GRRR. Looks like it’s back to the drawing board. I have been working on a Xanga Skin the past few days, but it’s not working out too well. One thing I have noticed and don’t like about the skins is that the skin is only available for the viewing of blog entries, which I guess is okay, but my reviews and events pages show up using the original “look and feel” section of Xanga. So, I am working on a skin from scratch that will be able to look classy and professional, as well as work well with the default xanga setup. That should be interesting. We’ll see how that works out.

I have had my daughter for the past week and it’s been a lot of fun. We have played and, honestly, I don’t mind the lack of geeking on my computer because of Em. She is a doll. We are currently working on getting her potty trained, but nothing is working. She knows what she needs to do, but doesn’t want to use the potty. She doesn’t see the advantage of using the potty. I give her a huge shpeel about how mommy and daddy use the potty, so she should be able to. I understand that she is only three, but all of her friends are already potty trained and Emery is sharp as a whip. So I don’t understand where this lazyness comes from. We’ll keep working with her, but I don’t know how much farther it will go. Perhaps I’ll have to hire someone to do it for me ——

On the Linux front, I installed FC4 on my AMD, and it installed! My Celeron 2.4 crapped out during the boot to the CD (Kernel Panic). So I loaded it up on my AMD and it ran pretty well. I tried to install VMWare though and that didn’t work out too well. VMWare needs to compile some kernel modules to run properly, and they didn’t compile under the FC4 kernel. It hung while compiling the ethernet module. I waited about an hour before I hard reset my Linux box. When it booted, it began starting services – and when it got to the VMWare services, it hung again when bridging vmeth0 to eth0. So back to square 1. I reinstalled FC3 on the system and booted up. When I tried to log in, I realized I had fat-fingered the password and now my box was inoperable. I had to bust out my hacking skillz and hack the root password (very easy procedure that takes about 4 minutes). Once I got back into my root account I installed VMWare and Windows XP Professional. (My review about VMWare is coming soon – including installation and configure notes, and comparisons between other Windows Software solutions under Linux, including Crossover Office and Wine).

I’m also working on my own Windows PE operating system. I have started with the BartPe system by Bart Lagerweij (www.nu2.nu) and have began hacking it to run the way I want it to run. I don’t like Bart’s launcher menu or his desktop wallpaper, so I am editing those out and using the standard windows start menu. I am working on getting video drivers working for at least the Radeon 9200 and GeForce MX4000 (both 128Mb) and generic AC’97 Audio drivers so i can start making bootable WinPE distributions of my Windows 32 bit Video Games.

I have already created a DOS boot CD Collection of DOS Games (called the Ultimate Games CD volumes 1-4) These CDs boot to a DOS Compatible environment that I created that has better memory management and video support for newer machines to run. I used a Caldera DOS disk as my start and added IBM PC_DOS 6.3 memory managers to achieve complete memory management (mucho better than MS-DOS 6.2 managers). A couple freeware applications run my ramdisk and CDRom packages and I have generic network support for 70% of the newer network cards. It allows me to play all my awesome DOS games (Kings Quest, Doom 1 and 2, Spear of Destiny, Masters of Magic, CIV, Colonization, etc.) at their original speeds while maintaining a working Linux or DOS(Windows) OS on the hard drive. These images do not interfere with the hard drives AT ALL. The memory requirements for DOS games such as these is very low. Most of my games run on a machine with 128MB ram (that is 16 to 32 MB of RAM for game memory and 64 MB of RAM for a RAM Disk to store game files). Descent ][ Requires 256MB Ram or higher to run because of more files needed to copy to the ramdisk for the program to work properly.

So, back to WinPE, my goal will be to create bootable DVDs or CDs to run games like Dungeon Siege, Doom3, Quake3, and other new programs from a bootable CDRom (or bootable DVDRom). We’ll see how far I get on those. So far, the MINIMUM RAM requirement is 192MB, but that could go up depending on how many other files it needs to write to to keep the game running properly. Newer games should be pretty considerate about that because of Windows XPs security. Windows XP allows a common (non-privileged) user run programs while storing user data in the My Documents folder. We’ll see if that ability works from CD once I get a final version working.

I am rambling, so I’ll end this post. But if you have ideas, let me know. I am open to suggestion. On a side note, I feel like Doogie Houser (remember that show?) I’ll be writing in my journal (blog) every night at the end of the episode 🙂 (I hope. We’ll see how many nights I can keep that up)