Daily Archives: June 15, 2010

Number Thirteen – back to Fedora

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I wasn’t very lucky with my OpenSuSE 11.2 system that was running on my mail and internet machine. Besides mail and internet I also use this PC for listening to music and watching some movies. Especially when I tried to watch HD movies SuSE fell down on his knees and were begging for mercy. Another very disturbing fact was that the soundserver crashed very often and curiously, mostly after Adobe Flash was active (even a few hours after). I switched from Fedora to OpenSuSE because Fedora crashed or freezed very often but afterwards I found out that some memory settings were chosen wrong. So now it’s time to turn back to Fedora and gain back more speed and bleeding edge repositories.

Unfortunately the installation of Fedora 13 failed a few before I finally made it to get working straight. One massive problem was an X server the did not want to come up after installing the proprietary nVidia drivers. I was able to fix this with a workaround first, adding nomodeset to the kernel boot parameters, and finally setting a fixed display mode (e.g. vga=773).

Fedora logo by ~Mola-mp

The final installation of the whole codec and media player bunch (e.g. kaffeine, smplayer, amarok etc.) went very well, except VLC player that still won’t work but this doesn’t really matter because SMplayer is my new favourite player.

Skype was another problem child because it is still an i386 application and it still requires i386 dependencies and for some reasons Fedora 13 x86_64 does not find the correct depencies and also does not install them. So I was able to install Skype via the Skype repo but it wasn’t working out of the box. I  finally found, after some research, the packages that are needed to get it working, just install the following

yum install libXv.i686*
yum install libXScrnSaver.i686*
yum install qt.i686
yum install qt-x11*.i686
yum install libsigc++ libsigc++.i686 qt.i686 qt

Until now everything is working fast and stable and I think that it is not going to change in the future. Finally I am very happy to be back to Fedora country especially because of the buggy package management system that is included in OpenSuSE with all its dumb priorities and messing up the system update.

The first month

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There’s exactly one month that has past in the ‘straight edge’ project. A few friends and colleagues of mine followed me more or less successfull on my stone covered path to the ultimate “edginess” and some who tried to follow cancelled the whole project after a few days. Time for a conclusion…

Like I said a few times in the past, I feel much better now and I can’t say that I miss something urgently. I feel more and more comfortable with waking up at 04:00am to get off to gym to practice my every day workout and training. The training itself turns to a more interesting and less boring point by now because the muscle regeneration and buildup process is nearly done and I can focus more on cardio training. I have done a lot of muscle training, especially bulge, back and legs, to get a kind of more body control in the cardio training and to obviate joint problems. I had these problems last time where I started with sport though, mainly in my knees.

Every gym session, including last week, implied the cross trainer and the bicycle as the only cardio gear. From this week on I decreased the amount of muscle training and increased the cardio training, it’s now about 30 percent muscle to 70 percent cardio training instead of 50/50 that it was before. I jog every day on the treadmill and soon will start with rowing, each 30 minutes plus crosstrainer (40 min) and bicycle (10 min). I guess that this will give me an enormous boost to my reduction of weight (hopefully). I have to mention that the bicycle is only warmup gear, because I ride my bike as much as I can in everyday life.

workout by *Geironimo

My weakest point are my passion, or better obsession, for sweets and chocolate. One rule says that I am not allowed to eat chocolate and I almost made it to live without it. Well, I eat ice cream nearly every day but this is for sure going to be stopped with the next milestone of this project. And I bought me a bar of chocolate yesterday BUT it’s got only 528kcal on 100g and it’s a bar of plain chocolate. One piece every third or fourth day won’t really hurt.

One thing that I absolutely don’t miss are cigarettes and alcohol. Two good things about this are #1 it’s better for my health living without alcohol and cigarettes and #2 I save a lot of money because I don’t have to buy this shit. Drugs are taboo, too.

Well, what can I say at last. I feel very well with my new circumstances in life and I am pretty sure that I will continue with it after 15th July.