Brace yourself, summer is coming!

Since I work in education, summer is a time when I can get a lot done.  So look forward to new things, and I pray the Wacom rises then as well.  It also may sign my doom.

Let me be very real.  My wife has been out of work for over two years.  After hundreds of applications we have worked away at what streams of income we can generate by our hands and that has enabled us to limp through these times.  But I don't know if I will get any extra assignments this summer from my job as the State has been in financial crisis for some time and money is tight.  I am facing the end of my road but refuse to go down without a fight.

Things might go well or they might not.  I will do my best to remain active here and do what I have promised.  We can look on the bright side, as long as where I am living does not kick me out for not paying rent I will be able to work online.  My book comes apace and will be done some time early summer where it will go out for editing.  I don't think it will come in time to save me from any disaster but when you face your end, never stop.  Keep doing and trying and looking at every avenue.  You never know what tomorrow might reveal.

You know, I have lost count of the number of times the end of the road has seemed to come near to me.  Every time something happens and I find I can go on.  So to, this time, I believe.  The past fourteen years have taught me much about enduring and about surprising ways things come about.  I do not normally like talking about this stuff with others.  It is my trial and my choices that have born me here and I don't want others to feel any obligations towards me.  It isn't my way of living.  It is not the faith that drives me.  I pray that in these coming months that you will bear witness to great things and successes or failing that, then that you see that I endure and continue, should that not be then that you will see how a man stands strong through things and how you walk through the fires of life to emerge into that new day, which dawns fresh each morning.

Argosian Mint 12 Script is currently broken and update on Wacom

SCRIPT IS WORKING AGAIN.

Just a note, script is broken at the moment.  I am reassessing the situation and have been running some tests.  Mainly, GIMP 2.7.5 breaks lots of things.  That and we still get some weirdness living on the edge with the bleeding edge repositories.

My thought was that we would be able to make it through to the end and the release of some stable things these coming months.  That appears to not be the case. So I am taking a hard look at building a script to make something STABLE enough to last you artists till 12.04 LTS, at which point many of us should migrate to a Long Term Support.  There are a ton of migration related things going on in nearly every package.  This gets to my next point.

libwacom is going through some changes, kind of like puberty..  What does that mean?  It means that every time I have tried to write something to get my wacom control panel into life something changes and breaks it.  So I am sitting on my hands waiting for some stability to return to Linux in that regard because.. well because there are some heavy changes in libwacom in the pipe that will make it much better but.. patience is now the name of the game.  Kind of like waiting for Gimp 2.8 to be released to see if we can actually build it against the 11.10 library set of Mint 12.

Nov 5, 129 SE

Nov 5, 129 SE

I have not slept since my last entry. Neither have any of our base personnel, we are all using Toran Stimms to keep functional. We won’t be able to maintain this level of work for long. I intend to get some sleep after this entry so that I can be fit to greet the Commodore on his arrival tomorrow. We were shocked at the amount of data that has already been collected over these encounters. The media lead us to believe little was known, but that wasn’t the case. We have confirmed that a single ship design is present at all events. That no weapon discharges were found, that a strange residual energy was present at all events. Rather, a lack of energy, like a footprint, like something warped the energy fields and then left this footprint behind. The most wonderful bit of data was a short vid clip from a ships exterior camera just before all power was lost to the ship. We saw it, the Zeno’s ship. It was like nothing we have seen before. We can now also confirm that the Zeno Ship did not fire on the cargo transport Splendity, at least while the camera had power and the ships reactors 4 and 5 went super critical mere seconds after the camera shutdown and the ship was destroyed. I am pretty certain the Commodore will try to paint this as a weapon and an attack, but I don’t get that feeling. You can never take a Zeno’s actions and judge them by our morals. It just doesn’t work. You would think that by now the military would have Zeno Interaction Training. No, they keep trying to anthropomorphizing a Zeno’s actions. For more details I have attached a copy of the report I will be presenting tomorrow.  The new species has been given an official numeric identification and has been registered with the Earth Zeno Database: X23319

--attached file-- Report-Zeno-X23319-Incident Analysis

Journal Records of Zenology Field Chief Alexandre Totenknoph

Journal Records of Zenology Field Chief Alexandre Totenknoph,

Head of Zenology Research Base Tallon II, K-191B Cluster,

Dominion of Terran Systems

Nov 3, 129 SE

I will try to record everything that will go on over the coming months and possibly years. For some time, ships entering the galactic fringe zone between the Western Arm and a super massive star cluster, that is better labeled a dwarf galaxy, have been destroyed. We even lost a nascent colony on Zor VIII. In every case the last recorded event was a massive power drain and the subsequent cataclysmic destabilization of the reactor or reactors of involved vessels and colonies. Today I was handed a missive, as the head of the Zenology Research Base closest to the incidents, that said information was forth coming from our first recording of the cause of these events. That it was sent to me clearly indicates that we have a Zeno incident. I will write more when I know more, they are currently transmitting all pertinent data to our base. We are to head the investigation. A small fleet is being dispatched and will arrive in three days. They are to be at out disposal. The captain is hand carrying my orders, they are from the Senate themselves and sealed. I am so excited about a new Zenos, yet something feels as if a chill shadow is laying over me.

In addition, I consider myself a saint for what I have had to tolerate as of late.  Kyle Fredrickson's damnable spawn continue to be allowed by staff to run freely about the facility.  I have censured him and others several times over this but to no avail.  Though I am the head of this base, I am accorded little honor and respect for my high position. I have considered requesting a recall on all families so that the scientists and engineers here can focus on their very important work without the distractions of family.  I suppose others would just call me cold and heartless, but this is important science!

A bit of Fun.

I have been long working on many quiet projects and hobbies.  One of which is writing, which I enjoy immensely.   What seems like almost a decade ago I was involved in a silly game with some friends on the Internet to create a story of galactic proportions where we each wrote the part of our own species.  After the game was over, we had quite the lore.  Some of us went on to deepen it and expand.  Out of this came a race called Valdorians.  I have never left them off, but over time evolved them.  I decided some time ago to write a series of fun adventure stories based in their universe.  Time and life has a habit of getting in the way of things so I am just now picking back up the project. 

Part of some work I did about 5 years ago on this was an experiment in writing a Journalized Account.  I enjoyed it and kept the work but never shared it.  So, each day, over the next week I will post a single entry from this work.  It isn't long but will act sort of a teaser for the Adventure Stories to come later.

This is an account from a persons private logs.

Look to the next post for the first installment.

KUBUNTU 11.10 Beta Script

This will be a simple post. Beta is up for KUBUNTU 11.10

This does everything that the other script version does except:
-add gimp painter to the menu: I just have not figured out a command line method of making a direct alteration to the K-Menu
-turn on Thumbnails: They are there but need to be enabled in Dolphin at the end of the process (not the beginning)

If anyone has some suggestions on how to do those two things in terminal. I will gladly integrate them into the script to make it that much better.

Link here:


argosiankde11.10.sh

Just the usual. CHMOD +X to make it executable.

Argosianmint 12 Configuration Script -Release 1.4-

Maint Release 2 is out in version 1.4:
-Change in direction.  I wanted to give some peace and stability to our users and deal with a few visual bugs that come with some of the bleeding edge repos.  So we pulled back.  No more Ricotz Testing (though I still love xorg testing, so it remains).
-GIMP 2.7.5 is unresolvable on Mint12 as of now so I changed repositories and fixed our version at the compatible 2.7.4, not the best but it is what we have to work with for now as 2.7.5 is being compiled against 12.04.. which is a mess at the moment.
-Removed Microsolve as it is no longer needed.

FTP ISSUE FIXED


Maint Release is out for the new micro version oddity with Gimp-2.7.5 Links are Updated :)  There is no forcing so this should resolve and update on it's own once the version oddities are corrected in the coming weeks.



This is the official release post for the Argosianmint 12 Configuration script for FLOSS Artists.

ARGOSIANMINT12-1.4-amd64.sh

Terminal Commands Below

• wget http://www.ideafactories.com/argos/argosianmint12-1.4-amd64.sh
• chmod +x argosianmint12-1.4-amd64.sh
• ./argosianmint12-1.4-amd64.sh

We are in 1.0.  It was quite the production.  Thank you all for sticking with me during this.  The result is about a 2 hour long script that will configure the desktop for your Artistic Needs. Be patient with this process, this is a very large monolithic process and it needs to be baby sat.  You will need to enter your super user password as it goes along.

The following are the only thing it does not do for you:

• configure Wacom Tablets (the script will never do this, I have other plans for this need)
• install Proprietary Driver (future looking feature to add in)
• Set your Theme (Hey, we all have likes/dislikes so I leave this to you)

I will be beginning the process of developing a GUI configurator for Wacom Tablets under MATE soon.  These already exist for GNOM3/Cinnamon and KDE and used to exist for GNOME2.  Somewhere in all the open source code is probably all I need and just a little work to get it going under MATE.

Am I done?  No, I will maintain the script and work towards additional functionality.  We use so many unstable sources here that as time moves on the script will need to be updated to handle the changing situation.  I will continue support of this script towards that end.  In addition I would like to add Graphics Card auto-detection and installation to the script but wanted to get a "stable" working script out and in use.

If you like my script and want to donate use button on the right.

Screen shots of the completed look on a raw install courtesy of David Revoy.

If you like living dangerously or are curious to how this came about, check out the old thread development: HERE :.