Well, I reinstalled Mandrake on Argo this afternoon. Better partitioning scheme this time. Plenty of space left for a Debian partition, which I plan to install when Potato is officially released. (After that, I might just go ahead and move on to Woody, but I wanna start with a fresh stable.)

It would seem there is an odd anomoly with my sound card, or more probable, the driver I'm currently using. I first noticed it when I tried to play a cd, and no sound came out. I checked the mixer, and made sure the levels were adjusted properly, to no avail. After multiple attempts, I decided to open up the case and make sure the audio wire was connected properly.

Several times in and out, but still nothing. I finally decided that either I had a bad wire, a faulty sound card, a faulty drive, or my sound card's driver was acting screwy. If it was a bad DVD drive, the problem would have to have been very specific, because I knew the cd was playing properly by the output from the headphone jack. It just wasn't getting to the sound card.

I didn't think a faulty sound card was likely either, since other functions have been working fine. A faulty wire? I suppose that wouldn't be too hard to test. Just find another wire and see if it works. A little more investigating has revealed that the likelihood of that is low.

I played with it some more, and discovered that in fact, none of the mixer settings work. With any mixer I try. It's the MIXER driver! Ahah! It claims to be sensing the sound card, and turning the volume up and down, but even when I change the PCM volume while playing an mp3, nothing changes. Funny thing is: it even "remembers" the fake mixer settings when I exit, reopen, or run a totally separate mixer app. I'm thinking a driver problem, but it could be something bad with something on the card. If ONLY I had net access, I could find out more, and probably have an answer within five minutes....

Did I mention that I absolutely hate US Pest? Thought so.

So anyway, maybe these auto sensing sound card modules aren't really all they're cracked up to be after all. Recompile the kernel yourself, and you know what settings you're getting. Hopefully... :)

Dagobah and Argo seem to be getting along better and better with each passing moment. I just entered today's ATM transaction into gnucash, which was running on Dagobah, but being displayed through Argo's X server. Gotta love it.

I 99% certain that I figured out why Dagobah was being such a grump when I was trying to log in from Argo last night.

[Bitscape is told he has a phone call. Goes to answer, 99% certain who the party on the other end will be. Sure enough! Talks for a minute. Returns to console.]

Anyway, I think that since Argo hadn't yet been put into the hosts file, Dagobah was trying to do a reverse DNS lookup, trying to contact the ISP's DNS server, and timing out. Makes sense. Anyway, when I added Argo to the hosts, the problems stopped. Strange that an app like vim would be trying to do reverse lookups though.... Oh well. Who knows?

Well, I'll now be shutting this rig down, to prepare Dagobah and Argo for their first big adventure together. Cheers!