2009-06-28T06:17:21-07:00

243 Yesterday, as I worked on my main computer, I watched my Ubuntu-powered Eee 1000 restart the login session, on its own, while I wasn't doing anything. Twice. I don't know what's up with that distro. They finally, seemingly, fixed the problem where every single web browser I could run on it would lockup or die every 5 minutes, but then they've introduced a new problem where you just get spontaneously logged out. So I finally decided to rip it off and put Gentoo on it. I had been working on a VM for awhile, so I had a stage 4 install basically ready to go. Now, I've avoided this exercise because I know that -- despite its flaws -- Ubuntu was doing an enormous amount of configuration work for me. Well, I'm starting to see just how much. I was running Gentoo on my work laptop a couple years ago, and it wasn't bad, as long as I didn't care about getting the thing to sleep. I convinced myself that I could live with just starting the thing up and shutting it down, and everything else worked fine. Now I'm trying to bring up Gentoo on this thing, and I find the Linux world is in a state of flux. All the configuration I'm used to has been supplanted. Normal group memberships have changed. There's a move afoot to the new policykit/consolekit structure, and I'm having to pull in all sorts of packages from the unstable side of the portage tree. I've FINALLY gotten NetworkManager going, but bluetooth is up in the air. (And, in true Gentoo fashion, getting it going is going to require pulling in lots of unstable libraries, which will force me to recompile a lot more packages that depend on them.) The audio is MIA. And I don't want to even THINK about power management yet. Hey, at least the Xorg guys have their act together. I didn't even NEED an xorg.conf file. I've already spent too many hours on this. It's getting really close to just scrapping it, going back to Ubuntu, and hoping and waiting for them to fix their problems.

2009-06-28T06:17:21-07:00