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catsidheGoddammit, 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.
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.