the reactions shift also, but otherwise remain the same. If I have a Windows computer that gets totally screwed up, the reactions might be
- A Mac user would probably tell me that it serves me right for not using a Mac.
- A Linux user would probably tell me that it serves me right for not using anything other than Windows.
- Another Windows user would shake his or her head disapprovingly, as if to say that you shouldn’t be messing with things if you don’t understand what you’re doing, and would go on to extol the virtues of the anti-spyware/anti-virus software of his or her choice.
And if my Mac got hosed (don’t even tell me that it doesn’t happen… I’ve had to fix some of them)… well, you get the idea.
The point being that sometimes bad things happen to good computers, regardless of the OS in question.
Case in point; there is a Dell about 10 feet away from me which spontaneously stopped booting yesterday. There are no known hadware issues, the user of this machine does not even have internet access, and it isn’t more than a couple years old. It just decided that it would no longer boot all the way into windows, but would continually reboot and ask you if you’d like to try one of several flavours of Safe Mode instead.
Back to the Ubuntu disaster.
To be honest, I was pretty carelessly installing new things, enabling alternate repostiories (that is, libraries of available software packages which may or may not actually be stable), installing optimized kernels with apt (I’m not sure that is a good idea anymore), and so forth. All this in service of getting Wine up and running, for the express purpose of getting World of Warcraft back up and running; not the most pragmatic of pursuits, I suppose.
At any rate, the PC at home has Ubuntu reinstalled, Wine working, and World of Warcraft mostly working. The borked Windows PC is being repaired as I type.
My wife’s Mac is still doing fine.
I think I might have to get one of those.
(Yes, I know I just claimed that Macs have problems, too. Well, they do; they just seem to have, well, less of them.)
I just installed Ubuntu Linux on my main desktop. Somehow or another, I had Gentoo right hosed, so it was either reinstall Gentoo (a project of a day or two) or dive into Ubuntu (which, other than downloading and burning the CD, takes about a half-hour).
So far (a few minutes only), I’m quite impressed with Ubuntu 5.10. It is among the most polished distros around, that is for certain.
I was just browsing Lulu.com (a self-publishing website), and I found that they have a downloadable PDF of E.R.Eddison’s The Worm Ouroboros. If you like epic fantasy fiction, you will probably like this book; it’s a free download, since the book is all but out of print, and was published way back in 1922.
There are a couple clumsy opening devices; if you can get past the unnecessary “dream sequence” at the beginning, and the fact that Eddison names his fantasy races “witches” and “demons” (etc), it is a fantastic read. If you like Jack Vance or Gene Wolfe, definitely give this a try. Heck, it’s free.
Here’s your one stop shop for a list of lists. These reflect a little geekier bent; you won’t find the “top wines of 2005” here, or even the “sexiest geeks of 2005” (proving to me once again that I’m missing nothing by completely ignoring Wired magazine). Here are (my) Top n “Top n of 2005″ lists of 2005.
From Michelle Malkin:
You’ve probably heard about the UMass student who claimed that Department of Homeland Security agents visited him after he checked out Mao’s Little Red Book from the library. Well, he has now admitted that he made the story up.
I saw this awhile back, and thought it was a really cool resource for designers, but apparently I never posted a link. Many dozens of royalty-free kitschy images are available at POPINK.com.
