To the AMD Catalyst Team

10 Mar 2012 at 19:18

tenach

Soapbox

No Comments

Dear AMD Catalyst Team,

Why can’t I upgrade my drivers in Windows 7 64-bit? I run a Radeon HD6470M and I have even used your autodetect tool to make sure of this. Downloading the Catalyst drivers (12.2 as of this writing) and attempting to use them causes it to tell me that I don’t have the proper graphics adapter. Really? Then why does Catalyst Control Center tell me this:

Driver Packaging Version 8.783.2-101028a-107493C
Provider ATI Technologies Inc.
2D Driver Version 8.01.01.1081
2D Driver File Path /REGISTRY/MACHINE/SYSTEM/ControlSet001/Control/CLASS/{4D36E968-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}/0000
Direct3D Version 8.14.10.0784
OpenGL Version 6.14.10.10243
Catalyst™ Control Center Version 2010.1028.1114.18274

Your autodetect tool tells me I have the graphics card, as does Windows 7 itself. Even if I uninstall the graphics drivers completely (making sure no file is left on my machine), I still can not install your drivers.

Why can’t I upgrade my drivers, Catalyst Team? I’ve looked to Acer for help, but they are just as clueless as I am. Please fix this or tell me what I am doing wrong, so that this can be remedied. I really don’t want to have to start using NVIDIA products, but this is aggravating me to no end and I’m seriously contemplating dropping ever buying your products.

Sincerely,
Tenach.

Moving to Arch from Ubuntu (Again)

07 Mar 2012 at 12:52

tenach

Linux

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For the past several months I have been bouncing around between Ubuntu (and Debian/other Debian-based distributions) and Arch Linux, and I think that for what I want to do with Linux, I have outgrown the use of a pre-packaged system. As good as it is, I don’t think that I’ll be using Ubuntu personally, though I will still be supporting it and it is definitely the one I refer people to when they’re coming off Windows or Mac. So, I’m back to Arch, after having taken a look at other distributions such as Fedora and Slackware. This is proving to me that paultag was right: I am most likely an Arch fanboy (though I’d rather say I’m an enthusiast).

My Arch installation went smashingly. And by that I actually do mean that it went well, not that I wanted to smash things this time. Gnome 3 works fantastically well with the Xorg xf86-driver-ati drivers, but that isn’t good enough for me – for what I want to do I need to use the proprietary fglrx drivers. This has been where I end up tossing in the towel and running back to Ubuntu. Not this time, however. I’m actually going to get this right (and double check instructions before I go forward).

So I uninstalled the Xorg ATI drivers and installed catalyst and catalyst-utils and now my machine won’t boot right. Probably because I didn’t initiate ‘aticonfig –initial’. My laptop now freezes when attempting to boot into Arch, after entering stage three. At least I have a LiveUSB handy still. While looking up how to fix this the easiest way, I found out that I can use catalyst-total, which also installes the lib32 ATI stuff, and that I should probably use an older version of xorg-server (1.11.x or something similar). Apparently this will make Gnome 3 look like crap but there is a hopeful fix in the Arch wiki. There’s a catalyst repository I can add to my pacman mirrorlist, which I am very tempted to do so I don’t have to remember all this stuff. I suppose it’s good to learn on my part though.

And so it continues, I keep picking away at building my Linux install the way I want.

Bits Have Feelings Too

21 Feb 2012 at 18:24

tenach

Gaming, Soapbox

No Comments

As I was reading through my stream on Google+, I came across this post:

Christopher Carr – 2:18 PM
“Played Skyrim for the first time last night.

So, why are there children in the game if you can’t bludgeon, shock, and burn them to death? You can beat women to death and steal their clothes, but the kiddos are off limits?” - Comment on Google+

Sure, I can get that they disallow digital child abuse/murder, but seriously, if they are going to decide to be politically correct about that, they should at least make more of the game politically correct, or none at all. It makes no sense as to why one can murder digital men and women, but not their digital offspring. Is it more ethically wrong to digitally harm a child over a female? One would think it’d be equally wrong to hurt a human no matter their gender, creed, or ethnicity.

As my friend Gibson posted, “I vote equal rights for all digital entities!” To which I concur. Because, you know, bits have feelings too.

Music that Inspired me This Week

13 Jan 2012 at 23:51

tenach

Inspiration, Literature, Music

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There’s been a lot of writing to be had from these fingers this past week! I’m so happy with how things have been turning out and am happy to say that the second installment of Spiral Jackals should be ready in time for tomorrow. I’ve been revisiting my music library and have found many of my old sources of inspiration, and thought I’d share a few with you. So, without further ado, here are some music videos for songs that helped particularly well this week (some of it I never would have expected to draw inspiration from, either):

Covenant – We Want Revolution

Vangelis – Tears in Rain

Hybrid – Dreaming Your Dreams

VNV Nation – Testament

Benny Benassi – Love is Gonna Save Us

This is but a small sampling of what goes through my eardrums throughout a given day, and is definitely not an exhaustive list!

I think Blade Runner is calling my name again.

What music inspires you?

Spiral Jackal #1

07 Jan 2012 at 00:40

tenach

Literature

No Comments

The first installment of my serialized novel is now available to read!

“Birthday”

74 Quick Sleep, 2087

There was no sense of time for them, other than the fact that Corina was born on the day of the incursion. Kenton smiled as he looked upon his youngest daughter, the youngest in their roving band of survivors. She was covered in dirt and debris, as was everybody else. Among the dirtiness, there were flowers woven throughout her long, strawberry-blonde curls that framed her freckled face. Flowers were rare to come by these days and had become a sort of symbol of freedom and innocence. Something everybody had lost when the monsters came. Happy birthday, little Princess, he thought and with a sigh, turned around and walked through the broken department store window and onto the strip of rubble that had once been a road.

Read more on Fictionaut: Spiral Jackal #1

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