Martin Geisler Online

Today there I received a letter that told me, that I won’t have to do military service. Yes! So this means that there’s nothing stopping me from starting at the university next later this year.

Yesterday I visited the Department of Computer Science at the University of Aarhus (also called DAIMI). They had arranged some tours, so that potential students like me could have a look at the place.

It looked very nice, so I believe that this is where I’ll spend the next 5-9 years of my life. I plan to take a Masters degree (cand.scient) in Computer Science, which takes at least five years. If I still like it after that, then I’ll probably start with a Ph.D. study which takes another four years. But it’s way to early to decide that now :-)

Yesterday I finally got my soundcard working again, after I switched to Debian. I really didn’t understand what the problem was, because the card was found without problems when I booted. But when I tried to play some sound using XMMS, I was told to check that my sound-card was properly configured etc…

The problem turned up to be that I didn’t have read-write permission to the soundcard. I think it would have been nice, if XMMS would have told me that. In fact, it was only because I was playing with the Open Media System DVD PLayer that I got the idea to look at the permissions. OMS complained to me that it didn’t have permission to access my DVD drive. So I had a look at it, and surely enough:

gimpster:~# ls -l /dev/hda brw-rw----    1 root     disk       3,   0 Nov 30 16:22 /dev/hda

At the same time I had a look at the permissions for the sound-card. When those were fixed also, I had sound!

OMS works great, if it were not for the poor performance I get on my NVIDIA GeForce2 GTS. The playback isn’t smooth, and you can hear some clicks in the audio. But I’m sure it’ll get better when they make some code for my card, like they’ve done for Matrox cards.

Last night I saw three very cool DVDs: “Me, My and Irene”, “Scary Movie” and “The Gladiator”. René had arranged this DVD-watching-event, because he has just the right equiptment for the job. When you’re used to normal stereo, then it’s quite an experience to see the films with Dolby Digital.

So, I’ve been really tired today — I went to bed about 5:00 am.

I’ve spend the last few days installing Debian, and it’s been just great! But it’s also been a long process.

I started by making a test-installation on my brand new harddisk. I then kompiled a new kernel, version 2.4.1 with support for ReiserFS. I’ve wanted to try out the new kernel for a long time, so this was the perfect time to try it out. ReiserFS works just beautifully. It’s noticably faster that Ext2fs, especially when doing a diskcheck after a power-loss. And because it’s a journalizing filesystem, it’s much better than Ext2fs at recovering files.

I also spend a lot of time getting used to Debian. The filesystem is organized slightly different than what I was used to from Redhat. I think this is because Debian follows the directions laid out by FHS (The Filesystem Hierarchy Standard).

One thing that’s easy to get used to, is apt-get. This is simply a fantastic program. If you need anything, you just write apt-get install anything as root, and it works. And it’s extra nice to use when you have fast internet-connection like I do :-)