Author: jonathan

After I started to make the new version of the site I designed to give up on the new design as I did not have a clear idea of what I wanted. As the current site already has a simple but nice design I designed to stick with that. I have remade the site based on that layout from scratch and it has taken be about 3 hours to do all of the CSS. I have no doubt that once I start to add content and test it in other browsers there will be more work to be done on the CSS but for now I am happy with the outcome.

As the code is made from scratch instead of being copy and pasted it allows me to make it much cleaner and remove any patchy parts where changes had been made in the past. I have also changed the way the the elements of the site are positioned on the page by not using position: absolute apart from on two parts where it is the only possible way to get the style wanted without it being fixed to a bad position on the page. A new logo has been made which is basically me writing “Cosmo” on a tablet. The entire site as it stands at the moment is 100% code with any graphics being SVG files. The XHTML needs to be validated but for now I will work on the back end of the site which I hope will be based on Ruby on Rails but if I am unable to do that I will fall back on PHP.

This is the latest version of my personal website. They normally last as long as the server or until I make any major change to the style or running. The new version will include smooth new SVG graphics and will hopefully be powered by Ruby or at the very least cleaner PHP. As with every website I make it is better than the last in some way as I work hard on improving my skills and knowledge base whilst working on new sites. I have been working a lot with Ruby on Rails recently and I would like the website to run on that. This will require a learning curve as I’ve not made a site using RoR before. I will also need to get Apache HTTPd to server ruby files. I will also have a change log with the site.

This computer belongs to my best friend and he managed to accidentally uninstall the sound driver. This would have been a simple problem to fix but he has installed another sound driver for a audio sound card that he does not have. This has caused them to conflict at boot and make the computer blue screen. I did manage to get the computer to boot into normal mode without disabling the sound card in the BIOS by looking in the driver’s directory and removing all the sound drivers that I could find. The biggest problem I am having now is trying to do a repair install of Windows XP Home SP2 as the drivers are still causing a blue screen crash. I have Disabled the sound card again until I can get windows to boot normally again. He has a spare computer that had a PCI sound card in so I could take that out of it and install it into his PC.

I have been looking at the idea of selling Linux Computers and the best idea I have had is to build them myself. I’d like to know if there is a demand for Linux Computers before I start to build them. To do this I want people who are interested in Linux computers to leave a comment at the bottom of either this post of the orginal post here. You can also email me on shop [at] bluesquarelinux.co.uk

An idea of the spec I have been looking at. This is just a plan spec, it is not finial in any way.
CPU: Athlon 64 LE-1600 (64 bit)
HDD: 160GB Seagate SATAII
RAM: 1GB DDR2 (1x1024MB)
Drive: LG DVD-RW
OS: Linux 64bit

This is a tiny notebook that I am working on now for the second time. It has had the same problem with spyware and viri and I think that the cause of this is that I did not register the Anti-Virus software. I installed it and left it on the 90 day demo mode so that she could register it herself. The biggest problem I have been facing with this laptop is that I do not know the password for it so I am having to log in as the Administrator. The second problem is the lack of anything useful to me such as optical drive, floppy drive, ethernet or the ability to boot from USB devices like my zip drive. Currently it is doing a boot scan for spyware using Spybot and to give you an idea of this systems performance, the “Time Remaining” counter is counting upwards. My overall plan for this laptop is to make sure the anti-virus, anti-spyware and firewall software is up to date, scan the computer and defragment it. This should make the computer faster as well as making it much saver to use on the internet. I am also now temped to install firefox on it.

I want to make a little web app to help users of my linux shop choose the right OS for them. The idea of this app is that they select the processor that they have and it then displays the available OSes for that processor architecture. The problem I am facing is that it has been a while since I’ve coded in PHP, Perl or anything other than CSS. I’ve ideally like to make this app in AJAX as this will instantly work without having to reload the page or sent them to another page to display the information they need. Another idea I have just had, literary now as I am writing this, is to have the shop sorted into distros like it is now but also allow them to display the OSes by architecture aswell. Both will require some planning.

With all that free time that I mentioned in here I have taken WordPress and turned it into a nice new site. I am pleased with the outcome as I am not that good at graphics so they are simple but most of the styling comes from the coding, this is what I am good at. I started off with the latest version of WordPress and installed the K2 theme. This is the theme that this website currently has but I have taken the sample stylesheet that they provide and created the new style from with that. The biggest problem I had was when I started making pages because to get the layout I wanted I couldn’t simple copy and paste the code from the original version of the website, so after a some more coding I finally got the page layout that I wanted. As an added extra I install my hit counter and JSSpamBlock to prevent the comments being filled up with adverts. Once the DNS settings update you can see the new site here.

I’ve had my friend banner on my site for some time and in return he got me to make him a 88×31 pixel banner for his website. So I made this small banner for my Blue Square Linux website. I also have this on Kustom PCs forums but it looks a little out of place on it’s own next to the big banner for my personal site. Today I made two more 88×31 pixel banners for this website and my personal one so I will have all three of them on the forums next to each other. To make them look more interesting I will use a PHP script to gather todays hits for each of the sites and display it next to the banner. You are welcome to use the banners to link to my site. You can find them here.

I downloaded Linux from scratch and started working though the book. Linux From Scratch, LFS for short, is a book that guides you through how to make you’re very own linux distribution and I decided that I would call mine Blue Sqaure Linux. I bought the domain www.bluesquarelinux.co.uk and then noticed that it would probably be a long time before I’m able to produce a working linux OS, let alone something that I could let other people download. I decided to turn my domain into a shop and for the past few weeks I’ve been selling Debian GNU/Linux and Fedora. I’d also got my site linked to from the Kustom PCs forums and Idle Entity who I seem to have been plugging like crazy recently. See as I have a lot of free time I might take wordpress and make a nice customized version for the shop or maybe build my own cart and blogging system.