Welcome back to another edition of the Saturday Guest Writer series! Today, drougnor gives us a taste of some stuff he's been working on...

So take a break from the beautiful day outside, sit back with a cold drink...and enjoy

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So, I was asked to write up something for the guest spot and my first
reaction was “What the hell am I going to write that I haven’t said in the
forums already?” I’m not a prolific person, by any means. As I’m sure you
all have realized, IÂ’m not an English Lit major. Hell, you could say that
Written English is maybe a 3rd language for me, after spoken English and
computers.

I thought about maybe detailing some of the problems that have been kicking
me in the ass in life away from the forums (De-stressing is the primary
reason I havenÂ’t been quite as active as usual, by the way. I will be back
to my semi-daily posting soon, IÂ’m sure.) Then I realized that IÂ’ve said
what I needed to about my dadÂ’s passing (Tho, IÂ’ve discovered from watching
reruns of Mash that Colonel Potter reminds me of the old man). You all
realize how much work sucks, so I donÂ’t need to add my own layer . . . Oh,
and weÂ’re all familiar with the idiots weÂ’re all surrounded by.

That narrowed things down a bit . . .

So I think about some of the stumbling blocks that I hit with working on
VB.NET to make the installer . . . I have discovered one thing that I hate
with a vengeance, but itÂ’s not enough to base an entire write up on. But, a
good paragraph will just about do it, I think.

For those of you familiar with the Object Oriented Programming structures,
this will sound familiar, and you may even think IÂ’m daft for being bothered
by it. But why, for the love of all that is holy, do I have to tell a form
that itÂ’s a form when I want to show or hide it??

Those of you who donÂ’t know VB.NET very well, it breaks down like this: I
build a form in the VB program. I lay out the buttons and text boxes and
graphics and such. It looks very pretty. I setup the code for the Next
button to tell the next form to show. Simply telling the program to set the
‘visible’ property on ‘form2’ to true SHOULD do this. So that’s what I did.
I then do a test run and expect to see the second box. Nope, I get a
compile error.

So I hit the MSDN documentation to find out why . . . And hereÂ’s how you are
supposed to do it. And IÂ’m going to use a conversational example to make my
point. LetÂ’s call Form 1 John. Form 2 is Bob. You normally will say
“John, I want you to hide, and Bob will take your place. Got it?” They’ll
say “Yes, Sir” and do it. But this is VB.NET land. John is standing there,
minding his own business. I say to John “John, go hide” and he does. Then
I look at Bob. In VB.NET Land, I now have to say “Yo, Bob!”

“Yah?”

“Bob, your name is Bob. Got that?”

“Yah, I think so.”

“Good. Now, you aren’t THE Bob, mind you. You are just ‘A’ Bob.”

“Ok . . . I Think . . .”

“Good, now that that’s sorted, Bob, NOW you can take John’s place.”

See that? I had to tell Bob that he was Bob before I could issue a command.
In VB 6 (Which IÂ’m going back to for this, by the way), you just tell Bob
what to do and he does.

*shrugs* I guess thereÂ’s a reason for it, but as I last coded in any kind
of actual productive manner just under a decade ago, and it was in a linear
programming language, not an Object Oriented one, the total reason escapes
me.

So, it was more than just a paragraph, but still not a full write-up. It
does seem to make a little more sense now that IÂ’ve got it written down, but
IÂ’m still a luddite . . . *laughs* Wow, MS Word doesnÂ’t have luddite in its
dictionary! ThatÂ’s great!!

But anyway, the primary reason I started hacking away on this was to put to
‘paper’ the steps in a minor irritation of a problem I ran into when trying
to test out a few desktop Linux installs on my primary beast.

It turns out, for those of you NOT in the know, that the nForce chipset
isnÂ’t very Linux friendly straight out of the box. Well, maybe IÂ’m
miswording that a little bit. Most of the driver sets that a lot of the
Linux distroÂ’s come with arenÂ’t very friendly towards the nForce chipset.

I tried to install Fedora Core 5 on my system about a month ago, and hit a
blank screen with a simple blinking cursor in the upper left corner . . . So
I reboot into windows and hit up the forums to figure it out and find out
that Fedora Core doesnÂ’t like the vid card. So, I move on to the text
installation they suggest and hit the same screen. It took me a couple of
days of reading, but it turns out that itÂ’s the SATA drives that are in my
system that are locking up the auto detection of the drivers. Considering I
wanted to install on a partition on my 300 gig SATA drive, thatÂ’s not good.

So, I tried SUSE, which is known for being MUCH more friendly to the nVidia
devices out of the box. And it ALMOST worked! Except that it was the SATA
drive that make me stumble again.

It seems that even though the installation went stunningly well, when it
came to the Grub setup, apparently it doesnÂ’t like to boot off an SATA
drive. It was the first time I found myself grumbling about the MS boot
loader not being able to support the Linux installations. So, due to this,
I couldnÂ’t successfully load into Suse, and had to reinstall windows to
repair the Master Boot Record.

In the intervening weeks, itÂ’s been sitting in the back of my head, stewing
in itÂ’s own juices, this problem. Then, the solution (well, A solution)
reared its head and grabbed me by the ass . . .

Move the drives around as far as my priority setup goes. See, I have two
SATA drives (a 300 gig and a 200 gig) as well as an 80 gig IDE drive. I
installed windows with the 80 gig drive unhooked so the 300 gig drive would
read as my primary and after Windows was installed, would hook up the IDE
drive so it showed as my third drive in the chain.

What IÂ’m going to do this time is partition out 20 gigs (17 for the primary
install directory and 3 for the swap partition) from the 80 gig drive,
leaving 60 gigs for the windows XP install. IÂ’ll be spending this weekend
getting windows set back up to my specs and for all the tweaks that I enjoy
before trying the new version of SUSE. I just have to remember that for
maximum stability during the initial Linux install that I have to keep my
SATA drives unhooked until I get the most recent nForce drivers downloaded
and installed.

*rereads and sweatdrops*

Ok, IÂ’m not sure if this is what IronSerif was going for, but itÂ’s what
clubbed my writing hands. I know it’s not exactly ‘modding’ related, but
once I get this done, and get my desk space sorted so itÂ’s more baby
proofed, I am going to be moving more towards painting my case.

And before this gets any MORE disjointed and more of a ‘disturbance’, I’ll
sign off.

Jeremy 'Drougnor' Keene

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Thanks for the submission man!

Thanks for the chance to just do a brain dump, Iron Serif! Once I got going, it was pretty fun.

I only read up to abotu half the page, and I dont know if I mentioned this before.

When your form 1 is done doing what ever its doing, put me.close at the end of the code. Once the form closes, it will go to the next one. So in your example, when clicking the next button it should close this form and then move onto the next.. The way I learned it is, When form 1 is done doing what its doing (in school we set up a simple password dialog box) when you entered the correct user name and pass (its a simple If statement) It executes me.close and goes to the next form

However. If you wanted to use ANY information from form 1, you had to make sure it was dimmed as Public. I have the example if you want it.

It is iinterested me, I like hearing about stuff I don't really understand put into laymans terms.

Cheers for the right up!