64 Bits and lovin' it

So, I finally bought a recent computer and have a bit of memory now (8GB - Yay). Note that when you install a 32 bit OS, you just don't get to see those extra gigs (oops :).

A brief note about this thought, when you install some x86_64 apps outside of ubuntu's managed packages, you may need to install the package "ia32-libs". This happened to me when I finally gave up trying to get vmware 5.5 working and downloaded the 64bit version 6. It installed and ran, but when trying to start a machine it failed with the error "Failed to connect to process". Sheesh!

Luckily I found the fix eventually through google.

Now to see how the quantum orderfinding goes...

Why blog?

My understanding the nature of blogging is to do it often and do it quickly. Hmmm. How do people shift the priorities in their life to do this? Why would I want to trade an hour of my life to publish something that likely no one is going to read? (I use a blog tool on Ubuntu rather aptly named drivel).

Since my initial foray below, I've been involved in numerous time users:

• Living life - cleaning my office, doing book-keeping, cleaning my house, spending time with my wife.


• Going on a train ride with my daughter, son-in-law and grandchildren.


• Upgrading the aforementioned Ubuntu to release 7.04.


• Recovering from a sprained ankle.

Perhaps the most interesting item to others on this list was the upgrade. It went very smoothly in general. Two items required additional work. First, I have mediawiki installed from long ago when I was using Debian Gnu/Linux. It was time to actually upgrade it and use the packaged version. To convert over, I installed the package using synaptic and then:

• Edited the apache2 configuration files so that only the new version had an alias of mediawiki.


• Copied the images data under the old version to the update directory of the new version.


• In MySQL, created a "superuser" for the wiki database and added that to AdminSettings.php.


• Ran the update.php and then the update links script in the maintenance directory of the new version to update the database.


• Copied in extensions etc, fiddled with caches and away I went.

Truly not difficult.

The next one, VmWare, was also easy. My initial install of Ubuntu, at version 6.10, spoiled me as it was the first time in my 5 year history with VmWare that I was actually able to download the modules. I was not as lucky with version 7.04.

So I tried compiling and as is normal for fairly recent kernels and VmWare, it did not work. So, I go get vmware-any-any, apply it as I am used to doing and the compile complains about "cc1plus" not found. Ha! It took a while to figure out that I did not have g++4.1 installed. I added that and voila!.

So, how much time of my life have I traded to compose this drivel? About 1/2 an hour. At this point, I rather enjoyed it, perhaps because I felt I had something to say. Maybe that's the point.