EasyLinuxGuide Blog

Well, it’s been quite a while since the last UFC PPV event and I am more than ready for some new bouts. On August 25th, we have UFC 74 – Respect. Shortly after that, there will be UFC 75 taking place in England which is supposed to be a free presentation on Spike TV. Anyway, on to UFC 74 – the matchups…

Main Event – Gabriel “Napao” Gonzaga challenges Randy “The Natural” Couture for the heavweight title. Of course the big tagline for this fight is that Gonzaga knocked out Mirco Cro Cop. Although it was an impressive and unexpected knockout, it could have been a lucky kick as well. I don’t see Couture suffering the same fate. Couture is successful because of his mental game and physical preparation – he is in phenomenal shape for any age, let alone a guy in his 40’s. Gonzaga is a highly skilled fighter as well and he does have as good a chance as many to beat Couture, but I don’t see it happening. Couture can be a little bit short lived when it comes to belts, it’s as if he just wants to prove a point and then let it go sometimes. Anyway, I’m still going with Couture in this one.

Georges “Rush” St Pierre vs Josh Koschek. St Pierre will likely win this one, he is too hungry to get the belt back after losing, Koschek is still very young and has lots of time to make his move to champion status. Something to watch for — watch St. Pierre and the low blows. He has a tendency to do this in his fights. The only way I seeing Koscheck winning this fight is in a borefest with two overly cautious fighters, otherwise, Pierre will catch him with a knockout or win by decision. I don’t see Koscheck being submitted.

Renato “Babalu” Sobral vs David Heath. I really would like to Sobral make a comeback. He has a great record and has only really lost to champions. It’s an important fight for Babalu, if he loses, he will need to fight some scabs to make his way back up.

Two Lightweight bouts: Roger Huerta vs Alberto Crane and Clay Guida vs Marcus Aurelio. All I can say is that I hope they show both of these fights, because the lightweights usually end up stealing the show.

Once again, I will likely not order this only because Rogers does not show these events in HD. If Rogers makes this available in HD, they can consider me a monthly subscriber to them, but until then, I’m not paying $40 for a regular quality tv broadcast.

It’s been a while since my last blog so this one is due. I bought a new laptop a while ago and made sure I got a dual core and I really do notice a difference in speed. So, after doing some research, I realized that I could get a dual core CPU for one of my other systems as it had a socket 939 motherboard for a measly $70 Cdn. With two GBs of ram already in this system and two spare ram slots remaining, this system will last quite a while with a processor upgrade. The CPU I ended up going with was an AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800 which I have read is equivalent to two AMD Athlon 64 3200 chips which is exactly what I had in that board previously.

It is faster, but it was a recent install so I have further testing to do to see how much faster it is. I have it quite optimized though running Arch Linux with a custom 64 bit kernel on their 64 bit OS. I am running Gnome on the desktop and have beryl enabled which runs seamlessly. Switching workspaces appears better than instantaneous if there is such a thing.

The installation went smoothly other than one thing which was my board reverting back to using the onboard video somehow. Also, I have a PCI-e Nvidia card in this box which I had to remove after setting up the bios as my 22″ LCD didn’t seem to detect the signal from the DVI connection. So, I powered off and removed the PCI-e card, connected to the onboard vga port and powered on, changed the bios setting, powered the system off, then re-inserted the PCI-e card, plugged the DVI cable into the PCI-e card, then powered back on and it worked. It was a bit of a hassle and unexpected, but I figured it out.

Linux VS. Windows…

Linux — Prior to installing the new CPU, I recompiled my Linux kernel with the latest version, ensuring I had the correct options for the new CPU in place and downloaded the new Nvidia driver so it was ready to install when I booted back into my system. My kernel booted up fine and I was able to install the Nvidia driver without issue. I would say this took about 10 minutes including the kernel compile and driver install. (The Ubuntu 64 and FC7 64 installs on the same box booted up as if nothing was changed due to using a stock kernel and accompanying Nvidia driver distro package).

Windows — It boots up to the login screen (does not show my username) and just sits there. It will more than likely require a reinstall or I may just ditch it altogether as it is only on that machine should I need to do work for a customer who uses proprietary software. Thanks Microsoft, what versatility!

There now has been a wiki created for ELG. The eventual plan is for the wiki to take over the main page and house all of the guides and how to’s. This may happen sooner than later depending on how much time I and some others have to do write ups for the wiki. The decision was made to move away from the previous style mostly because we wanted everything centralized. The other parts of the site will remain intact and there will be links to them on the wiki. The wiki can be seen at ELGWiki