red Mountain roots

One of the most irritating things about running Linux as your primary operating system has been lack of driver/software support. This is much less of an issue now when even many of the Windows applications people use are open source (Firefox, GIMP, Chrome, Thunderbird, etc.)

However, there is one site that I couldn’t be without that didn’t work in Linux. Netflix. We are Netflix junkies, we don’t watch very much television, and rely on Netflix and Hulu for what little we do watch. I have a Hulu Plus subscription, and even Hulu offers Linux support, going so far as to offer a Linux Hulu Desktop application for HTPCs and dual monitor use. Netflix, however, offers nothing.

The reason why is not the Microsoft Silverlight plugin that Netflix has recently begun to use, because there are Linux alternatives that work well for other Silverlight sites, such as Moonlight. The problem lies in the DRM plugin that Netflix requires — it is made by Microsoft, and does not have a Linux equivalent.

So, I took the side route. Using VIrtualBox OSE on my Fedora laptop, I installed a copy of Windows Vista Business I bought for something and never installed. Installation went well, and performance is surprisingly not bad. I turned Aero off and things definitely improved some, but even with Aero turned on things weren’t too bad.

First step was to install Google Chrome, since it is lightweight — I am effectively spitting my processing power and running Windows and Linux on half the resources. Any little bit helps.

After a flawless Silverlight install, everything works great. Surprisingly easy.

My wife’s site (red Mountain designs) has been hosted on another server for a while, because it was established before I set up a VPS. I’m finally transferring it over to this server, hosted by VPSLatch, today.

I’m looking forward to it, VPSLatch has fantastic support and service. I’m waiting on backups to complete so I can move cPanel over and get it online before I switch the nameservers over. The transition for her visitors should be fairly easy.

I have been toying around with Linux distributions on my laptops for a little while, and decided to try Fedora, which I used to know as RedHat. Evidently RedHat has been re-branded for their enterprise-level and server software, and Fedora is the personal use side. Whatever the name, Redhat has been around in the Linux world for many years, and for quite a while was *the* easy-to-use distribution, until Ubuntu and its forks started developing.

As prevalent as it used to be, though, I never actually had a Redhat-based box. SuSE, Slackware, Debian, Ubuntu, and even a few *BSDs, but never Redhat. Weird. Anyway, I was anxious to give it a try.

I installed it on an older Acer Aspire 4720z that I have had for years, and shockingly, everything worked out of the box. No extracting firmwares to get the wireless chipset to work, no messing around with ALSA trying to find the right sound drivers, no problems with the power management. Even the softkeys (WiFI, Volume, etc.) work!

I really didn’t know what to say about it, to be honest.

It has been running flawlessly on this laptop for 3 days now, I have turned it into a LAMP test environment, and I couldn’t be happier. The only gripe I have is that the default package manager is sort of useless, but YumEx was a quick install that really improved things.

It’s even usable to the point that I would hand it off to my 80+ year old grandmother and would feel relatively confident that it would be worry-free. We’ll see!

Well, we got some snow. 2-3 inches. Then it melted a little and turned into ice. We had lots of ice. Still do, actually. Here’s some photos of our murderous weather system (caution, graphic images ahead.)

I’ve been toying with the idea of starting a blog for a while now, but never could really pick one “thing” that I could consistently write about — my interests tend to be all across the board and in bursts. It’s always interesting, never consistent. Then I decided that all of that didn’t really matter, and did it anyway.

This blog will be the roots of myself, the rambling, changing, twisting, turning output of my mind. Who knows what it will contain.

I am a 24-year-old IT Director and Student from a medium-sized city in the Southeastern US. I’m currently seeking my MBA, and will finally be finished with that in May of this year — after that, who knows? The IT position has been a great opportunity, and I am ultimately happy there, but it’s time for something different, in a lot of ways. I’ve spent the past 7 years tied to a University (albeit a great 7 years and a great University), and it’s time to go!

So look for more. Who knows what will be next? (I do, its going to be snow photos).

-d-