jciv’s blog

OS Ramblings

March 15th, 2006

I don’t use Linux much (I used to use it more than Windows at the labs at school) but rather than just install a pre-setup desktop distro, I decided to go with Gentoo for my own box. I have learned a lot about Linux this way. There is no better way to learn about it than to setup things mostly manually. Sometimes it is a major pain though.

I don’t use the Gentoo box directly often, but I have Samba and SSH setup and store some files on the machine so I can access them from anywhere. Amazingly (coming from Windows) I have had the machine running for 175 days without reboot. Windows XP I can sometimes keep going for around 30 days before it gets really unstable.

A while back I upgraded KDE and it stopped working. But since I mostly used command line I didn’t care much. So recently I decided to upgrade stuff again and see if I could get the new KDE 3.5 to work. Well, it turns out that the reason I couldn’t solve the problem was I had no mouse plugged in so now I actually have 3.2 working. I needed the mouse on a different computer for a bit and never reconnected it though it was sitting there. I am not sure if that was the original problem. I hope not, that seems too dumb not to figure out when it says something like mouse not found.

Then I found that KDE 3.5 is not ready on Gentoo yet, it is masked. Not being satisfied with not having the latest version, I went in search of how to force it to install. So after some package.keywords magic and cleaning up some other problems I got the compile started. Well, somewhere along the way the compile failed. So I gave in started emerging KDE 3.4. This was not a fast machine back in 2003 when it was new, its an Via EPIA M9000 Mini-ITX, so compiling takes a while. I didn’t write down the 3.5 error, but this one died too with something that looks a bit familiar. It seems to be a gcc upgrade issue. Hopefully it is fixed now. I am going to give 3.5 another shot.

Long ago I had Windows XP on this box. I didn’t want XP on my main machine because I was being stuborn and sticking with Windows 2000. It ran XP ok, but I hardly ever used it since all my stuff was on my 2000 machine.

I like to play with Linux and I like a lot of the utilities (UnixUtils for Windows), but I am too addicted to Windows to actually switch yet. Speaking of switching, I am pretty interested in the new Intel Macs. They sound great from reviews and those that use Macs. But the couple times I have tried a Mac I get rather confused. The UI is so different from what I am used to with Windows. I would like to have one to try out though. The only problem is they aren’t free and I can’t really justify buying something that expensive if I likely won’t use it any more than my Linux machine. Anyway, I think I will wait till the second generation of Intel Macs to decide. Either they will work out some bugs or maybe I can find one of the first gen ones a bit cheaper.

My other problem with deciding to getting a Mac would be do I want a Mac mini, an iMac, or a MacBook Pro? There are major price differences between them. If I turn out to like it and use it a lot, the laptops would be great. But if not, that is a lot of wasted money. Though, I guess Ebay would be a solution.

With Windows Vista coming, maybe it is time to move on from Windows as my main OS. I will certainly give Vista a try, it looks so pretty. But I think they are hurting usability all over the place and it certainly is going to take a powerful machine

Entry Filed under: operating systems