Tetsuo Time

I met with the people at New Horizons today about the courses I might be taking at their school. I would be taking classes not only to get A+ certified but it would be in a package with the Microsoft certifications.

I got some paperwork to take over to the people who will be financing but the person I am supposed to meet had called in sick. So they left a post it note for me on his monitor so he can see it tomorrow when he gets in.

I also got my drivers licence renewed today. I got an eight year one so I don't have to renew until 2013.

Speaking of computer stuff I got the Elive CD going last night and it seems to have issues when trying to boot it in normal mode. I had to boot in "expert" mode which really the only difference in that mode is it doesn't have a fancy boot screen. So it is more verbose like you see all the system messages cascading down the screen terminal\DOS style. Then you have to pick between E16 and E17. For this tryout I picked E17 which is the one I have been wanting to try. E17 seems fresher to me and has more modern effects. Although it is not perfect and it crashed on me once. The icon box is also not enabled by default so when you minimize windows and don't know that there is a task menu in the popup menu you would think that the window is lost.

The only thing is that I don't have the internet hooked up on my PC so there isn't a lot I can do on there for now. It's also still not as nice as Mac OS X. ;)

Below is my current screenshot from my Mac:

I tried out the Elive cd today. Those of you who know me the longest know that I used to be a big fan of the Enlightenment desktop on linux. Well thanks to Elive I was able to try it again after a couple of years having just tried it on Mandrake.

Well, the CD had issues. It tries to load the Linux 2.4 kernel which should be ok but on my PC it spat out a lot of errors and they set it up to load up a spanish keymap by default so I have to hit F3 or F4 during startup and put in options to boot with the Linux 2.7 kernel and with US as the language.

But there is a problem. It doesn't seem to support USB keyboards which is what I have my old keyboards are PS/2 but they are my families broken ones I really should throw away. So I'm unable to do much and I wasn't able to get it to load E17 only good ol' E16 that I used to try to emulate on Windows.

Since my mouse worked I did muck around a bit launching things and what not and I find that Enlightenment just doesn't have as much polish and solidness as Mac OS X has. They also have replaced the default theme "Brushed Metal" with a theme that has titlebars that sort of Ape Aqua a little but the titlebar buttons and rest of the theme are just so blah. I mean just look at it. What where they thinking? They need a theme to impress and show what E can do loading by default. Yeah I know you can easily change it but still an alternative desktop needs to make good first impressions.

Maybe if the next version of Elive has USB keyboard support I might be able to get it to load E17 which is the cutting edge E that I am wanting to try out.

Ok I got the keyboard to work and I found "Entrance" which is the E17 login window but no other thing of E17 that relates to it's desktop shell seemed to be present.