Today we had some Dell and ATI fun with Linux. Dell aren’t on my top list of computing providers and ATI are well down on my list of graphics card suppliers because it has horrible drivers, even under Windows let alone the pathetic excuse they have under Linux. The issue was that using DVI on the graphics card didn’t work until the operating systems graphics subsystem picked it up. This meant that the BIOS and boot up until the graphics card initialization set up the display, in either Windows or Linux (even Windows’ loading splash screen failed to display). Using VGA onboard seemed to work well, which was weird. We managed to get a VGA dual monitor adapter (yay proprietary connectors!) from a visitor and tested with this and it turned out that the DVI system was broken however VGA works both on board and on the card. Problem solved.

I also had some fun with the Windows High Contrast system. For some reason I saw the “High Contrast NT Daemon” fail, why I even care and why it didn’t restart it automatically in the background is beyond me (perhaps they need to read up on Mac OS X’s Launch Services system). So I got curious and activated it and found it weird that it as a side effect appeared to make my font really big – but thats perhaps not the strangest thing. It took a few seconds and even a “Please wait” model window to display, greyed the display progressively and then activated it. After noticing how badly Windows handles it, I decided to deactivate it. When I compare this to how hard Mac OS X makes it I really wonder, I can flick it on and off very easily even whilst a movie played on an external display – no lag. I’m really not sure how Windows makes it so hard to work properly.

I’ve also been playing with Git and I’ve been reading through http://utsl.gen.nz/talks/git-svn/intro.html which is a comparison between Git and SVN, basically an advocacy piece. Its an interesting read, it appears that the one thing that I will lose is easy merging in of changes in one command however I guess some extra flexibility will help me in some other areas to avoid having larger uncommitted changes in some of my SVN based repositories.

I also used my Windows box at home to test some network stuff to see how it behaves with the ethernet connector. So we booted the machine with no monitor, checked to see what the network card looked like and was happy with things and then I wondered, how do I shut this down from mac? Well it turns out the answer is very simple:

net rpc shutdown -S 192.168.1.104 -U Administrator

Yay for Samba! Another win for the team.