Monday, January 27, 2014

CinnaMateStudio : Current Status : Alpha_3.0.0 ~ Unusable :(

By Avatar JayR Cela

   Bless the heavens I was gifted with a full head of hair! The past week or so i have been installing / and rebuilding various versions of my Alpha_CMS project, and I am literally pulling what hair I still possess out by the roots. Recent upgrades in Sabayon have made the Cinnamon Desktop environment unusable, Mate on the other hand still works fantastic, in fact it seems to be better than ever. And I find that rather odd when you consider Sabayon has dropped official support for the Mate Desktop environment, they are supporting Cinnamon, but not officially yet, the same can be said for the Gnome 3.10.x UI.

    So at this point I am completely baffled, I just tried Mint 16, but I found it way to buggy to even consider until version 17, and Debian unofficially support's Mate, but not Cinnamon.

    OMG :(

    I'll figure all of this out eventually. Damm I was getting so close / LOL :_)

JayR Cela :_)

Saturday, January 25, 2014

SecondLife : Rod Humble : Depart's Unexpectedly : *Bigg Huggs* :_) : What Happens Now ?

By Avatar JayR Cela

    First let me say that this took me by complete surprise, best wish's to Rod. Now what the hell's gonna happen, LOL :_)

    I would say...
 #1, Don't panic ! / #2 We've  been through this before / #3 Things Change.

    Haaa, haaa, I am sure numerous rumors as to why he left will be floating around for a while and, I have plenty of my own idea's, but nothing of interest to anyone but myself. Man I did enough complaining over the years, at this point I want to see the platform survive.

    Anyone can sit back and criticize, I choose "Long Live SecondLife"

JayR Cela :_)

P.S. hmmmmm... forgot what else I was gonna say, LOL :_)))

Thursday, January 23, 2014

SecondLife : Virtual Worlds : A New Video Card : Now Is A Great Time To Buy !!

By Avatar JayR Cela

     Hey, now is the time to make a great buy on a close-out discontinued and Brand New, Brand Name, Video Card for your desktop computer. This is especially true is you are a SecondLife or other Virtual World user. The time to buy is now !!

     There are some really great clearance deals going on. A lot of this stuff is discontinued, but still new in the box.

    Now, after the Holiday Madness, is the time to buy.

Go For It :)

I just picked up a PNY GT620 1024mb ddr3 Nvidia card for 35$ US

What A Life :_)

LOL

JayR Cela :_)


Monday, January 20, 2014

RealLife : The Dumb Phone : Smart Phone's Killing Our Kid's Ability To Interact !

By Avatar JayR Cela

    I don't mean to rain on anyone's parade, but the so-called Smart Phone is dumb-ing down our kid's into a state of mindless jelly. How many young people have you seen lately wandering around aimlessly with a pair of ear-bud's blasting their eardrums to a point of being completely worthless by the time they reach about 50 years of age.

    Stepping blindly out into traffic is a common scene i see on a regular basis here in Detroit.

    An increasingly large number of young folks I meet are completely oblivious to anything but their FaceBook account, or Twitter, or whatever the current trend is. It goes on and on.....

    Just a random thought.

JayR Cela


Real Life : Looking Back : Martin Luther King Day : A Dream Not A Reality :(

By Avatar JayR Cela

    If you look at my SecondLife Profile, one of the the first thing's you will see is my statement that : Race ~ Gender ~ Species Have No Meaning Here. And has been something I have been saying since my first day alive in SL, and I came to realize that Slavery was Alive in Well  here on the SecondLife platform.

    As I sit here and look deeply into the odd ball world of SL, I have to say the platform itself is a great equalizer towards achieving racial, and gender equality. And in the case of SL Furries, they are individual people as well. Now I am defiantly not a religious person, but I would like to quote a phrase from the Bible.

John 8:7

He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone....


    Something to think about every day of your life.

    It is really a sad state affairs when the U.S. is awash in poverty and inequality for people of all color's.

    Did M.L.K.J. make a difference in our society, Yes, was it significant, Yes. Do Up Tight White Lunatic Fringe people still pose a threat, Yes.

JayR Cela 

Sunday, January 19, 2014

CinnaMateStudio : Backup's : My Recommendation : UBCD and CloneZilla

By Avatar JayR Cela

     I was just sitting here thinking about CMS and backing it up while progressing, Ultimate Boot CD is a great tool, everyone should have, regardless of OS. I'll list the link, but as far as backing up your Linux test runs, CloneZilla is a fantastic tool. I use it on a daily basis to create ongoing disk images while testing.

http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/

http://clonezilla.org/

JayR Cela :_)

Saturday, January 18, 2014

SecondLife : and Linux : MONO ~ .NET : How Important Are They ?

By Avatar JayR Cela

    Very important, there is a ton of recent web development going on within the .NET & Mono communities. It is something ya wanna keep up with on the Linux front.

    Personally I have been experiencing all sort's of odd ball problems the past month or so. After some digging around various blogs, forums and such I ran across several references to a Complete MONO install.

   What it's going to be called is going to depend on your distro, how this package may or may not be labeled, just. find it !

    Then Install It !

    LOL / I'm telling ya, all my crashing problems went right out the window.

JayR Cela :_)

P.S. FireStorm 4.4.2.x no longer crashes, in either Mate or Cinnamon : WOW ! / LOL :_)

EDIT : 1-19-2014 : I was a little premature with my claim of FireStorm 4.4.2.x no longer crashing. It should be : no longer crashes as much : LOL   :_)
             I am also happy to say that FS 4.5.1.x is working crash free / Very Kool :_)

SecondLife : Boy I Sure Would Like Some Tear Off Menu's

By Avatar JayR Cela

     Ok, I'm back ranting on this idea again, however I feel it's a subject worth bringing up over and over.

   Tear off menu's in a multi screen environment, for the SL Viewer, or one of the still remaining  TPV's.

JayR Cela :_)

CinnaMateStudio Linux : Building Your Own : Part 4 : Sabayon Version

By Avatar JayR Cela

    I'm finally back on track with this series of post's delving into building your own working version of CinnaMateStudio, the past few days I have been toying around with Mint Linux 16, I'm defiantly planning on waiting until Mint 17 is released, but I can say this much putting together this platform on Mint is a whole lot easier than doing it on Sabayon. / LOL :_)

    So if ya still got the stomach for it, and have figured your way around Sabayon Linux, you have probably installed Cinnamon, booted into it and said, WHOO-Nelly !! what and the hell is this piece of crap, haa-haaa, the jokes on both of us, Cinnamon is a very user customization oriented desktop environment.  Ya just gotta know where to find stuff, and be willing to play around with it. You are also going to want to install Cairo Dock, and the complete version of Mono. For those of you that may not know Mono is a Linux cross platform equivalent version of Microsoft's .NET platform, sort of. Anyways your definitely gonna need to install that too. Open Rigo and in the search bar type in Mono
and install Mono2.10.x.x, Mono Basic 2.10, Mono Addins 0.x.x, Libgdiplus 2.10.x.x, and that ought to do it.

    Now you need to start playing around with the settings, here are some pictures of what you can expect to see. The ugly opening screen, ( seriously I don't know why this is the default, it's just plain ugly )











 
    So ya dress it up a bit by opening the Control Center. Select Themes, Get more online, then Other settings












   

    Myself I chose the Dark Cold theme, and for Other settings BlackMATE for the Controls, Fog for my Icon choice, and Menta-Black as my Window borders preference. This results in a nice Black, Blue, Grey combination I find quite easy on my aging eyesight capability to read things clearly, and it looks really Kool too. / LOL :_)
















    I'm kinda loosing track here of what I am doing, eventually you should end up with a very customized desktop. Something like what I have shown in the past. It's just up to you. All this stuff is just cosmetic anyways, the real question is does it work ? Yes and No, as far a being very stable for an everyday desktop environment, I am using it daily, and slowly weening myself off of Windows 7, there are however a lot of back end plumbing issues I have yet to resolve dealing with Jack & QjackCTL. And that is just going to take time on my part trying to patch all this stuff together into a coherent User Interface. My original plans of a December 2013 alpha release were greeted with a number of unexpected setback's, but I'm still hanging in there, a more realistic attitude for this endeavor say's late 2014. Right now I need to update the official application bookmark html file, and start writing some coherent documentation, describing all this stuff and not only how it works, but how to use it, and I'm a bit overwhelmed. Haa-Haaa

Thanks for reading.

JayR Cela :_)

Friday, January 17, 2014

SecondLife : Linux and Older Computers : Performance Issues Explained

By Avatar JayR Cela

    If you are an avid Linux and SecondLife user, you fall into a relatively small and unique category. You should also be aware of the fact that the most recent Linux kernels have dropped support of older MB integrated graphic chipsets, and older video cards, AGP ? forget about it ! More and likely your S.O.L. it's just not going to work !! The dedicated kernels. headers and non-free propitiatory manufacturer driver support has been dropped in favor of the new Generic Linux Video Driver.

    I am a firm believer in recycling older computers that still have some life left in them, but eventually you get to a point of diminishing return. So what are you going to do ? Hopefully your not stuck with using a Lap-Top ( I refuse to own another one, ya can't fix em in most cases ) If however you have a desktop design with a dedicated PCIe video adapter slot, do yourself a favor and pony up a few buck's for a new Video Card, there are quite a few sub $100 U.S. ones available. Personally I am a die hard Nvidia person, but a lot of really decent cards from both AMD/ATI and Nvidia below the $100 price point are readily available.

    Example : Nvidia ( based 620 ) about 70$ give or take a bit.

Oh Well / Life moves on.

The bottom line is this, the generic Linux video driver, is still a work in progress, and so far the results are very mixed, they work great on Android tablets and smartphones, but really leave a lot to be desired in a graphic's intensive desktop environment platform such as SecondLife.

JayR Cela

Wednesday, January 15, 2014

Linux and Real Life : Virtual Life : Why I am a Believer in The Linux Platform : Part 2

By Avatar JayR Cela

    People like those behind the Sabayon, LinuxMint, Ubuntu, Debian and a ton of other distributions as well.

    I'm thinking about giving Fedora a run for the money again.

JayR Cela :_)

Tuesday, January 14, 2014

Linux and Real Life : Virtual Life : Why I am a Believer in The Linux Platform : Part 1

 nut case

RealLife : InternetLife : Government Is Not The Problem : Government Is The Solution : Net Neutrality

By Avatar JayR Cela

     The next time I hear a lying Republican tell me that the US Government is the problem with all of our social ill's, I want to just scream. All these RICH bastards have theirs, they don't give a rat's ass about anyone but themselves, and their bank account's.

     In case you have not noticed lately, Net Neutrality is back on the political platform block, and we are about to get screwed.

    The latest shenanigan's can be seen in our pitiful attempt by us the people to get some sort of adequate representation.

     There is a solution, vote these people out of office. And Repeal Citizens United !

JayR Cela

SecondLife : Random Crash's on some Linux Distro's : Possible Explanation : Old GTK+2 Libs ?

By Avatar JayR Cela

    Up until just recently, I have been enjoying my SL life on Sabayon Linux with the Cinnamon and Mate desktop environment's happily. The past few week's however, I have been getting random crash's mostly with the FireStorm 4.4.2.x release, and a few other older Third Party Viewers for the platform. I have tried to narrow this down as best I can, but have to admit I really do not have the skill's necessary to offer a definitive answer. In other word's I'm going to make an educated guess.

    Ya need to upgrade your viewer, I am not sure what happened in the Linux world that could of caused this, I'm thinking it could be some Lib's were upgraded. There is one thing I am sure of this problem seems to be isolated to the Mate & Cinnamon desktop UI's, and not one particular flavor of Linux, I have read the same results for folks dealing with Fedora & Suse, Mint, Debian, Arch, etccc...

    I'm taking a wild stab in the dark here, but I am guessing that since both Cinnamon and Mate are relative newcomers to the Linux Desktop User Environment, and both being branches from Gnome2 that there may be conflicting GTK+2 libs at fault here, GTK+3 is the newer version currently being used in just about everything Gnome based these days.

    Here's the deal, and I have seen several Jira's on this subject, in the terminal you get a message to not run SL directly, and then it crash's. Dammm / LOL :_)

    So my recommendation if your on FireStorm and having problems with random unexplained crashes, give their Beta 4.5.x a try. So far it is working well for me, at least it not crashing while I'm in the Mate DT, Cinnamon on the other-hand, I expect everything to crash. And I actually prefer the FS 4.4.2 viewer for the simple reason it is much easier for me to work with while building, somehow or other the ability to FLIP Textures got lost ( and it will be restored in the RC or Final release ) in the process. Oh well, not really a huge deal for now.

JayR Cela :_)

Saturday, January 11, 2014

Linux : Waiting For Ubuntu 14.04 LTS : Debian Jessie : And Derivatives ? : Not That Far Off !

By Avatar JayR Cela

    I don't know about you, but I am really looking forward to the next Debian stable Jessie release, Ubuntu 14.04 not so much, personally I prefer LinuxMint over the latter, and I'm currently pulling my hair out trying to get a number of SecondLife compatible viewers to work without crashing after about 5 minute's or so on Sabayon Linux, no problems with Debian so far. GRRR :(

    Oh Well, I'll figure it out eventually, I'm really just waiting to upgrade some hardware here later this month. My current set up is getting kinda moldy to say the least / LOL :_)))))

     Hang in there all you SL Linux folk's the next Debian based LTS release will be coming our way this year / *YaY* :_)

     Until then I'm gonna figure out why and the hell SL ain't working on Sabayon / It used to run fine until just recently. Haa-haa off to the Wiki's and search engines for me :_)

Here are some Links you may be interested in

https://wiki.debian.org/DebianJessie  

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Releases

Cinnamon Ultimate Desktop Dream : LinuxMint 17 partial roadmap

    I'm just about ready to take Mint 16 for a spin around the block or so, even if it's not a LTS

JayR Cela :_)



 

SecondLife : Moving Your Residence : Man This Is a Lot Of Work : LOL :_)

By Avatar JayR Cela

    Well I really was looking forward to doing some more work on CinnaMateStudio this weekend, but it seems Cathy and I are all caught up in the process of moving from one Simm to another in SL. Damn, this may not be physical  work, but it sure is time consuming, after 6 years living in the same SL residence, packing up all the stuff is more work than I thought it was going to be. It is however fun too.

JayR Cela

Friday, January 10, 2014

SecondLife : Is It Worth Even Bothering Worth Any More ?

By Avatar JayR Cela

    I don't really know, but the more I keep running into old odd-ball problems, that have been fixed and subsequently broken again, over and over, time after time. And the utter-barrage of incompatible  LL-SL -Viewers.

    I'm at the point of just saying, the heck with this crap !

JayR Cela :(

Wednesday, January 8, 2014

SecondLife : Sad News For Me : Cristal Cove Estate's My SL Home For 6 Years Closing : Owners To Abandon Land :(

By Avatar JayR Cela

    I gotta say I have been expecting this for some time now, Cathy & mines home is SecondLife, Cristal Cove's owners will be abandoning their private island here. Actually I can not blame them one little bit, I have been watching people literally just abandoning SecondLife land holdings at an increasingly rapid rate the past year or so. I know I have. Why didn't I sell it, haa-haaa, try finding a buyer, it's not easy. I'm going to print the note card I received today from the islands owners.

Cathy, JayR, Nan,

It's been quite a ride, and quite a shame what Linden Lab has done to itself, crappy viewer, collapse of the real estate market- what business would tolerate piss poor group chat- so they all took off.  Destruction of the mentor program....

Cathy, I'll be returning the last payment you made on the house, thanks for the love and caring.  JayR, thanks for the friendship, it always came at the right time and I'll be forever grateful.
Nan, Kitty- it looks like you have abandoned the property for some time so I'll be leaving you with my best wishes for wherever life takes you.

The simulator will be abandoned in 3 days and 17 hours.
Please take whatever objects that are dear to you all- they may not make the return trip to your inventories.
Dragger ... (Will)

    Oh well, I agree with em, on all 4 statement's, Crappy Official LL-SL Viewer, Collapse of the SL Real Estate Market, and broken Group Chat ( the CHUI interface certainly did not make things any better, probably we are worse off now than before ) and killing off the SL Mentor program.

    And I'm gonna add one more thing, Tier is Too Damm High !!

    Cathy and I have called Cristal Cove Estate's our SL home for about 6 years, before that we bounced around from place to place our first 2 years together before settling down here.

JayR Cela :(

Tuesday, January 7, 2014

CinnaMateStudio Linux : Building Your Own Part3 : Sabayon Version

By Avatar JayR Cela

    For this post I'm going to concentrate on ensuring most of the multimedia based plugins and lib files are included, then perform a routine system check and clean up. Both are relatively easy to do using the RIGO installer, along with the command line and can be very time consuming.

    Open RIGO and in the search bar type in

                        gstreamer












                  Lv2




              Ladspa










               Allegro then OpenGL and SDL, OpenCL
And a few other things will obviously need to be added later, hopefully once we start adding the individual A/V-Applications that process will be automatic.

    The main thing I want to stress at this point is to perform a cleanup routine. So open Konsole or better yet reboot and once Grub starts up select the Advanced options for Sabayon GNU/Linux, then Sabayon GNU/Linux, with Linux x86-3-xx.x-sabayon (recovery mode ) and get to the root # prompt. Type in these commands. ( disregard the hash mark # that is your Root prompt )

# equo update --force

# equo deptest

# equo libtest

# equo conf update

# equo cleanup 

    Ok now hit CTRL+D and the boot process will continue, if all went well you should be ready to install Cinnamon. Open Rigo, in the search bar just type in Cinnamon.


















      Make sure all 11 Cinnamon modules are installed, log out and back into an incredibly ugly default Cinnamon Desktop. / LOL - I'm not kidding, it is Butt Ugly ! :_) I'll go through dressing it up in my next post.

     That's it for me today, but I will be back, thanks for reading.

JayR Cela :_)

Monday, January 6, 2014

CinnamMateStudio Linux : Building Your Own Part2 : Sabayon Version

By Avatar JayR Cela

   I guess if your still reading my hair brained posts based on the CinnaMateStudio project for Linux, that's fantastic and I'm glad your still here reading this blog. As you know I'm using the Sabayon Flavor of my favotite OS and I see no reason the same can not be accomplished this with various other distributions as well. I grew up in the Linux world with a crap load of distro's before finannly settling on Ubuntu for a number of years, moved onto Mint and recently switched over to the Sabayon platform. It's a total love and hate relationship so far, but I enjoy the challenge.

    For my self I have found by starting off with a really basic X-window manager ( I choose FluxBox or FVWM-Crystal ) Both of them are very basic lightweight minimal environments, and are a great way to get a really clean install.

     Once I have made sure everything is up to date, I simply add Mate and Cinnamon, From that point on its all about customization, I know what I like, but that does not mean my preferences will appeal too, or suit everyone's needs. Hence Fluxbox, an almost pure command line access X-terninal a Web Browser and just about anything really necessary. ( as long as you feel comfortable with the Linux command line ) Add the Mate User Interface which is a minimalist  Gnome-2 fork ( it looks and act's pretty much the same as the original ) and with a bit of tweaking Mate's UI will use extremely low system resources, which is very kool, and functional, if not rather a bit of an ugly duckling, it can however be dressed up rather nicely. Then along comes Cinnamon and allows complete freedom and customization, it is defiantly a work in progress though. A temperamental and a bit quirky at times, is a fairly accurate description. Haa-Haaa, but what cutting edge software have you ever known not to be  ? /  :_)))))

    And Cinnamon is resource intensive, a dedicated PCI-e based Video card and possibly an SSD is best, but I have seen some of the AMD/ATI- APU based motherboards work just fine, and that's usually a matter of being able to Tweak the CORRECT Video Driver ! I have no experience with the current line up of Intel Graphics solutions, but my understanding is that they are quite good in some cases. Anyways, I generally stick with Intel as my #1 choice or AMD for the CPU, Gigabyte or Asus for the MB. Or if I just gonna buy a computer, I've had good luck with Dell. There is one thing I'm a stickler on though and that is Nvidia graphics. I've been using their stuff since the original G-Force and haven't looked back. ( except for a few squeaky cooling fan issues, a common problem on certain past 2nd tier brands of the chip-set product line up )


   I'm taking it for granted your still interested, so let's continue from where I left off  @
http://jayrcelasecondlifetechnologist.blogspot.com/2014/01/cinnamate-studio-building-your-own.html

    If your catching up, there's a link, so anyways we got this far, and may as well see what we have :_)
















    If you would care to continue, now would be a good time to open the RIGO GUI application installer, and add some extra stuff, its fairly simple to use, for right now just make sure to add any Mate or Cinnamon extra stuff that may have been missed ( skip the Development files for Mate - it will only cause problems )










 

    Now ya just gotta start playing around with the various control panel and user panel bars settings.






























    You should have something that looks kinda like this.



    And eventually like this.















    Providing you have dual screen's that is :_)

    I guess the next step is to start installing all the Audio and Video plugins, and various software, all of which are easily accessible via the Sabayon Linux Rigo Installer.

    A relatively recent list as an HTML bookmark file can be obtained here @   http://sourceforge.net/projects/cinnamatestudio/files/CMS_alpha1.8.7_Included_Apps_html_Bookmarks/CMS_alpha1.8.7_bookmarks_10_6_13.html/download   It is a bit dated, but should suffice, for now.

    Well I gotta wrap up things for the night soon, but I will be back hopefully tomorrow with some more specific information, setting up Cinnamon and eventually I hope to do a Debian build and of course Linux-Mint as well, who knows perhaps even a Fedora project might slip in there. LOL / I'm having fun doing this, and I hope you will too.

Thanks

JayR Cela :_)