Dev-Picayune

So I couldn’t help myself, I had to install Ubuntu Edgy Eft on something. I had been meaning to rework my old laptop anyway, so I kicked Breezy off completely, and reformatted. Honestly, I thought Dapper was slick as an install, but this was even easier. The one thing that trips me up still on that old Dell C840 laptop is loading the restricted Nvidia driver. By default, when the system installs… it gets it right, 1600×1200 screen and the whole works but it isn’t the Nvidia supplied driver so 3D is dog slow. The trick to making the driver work right (and that’s assuming you do the simplest of installs (just search the web for the basic install) ) you still have to change the /etc/modprobe.d/options where they say “nvidia” make it read “nvidia NVreg_Mobile=0″. This solution is referenced on the web but it’s buried amongst a lot of other things that don’t work.

But honestly, it’s really just a click and enter a few things kind of installation that is much faster and simpler than a Windows XP install. Dapper and Edgy seem to support so many more devices out of the shute than XP SP2 even does.

The bad news is that Python 2.5 is not the default version. It’s available as a secondary version but it’s not run by default (i.e. when you type ‘python’ at a command-prompt). I wonder now how long it’ll be before they handle that full upgrade?

Technorati Tags: ubuntu, edgy, linux, dell

And now for something completely unrelated to what I have previously been blogging about, I needed to write a quick application that showed the current .NET CLR version that was used to run an application. To get the value for the CLR version you just need to use this static method:

System.Runtime.InteropServices.RuntimeEnvironment.GetSystemVersion()

Now aren’t you glad I documented that?

Technorati Tags: c#.net, clr

A quick note here to state that when closing a wx.Dialog and you want to make sure you get a valid result code back (where you haven’t setup the default OK and Cancel buttons) you can do so like this (assuming self is referring to the Dialog window):

 self.EndModal(returnCode) 

In this case, returnCode can be just about any integer, but it’s probably a good idea to do something like this:

 self.EndModal(wx.ID_OK) 

or

 self.EndModal(wx.ID_CANCEL) 

The other important note is that I noticed that when I left the self.Close() call in after the self.EndModal it still got called and it impacted the result code by incrementing it by 1 which of course broke the code. So thing to remember is to not call both. You should only call EndModal if it’s going to be a modal dialog window.

Technorati Tags: python, wxpython