Rick's World

I am in a good mood this morning. After months of frustration, 3 different KVMs and a good chunk of money, I finally fixed the KVM problem! For the first time in 5 months, everything is working on all my computers! (knock on wood).

I spent several hours yesterday trying to figure out why my Linux computer refused to work with the KVM switch I had at 1600x1200 on my brand new Dell 20" LCD monitor. I would start up the Windows box and it would come up perfectly, but when I started the Linux box, as soon as it tried to go into graphics mode, the entire screen would go blank and the computer would just freeze. I thought it was a problem with the KVM but it wasn't. I should have known better. If Windows can pump 1600x1200 through the KVM, so should Linux. It took me several hours, but I finally figured out that in Linux, it wasn't detecting some video setting right and when it went into video mode, it locked up. Oddly enough, if I removed all the video settings from Linux and let it default to everything, it worked! So after some playing I was able to make a configuration file that matches the default configuration that it uses when there is no configuration file and it worked. I even managed to get the Nvidia accelerated video drivers for Linux working!

I also managed to figure out why my Linux box wasn't even able to connect to the network. Turns out I had a bad network cable (I seem to be getting that alot lately.) Once I replaced the network cable and configured the network for DHCP, it came right up.

I'm currently running an interesting version of Linux called ArchLinux. It's an unusual version of Linux in that it does almost NO configuration of your computer itself. It just installs a basic version of Linux and leaves it up to you to configure everything. This forces you to learn pretty fast how Linux works. This is a good thing. Plus, since it doesn't setup anything for you, you don't have to dig thhrough tons of configuration files and scripts and everything to figure out what it's doing. You learn ALOT about Linux this way. It also contains a good Wiki site that has a lot of documentation to help you out, so you aren't totally on your own. (and there is a lot of documentation for Linux out there to be had, if you just look for it.)

This is my first blog *ever* to be entered from Linux! Many more to come now that I got this thing working!