Compiling my own versions of programs when trying to get DVD stuff working intrigued me. I've tried a couple of times to teach myself C++, but hadn't really gotten that far. My understanding of some of the concepts has improved some, and I've also found a good set of tutorials on C Programming's web site. I went though the tutorials, and got some interesting things working. This was PC-based, using the CygWin Linux emulator. I actually understood everything I wrote, which is a very nice feeling! This knowledge should come in handy if I ever have trouble compiling something…

The power supply has been ordered, but I'm going out of town between the 19^th and the 26^th, so it probably won't make it here before I leave. This adventure will have to resume at that point.

Searching for power supplies was very interesting. I determined that I needed at least a 300W supply, and considered upgrading case and all. Some of the bigger stores, such as Best Buy, Office Depot, and OfficeMax, revealed nothing under $30 (just for the power supply). I checked some other sites, such as Tiger Direct and TCWO, and found one for $17 on Tiger Direct. I thought that was pretty good, and was planning on ordering it, when a friend (the person I bought the computer from) found one on PC Direct Source for $10. I'll probably order it tomorrow.

I fired up the computer today while I was at home for lunch. I booted it into Windows so my younger son could play a game. When I came home from work, I noticed that the computer was off. Seems that it just completely shut down while he was in the middle of the game. After some hardware troubleshooting, I narrowed the problem down to the power supply. Time to go power-supply hunting…

Today was my first induction into the stereotypical Linux “dependency hell” (a term meaning that every package you try to install has dependencies on yet another package you don't yet have). In my case, I decided to look into VLC from VideoLAN. The download provided contained about 85% of what was needed. I downloaded several packages from different places (two of note were Fresh RPMs and RPM Find, and got all unresolved dependencies down to 1 - “libxinerama.so.2”.

Upon further Googling, I found that this library is part of XFree86. This is where the “fun” began. XFree86 has gone not-free, so they don't have anything for you to download. No worries yet - a new organization called x.org has taken over development of the free version, so I'll go there and download it. Well, x.org is new, and they don't have any software available for download either - just documents about what they're going to do. Through my searching, I found that xinerama is an X add-on that supports multiple monitors. Although I only have one, this program just has to have it. After fruitlessly searching for hours, I gave up on VLC.

Okay, let's try MPlayer - it sounds like it could be fun. Got it installed, and got nowhere - seems /dev/dvd doesn't exist on my system. So, I create /dev/dvd/, unmount the DVD/CD-ROM drive, re-mount it under /dev/dvd/, and give it a shot. Now I get a message telling me there's no installed handler. -sigh- Next I tried xine - the site recommended that I download the source and compile it myself. That was interesting - at this point, I got so frustrated that I called it a night.

Not that today was all negative - I was able to send an e-mail, using addresses imported from Netscape on my other machine, to every member of my Sunday School class. In fact, I was so impressed with how easy Ximian Evolution is that I changed the setting on the mail account to delete the e-mail once it's pulled down. I haven't yet found a way to import my mail from Netscape, but that's a low priority. I also signed up for the WBEL Users mailing list, so I could keep up with what's going on with WBEL.

Inspired by my previous day's success, I fired up the computer and began looking at Ximian Evolution (now distributed by Novell) for my e-mail. I used Netscape 7.1 for my e-mail and newsgroup access, so I figured that Mozilla's web and e-mail clients were similar. Evolution looked more like Outlook, so I decided to give it a shot. To begin with, I set it up to leave a copy of the e-mail on the server, in case things didn't work. It worked very well - it's got a nice interface. I also downloaded copies of all the pages on my web site, and modified the Sunday School prayer list using GEdit. I also did some other exploring around other features of the operating system and desktop environment.

I was also able to play an Ogg Vorbis audio clip using XMMS, a WinAmp clone included with WBEL. Tomorrow, I'll be trying to send an e-mail to everyone in the Sunday School class, and get DVD video working.