Wolf's Plateau

I spent most of last weekend playing with my girlfriend's laptop. She has an old Toshiba Satelite 2805-S302 and wanted to install Windows 2000 on it (it came with Windows ME three years ago). The installation went well except that Windows 2000 can't recongnize some hardware - graphic card, sound card, modem, ethernet, motherboard chipset - just about anything. I thought the driver problem was mostly solved when Windows 2000 was out -- it seems that I am wrong, and this really reminds me of old days of installing Windows 95.

Not too bad, though, since Toshiba has a decent support center and I found the driver download page easily, got a bunch of files, and began to install them one by one. However, after all the installing and rebooting, the graphic card and ethernet are still not recongnized. I even tried to install the graphic card driver from S3 Graphics, but it didn't work either. With some help from LIN Yu, it finally turned out I have to download the drivers from 2805-S301 driver page (where my model isn't listed as applicable). What a mess. Anyway, everything is fine now, and she seems to be happy with them, including the Mozilla Firefox I recommended to her. :-)

Believe it or not, the source code of Microsoft Windows NT and 2000 is leaked out. Slashdot had a story yesterday and a follow-up today. Microsoft also confirmed it. Groklaw warned people not to download or peek into it, though, since it is likely going to get you involved in a copyright infringement lawsuit if you are contributing to an open source project (or would like to do so in the future).

I've finally managed to make a homepage for the Debian Chinese localization project on Alioth, thanks to Mozilla 1.6 (It's still a bit slow in Windows, but the HTML composer and IRC client are really handy). I would really like to make this page use language negotiation so that Chinese environment users will get Chinese pages directly, but it seems not trival, and may need some help from the site administrator.

GDM is obviously much more complicated than I thought. Having been wondering why GDM doesn't read my ~/.bash_profile for days, I finally found a thread on debian-user mailing list.

Then I spend a few hours poking around and found out adding ~/.xsession doesn't work (most probably due to /etc/gdm/Sessions/Default doesn't exist, but I am not sure), and decided to just hack on system configuration files. I add a new session /etc/gdm/Sessions/User, copied the one-line /etc/gdm/Sessions/Debian, add lines to source /etc/profile and ~/.bash_profile. Go back to GDM, choose Sessions->User in menu, now it works, yay!

However the gnome-terminal still use some strange $PATH. Hmm, way to go.

My research is becoming software searching these days. We need a decent molecule viewer for generating images and the current avaiable ones aren't good enough. My advisor doesn't mind buying a commercial one, but the question is which one is worth buying.

Yesterday I came across an open source one named viewmol. Debian has a package for it, but unfortunately it doesn't work on my sid box. Since it's the old version 2.3 anyway, I managed to compile the new version myself (the build dependence in Debian package helped a lot), and it seems okay.

However I found out today that it's way too slow to be useful. Why almost all OpenGL viewers under Linux has this problem? Sigh.

Hmm, I haven't updated my blog for two months. Maybe I should use it as a diary more than a notebook. I'll try to write a little more from now on.