Hello! I'm sure some of you are wondering why I have written Day 6 when Day 4 was in early February. The reasons are that I went to Prague for 2 weeks (more on that later) and my monitor suddenly turned yellow. It's been in and out the shop because the South African distributer Rectron are incompetent bastards. It's still in the shop (3rd time I've taken it back because they keep giving it back to me "fixed") So I eventually bought a new monitor. I decided to go modern and get an LCD. After looking on the net and doing tons of research I decided to get the LG 1960TQ 19" 4ms (more on this later) which I am now using.

I only got this monitor 2 days ago, and luckily all windows downloads have finished so I have completely moved over now. When I booted Linux again there were a ton of new updates for it (auto update woo hoo!) so I loaded that and restarted. Hmmm, no sound. After messing around a bit and not being able to figure out the issue. (Sound cards detected, speakers working correctly?) I read a bit online and still couldn't find anything. So I switched off my computer completely and switched it back on again and it was fine (???) Don't know what happened there but everything is ok again.

I promptly started work on it and started to install new things. I was happy to find that after the update the bug I was having with not being able to play videos full screen was now fixed and there were no issues with that. I've also found out that the problem where some of my maximized windows were turning black was because of the Nvidia drivers. No current fix. Great. Luckily it doesn't happen that often and all you need to do is make the window smaller. (It happens about once a day)

I've made a to-do list and have steadily been going through it with only one major problem, which I will get to.

So far I have successfully installed gmail-notifier, set up google talk in gaim, installed a linux MSN rip off that works with my webcam, smooth fonts, a winamp rip off, all plug ins needed for watching multimedia online (e.g. Youtube), google earth (It was there and there was a Linux version) and an OSX ripoff dock. The dock works, however there are some problems with the animation effects and they do not seem very smooth. Looking into fixing this.

The one issue I have had is setting up my wacom pad. There are no linux drivers for this except community made ones, but I've tried all the normal tutorials to get it to run and I haven't succeeded yet. It's being detected and the drivers have been installed, it's just refusing to work, grrrr.

Other than that it's been smooth sailing. All the applications listed above were all installed faster than can be done in Windows which was a real treat, I also feel that I am starting to get used to the process of doing things.

So my to-do list to get everything I need running is:

- Setup wine (Windows emulator) to run all required windows apps, which are:
- Photoshop CS
- Civilization 4

- Setup a Linux bittorrent app, I don't think utorrent will work as it should through wine.
- Install quake 3 ioquake3 (this should be easy)
- Install quake 4 (also pretty simple)
- setup the grub menu (bootloader) also very easy, but it's on the list, at the moment it autoboots to a new kernel which I haven't setup yet.
- Setup new kernel :)
- Setup AA for the groovy GUI
- Install the wacom pad
- see how to share my hard drives and access other computers hard drives on my home lan.

And I can't think of anything else, but that is the basic stuff. In other news, I am getting dreadlocks so I am in the process of roughing up my hair, it looks quite dreadful (no pun intended) but my first major knot has developed so it will probably look like a dread in about a month. That that point I will be going into a salon to shape them and roll them, and we shall see what happens then :) Concerning Prague and the performance of the new monitor you will need to wait until next time :) Till Then!