I know it’s only December, but I’m already making plans for this coming October. I bought some wooden 3D puzzles with Christmas money. I bought a Chinese Phoenix and a combined phoenix dragon puzzle. The combined puzzle in particular should make for a nice pumpkin carving. I paid way too much money for my puzzles at a booth in the mall. The following website has these puzzles for a much better price: http://www.ecclecstacy.com/puzzeled2.html.

In related news, I was searching Google pictures for “Chinese Phoenix pumpkin” One of the top three results was my Chinese dragon carving, and it wasn’t from my web page. The link to the site is http://www.anytimecostumes.com/chatter/2007/10/7-pumpkin-design-ideas/.

I noticed when I got home that I couldn’t play movies on my laptop. It’s running Fedora 8. I tried running Totem movie player. Got sound, but the screen was just blue. Blue screen of death for Linux I guess, only it didn’t take out my whole laptop. A little research suggested that my Compiz settings might be interfering. Compiz lets me do nifty desktop graphics like full transparency on my terminals and the workspace cube. Turning compiz off didn’t help. The following link got me started: https://answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+question/16972. I ran gstreamer-properties in a terminal and went to the video tab. I then selected “X Window System (No Xv)” under “Default Output.” That didn’t work.

I then installed xine and gxine to see if it was just a Totem problem. That didn’t work either but it helped later. I changed my search to look for xine issues instead of Totem. From there I found a site that suggested opening the xine_config file. Most distros have this located in your home folder under .gnome2/Totem. In that file I ran a search for “video driver.” I changed the following lines:

#video driver to use
#string, default: auto
#video.driver:auto

to

#video driver to use
#string, default: auto
video.driver:xshm

After rebooting the computer I still wasn’t getting anywhere. But the following forum at least had a good clue to getting something working.

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2859

The original poster noted that he could play movies if he had more than one player open at once. So I opened Totem and gxine and started both playing. Both brought up video. Now I can open just one and it works fine. Strange work-around, but video problem solved.

On the down side, my parents home computer is in really bad shape. I had it booting Knoppix and we had started some data backup. But now it won’t boot at all. Unless I figure out why and am able to fix it, that machine may be a lost cause. I should still be able to move the hard drives to another machine to recover the data.

Today my family’s primary computer stopped working. Starts to boot, then reboots with the option to start in Safe Mode. None of the safe modes are working. I called my dad and explained the problem. Something similar happened to his primary work computer a few years ago. He asked me if I could “Linux” it. I love that. When his work machine went down a few years ago I used a Knoppix CD to connect it to his network and pull all the data off. He’ll bring home that same CD tonight so that we can rescue the data from this machine. I do wish I could convince him to just let me put Linux on the machine. There is the possibility that a hard drive is acting up, but I doubt it. A nice Ubuntu distro could be styled to look like Windows. My mom wasn’t able to use the computer last night to view pictures on a CD. I brought them up without a hitch on my Fedora box.

It would be just my luck that when I have the best chance to convert the home family computer I leave all my best CDs at home. Linux just makes everything better.