Entries Tagged 'Linux' ↓

Today I found out one of my media center hard drives decided to die. My media center has been acting strange all week but today was the first evening I was actually able to investigate the problem.

After pulling off the side of my case to first figure out what the popping noise was I heard late Monday evening, I really didn’t see anything unusual. I then proceeded to investigate the hard drives since two of them disappeared off my computers radar. Upon investigating and through many tests, I discovered my secondary slave drive (a 120 GB Hitachi Deskstar 7200 RPM P/N 07N9549) died. This sucked! I had a dozen DVDs on that drive in ISO format so I could just quickly play any of them without putting in an actual DVD Disc.

So without any doubt I will be looking for a hard drive to replace my dead one plus a few new fans, as some of them are getting really loud and are annoying the crap out of me.

Today, I bought myself a “Logitech TrackMan Wheel” mouse and being the bright person I am, I unplugged my old mouse from my machine (while it was powered on) and plugged in the new mouse. Instantly I could move the cursor across my two desktops at the ease of moving a ball, while my hand frantically tried to move the whole mouse.

Then, I decided to browse a few forums I like to visit, and behold I noticed the scroll wheel did not scroll the page up and down…BLAST! I then proceeded to assume it was a configuration issue and search the Internet high and low for solutions that all failed. Using ZAxisMapping of “6 7″ or “8 9″, etc. all of it did not work! Restarted X Server countless times all to find out my latest changes were doing nothing but annoying my wife (as when GAIM starts and she is logged in, it automatically sends her a message, and so she got half a dozen or more tonight alone).

Finally, I reverted my X configuration back to its normal settings and decided to lose my up-time statistics to see if a reboot would help anything. TA DA! Everything worked right out of the box. Why I spent an hour earlier trying 50 dozen things that didn’t work instead of properly installing the mouse is beyond me, but none the less, I am now a much happier person trying to overcome the frantic need to move the mouse physically to move the cursor.

Let this be a lesson learned, no matter how simple the computer part, it is best to install it with the computer powered off. Who would have guessed?

This week was really busy for me, I had a lot of tasks to get done this week at work and just added another big one I would like to have completed before I go on Vacation next Friday.

Aside from that though, I also had a lot of things going on at home. I have been prolonging fixing my main system as it continuously frustrated me, but today I decided to give it another try and to get the second power supply to properly control my hard drives, while my main power supply powered the motherboard and video card. FINALLY today it worked! Now my main system finally has all its hard drives running which is sitting at a total of 5 right now, in a while, I will be adding more, but 5 is good.

I also got my secondary system (used for development/testing of Linux updates before preforming them on my main machine) up and running today with a major overhaul. I also have two 120 GB drives in there for storage as well and I am thinking I will mirror them and use it for backups, but that will be decided later. Right now, I have it installing Feisty (https://wiki.kubuntu.org/FeistyFawn/Herd1/Kubuntu) as I want to see what eye candy comes out of it and see if I want it on my main machine.

Also, cpCommerce released v1.0.4 this week! I re-added the MySQLi support. It also has several fixes by other members who spent countless hours learning how to use SVN and contribute to fixing the bugs.

Well, I really do not have anything more to add at this moment. I am looking forward to a 4 day work week and then I will be gone for 8 days as I am going down to TN for Christmas (I may even take Kami - my wife along… hehe).