The more I work with computers, the better subsistance farming looks as an alternative.

[catsidhe]

Goddammit, Linux, stop fucking with me!

My laptop was getting unstable... the last straw was when every media player on the system started to segfault. It's amazing how many programs have media players as plugins.

And when I tried to reinstall the relevant packages, and they still failed, I gave it up as terminal and fading, and this morning I plugged it in at work and started a dist-upgrade.

"Ah," I thought, "It'll want to go to 8.10 before it goes to 9.04, so this'll take a while."
I was pleasantly surprised when it told me that it was going to jump straight to Jaunty, that it would use the Aarnet mirrors, and to come back in a few hours.

I came back in a few hours, and it was basically done.

And the disappointment started.

KDE4.2 is wonderful and shiny and slick and great... if you have a Gb or more of RAM to spare. This machine has 512Mb. So, not so much. It's... so... very... slow... to... do... a...ny...thing.

It's almost usable, but it's not pleasant.

So I installed XFCE as a lightweight alternative. It's so lightweight as to be almost as unusable. I'm sure that there's a way to get the keyboard shortcuts I rely on to work, but I don't have the time, the patience, or the inclination to suffer through finding out.

So I installed Gnome. This is a big step for me, I've always thought of Gnome as a warm fuzzy straightjacket, where it was possible to do anything, if the writers of Gnome thought you should be able to do it.

But Xorg under Gnome uses 10% CPU time, as opposed to Xorg under KDE, which sits around 90%.

Alas, in the effort to install Gnome, I missed out on the bit that makes the network work.


So here I am with a machine I can either use quickly, or on the network, but not both.



At least I figured out how to work around a problem I've been beating my head against at work for more than a week now. So that's something.

Comments

[tau-iota-mu-c.livejournal.com]

I got sick of gnome's "you do it the developer's way, or you get to jump a cliff" attitude a couple of days ago particularly with regard to window placement, and now fvwm is the window manager on the console of the telescope control computer.

I even had official sanction to do it. Sort of.

[catsidhe.livejournal.com]

Ayup.

It doesn't help that this laptop (borrowed from work on the good graces of a decent manager) also has bad sectors on the 60Gb HDD and a failing battery with a life of ~30min, if I don't try to push it.

One of these days I should go out and get myself a decent new laptop.
And an LCD monitor to replace the one that's failing at home.
And a house to put it all in.
And a job where I have dignity and not continual stress for being unable to meet impossible expectations.
And a pony.

[catsidhe.livejournal.com]

Oh, and having XFCE seems to be as near as Ubuntu wants you to get with fvwm. Having fvwm running with some of the more useful plugins from KDE and Gnome, with my favourite keyboard shortcuts programmed in, would be just about perfect. I do not have the time or inclination to go futzing around to get that working, either.

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

Whilst I'm quite happy with GNOME, I suspect the path to your happiness is StumpWM :)