Mandriva 2006 — RC1

Installed the Mandriva 2006 OS (Release Canidate 1). Easier to install than XP without the pesky phone activation.

I have an NVIDIA GeForce 440 which required me to install drivers from the [Nvidia site]. Before running the script, just install the kernel-source thru the package maanger. And then afterward change ‘/etc/X11/XF86Config’ to use (Driver “nvidia”) instead of (Driver “nv”) Un-Viola!

I think I’ll install [.NET Mono] next.

And more importantly, let’s not forget [Easy URPMI].

Also installed the [VLC media player] with ‘urpmi vlc’.

The VLC player is useful for watching videos or steaming videos like the [Blender interface video tutorials].

Ogre Mesh XML Scientific Notation

I noticed that Ogre wasn’t handling a mesh very well that used scientific notation. So I wrote this little perl script to remove the notation. It just converts any scifi notation to zero for now. You’ll need Perl to run the script.
————- ogre_remove_scifi.pl ———–
use strict;

my ($arg1) = shift;

print "Processing… $arg1\n";

open(FILE, "<$arg1")
or die("Unable to open $arg1");

open(FILE2, ">$arg1.xml")
or die("Unable to open $arg1.xml");

while(<FILE>)
{
$_ =~ s/"[^"]*e-[\d][^"]*"/"0"/g;
print FILE2 $_;
}

close FILE2;
close FILE;

print "Done. $arg1.xml [ OK ]\n";

exit;

GUIDs in Perl

Here is a handy Perl module called [GuidGen] that let’s you create GUIDs (Global Unique Identifiers) in Perl. A GUID is basically a random number that is guaranteed to be unique across the net. It is based on time and your MAC address. A GUID is useful in something like the ‘user agent’ string, hehe.