My Desktop
A week after my harddrive crashed on my main desktop I’m pretty much all caught up to where I was a week an a half ago. I’m missing a couple changes to my primary project that I hadn’t committed, as well as a couple of prototypes for other projects. The prototypes aren’t as big of a deal, since most of the work done for those was research related, and not too code heavy. I still retain the knowledge, I’ve just lost the code. It goes without saying that I’m going to be implementing a nightly back script that backs up to my fileserver.
Previously, my desktop ran Gentoo. It was a great learning experience, and I still encourage those learning to give it a try. However, it tends to be on the bleeding edge and it’s not surprising for packages to break here and there. And as I find myself focusing more on my development, I’m less amused admining and repairing my systems. This time around I’ve given Debian testing/Sarge a try. It’s not as ancient as Debian stable, and not as cutting edge as Gentoo, but I hope it is a happy balance of timeliness and stability. So far it’s looking good and reunning well. I’m very happy. And I found I still enjoy setting up machines. I guess maybe it’s just the daily grind/maintenance that sucks.
Couple things about Linux desktops. Setting up those extra mouse buttons is still more difficult than it should be. Why must I edit my X config, create an Xmodmap config, install and configure imwheel and restart X? And it doesn’t help with everybody suggests a slightly different imwheel configuration (granted the Debian default was correct, guess I should have tried that one first). And sound is stil a pain in the ass. Definitely less so now. But ALSA/OSS collisions, and now mixer funkiness is kinda annoying me.
Anyways, I’ve got that backup script to write.