August 22, 2007 at 11:54 pm (Linux, MAME)
My wonderful wife decided, for my upcoming birthday, to give me the thumbs up to get the parts that I needed to finish my MAME cabinet! I’m so stoked!
So I have been busy trying to bring things together. My good friend Anton just happened to have a set of extra buttons that he so graciously donated. I ordered the remaining buttons, 4 Mag-Stik joysticks and a I-PAC4 from Ultimarc.
While waiting for the parts to get here, I have also pulled together some old computer parts, installed Ubuntu Feisty with the Radeon frame buffer kernel driver (radeonfb), and AdvanceMame. In theory, this should allow me to run MAME on the original arcade monitor (*crosses fingers*) using my old Radeon 7500 card. I have also prototyped the control panel layout on card board.
No new pics yet, but I promise to post some as soon as I get the parts in. I’m really excited that everything is starting to come together!
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March 18, 2007 at 9:30 pm (Linux)
I decided to take the plunge this weekend and upgrade our main computer from Dapper to Edgy (Ubuntu Linux). It went fairly smoothly with just a couple of hiccups. I thought I would blog about the hiccups that I ran into in case anyone else runs into similar problems.
- No more K7 Kernel? Yes, it seems that starting with Edgy, there is no longer a K7 specific kernel. So if you are using a recent AMD processor (or even more importantly any of the dual core processors) you will want to use the generic kernel instead of the i386 kernel. Running the i386 kernel only saw one core of my dual core proc, and switching to the generic kernel opened it back up to both cores
- No boot screen? After switching to the generic kernel, I didn’t get the boot screen and a message with the following error: “usplash: no usable theme found for 640×480″. I re-installed the usplash package through synaptic, and it fixed the problem.
- Picasa slows to a standstill? After upgrading, Picasa would quickly grind to a halt when started. Angie could hardly get anything done in it at all. After some poking around, I noticed that it starts up an explorer.exe process that hogs almost 100% cpu. After some googling, I found a link to this posting in the picasa forum. Following the instructions to add a line to the startup script for picasa fixed that problem.
All seems well now, and I can get back to my regularly scheduled hacking 
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