Fun screenshots and quotes...

While wandering the web today, I've managed to capture two screenshots that raised my eyebrows enough to make me chuckle... The first one came while I was doing a search over at Borders:

Gee, think we can get that in paperback?

Second one was actually just a few minutes ago... Realizing that I need to set up an AIM account for my netbook, I ran a Google search in hope of leaping straight to the account-creation page.  Normally its suggestions are based on typos or alternate spellings, but not this time:

No, I didn't, why do you ask?

I also ran across a number of comments that really amused me...

Regarding the controversial upcoming GNOME 3 environment:

oOarthurOo: The gnome mystics promised me it would transform the my relationship with the desktop, and it has; I’m using KDE now instead of Gnome.

Dan: ...the first few things which came to mind as I was wandering my way through a shockingly counter-intuitive interface were:
-- What the 'ell were these guys thinking?!
-- ... Or drinking?!
-- ... Or smoking?

Dan and his partner: After her machine was shut down [after trying G3], and I had the marker in my hand to label the disk, she saw what I was doing and offered the following by simply spelling it out verbally.  "A-B-O-M-B-I-N-A-T-I-O-N."

Dan again, later: In short, this is what you get when you subject Nautilus to a frontal lobotomy.

In an old review for Mercedes Lackey's book Exile's Valor, which takes place a bit before the original Valdemar book Arrows of the Queen:

(hockey plus lacrosse plus polo equals SHUT UP, I DON'T CARE)

I am eagerly anticipating the horrifying disaster or quiet fact of life that makes [Lackey's Mary Sue avatar] completely absent from her supposed role as Herald-Chronicler by [Arrows].

...the robes of the karsite priests, for example, are a mess, and so is this book.

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Up and Working!

Well, my Acer Aspire One 721 (or AO-721) "Cecil" is now sitting happily in Fedora 14 and fully functional.  I switched to using Unetbootin (rather than Gujin) to make a liveUSB of Gparted Live (I'd been using System Rescue CD) -- that gave me no problem at all about resizing the partitions and adding new ones.  I then used Unetbootin yet again to create a new Fedora 14 live USB, booted it...boing, no problem at all installing!

After setting up some very normal things (turning on tap-to-click, etc.) I discovered something really problematic: it couldn't come out of suspend/hibernate, and once rebooted after such an incident, it couldn't turn wireless on.  After a few days of periodic searching, I found these instructions, which also works in other distros like Linux Mint:

1. As root, edit /boot/grub/grub.conf (mine was .conf, theirs was .cfg) in your favorite text editor.
2. Search for the word "quiet" and add these words after it, then save: 
noacpi apm=on noapic 

However, wireless was still off!  If I held down the function key and hit F3 to turn it back on, it didn't light up, even though all of the other function-F# keys were working just fine.  After some searching and experimenting, I noticed that after hitting Fn-F3, "Enable Wireless" in the NetworkManager tray icon was alternately an option or grayed-out; if I clicked on it when I could, surprise surprise, I was suddenly back online!  Turns out that the bleeping thing is toggling the wifi off & on just as it should, but due to some glitch, the light is only being turned on if NetworkManager also enables it.

If only all of my problems were this easy to fix...

Is this a gift or a curse [Edit: It Works!]

Evidently my brother got fed up with hearing about my various failing computers -- ages 6, 10 and 11 -- because to my shock, when I came home from seeing the Wavy Gravy Movie with Dad & his partner, there was an Acer Aspire One 721 here for me.  It's currently being used to stream old Grateful Dead videos for me, because...

...so far, the three Linux installers and Gparted on its own have all been unable to resize the hard drive partitions, which is required to install Linux. [Edit: Working OK now, see next post.]  Fedora 13 & 14 yell "FIRMWARE BUG" at liveboot, which evidently never happens with netbooks other than the AO721 (lucky me).  Fedora and OpenSuSE refuse to boot off USB keydrives created by my Averatec (only option at the moment).

I'm learning that I still don't care much for Windows, but that for some reason, it's able to connect to my wifi router -- Linux has recently been forcing me to type in the IP, DNS servers, gateway, etc. and I don't know why.  I can't think of anything redeeming to say about Firefox 4, which I've avoided in Linux thus far as 3.6 has mercifully been the default on my preferred distros.

Better get back to figuring this thing out (after some aspirin for the headache the netbook or frustration has caused both days thus far).

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