[CLUE-Tech] upgrading rpm (continued and resolution)

[Nate Duehr]

Collins Richey wrote:
> On Sat, 20 Nov 2004 21:10:44 -0800 (PST), Carl Schelin
> <co_bofh at yahoo.com> wrote:
> 
>>(another delay; fscking netgear has failed and I have
>>to recable. second FPOS netgear to fail out of two. no
>>more netgears for me.)
> 
> 
> Interesting. I've always gotten good results with netgear.

Same here.  I'd gladly buy more Netgear.  Always liked that they still 
use real metal boxes for their switches and hubs and not plastic junk.

I'm curious - in what way are they failing?  Do you know?  Static zap? 
Bad power supplies?  Ports going dead?

> [ rest of tale of woe snipped ]
> 
> Hey man, I really sympathize. I had similar problems with RPM-based
> systems years ago, and I switched never to look back.

Me three.  The story he gave is EXACTLY the type of thing that drives me 
nuts on RPM-based distros.

> I recommend run-not-walk to debian unstable (if you prefer a binary
> distro) or gentoo (if you can deal with source-based). I've heard
> nothing but goodness from people who use debian with apt-get (or
> other) on debian, and I can attest to years of successful updates with
> gentoo. There are, of course, several ways to get going with debian.

You guys are going to laugh at me... I finally moved the laptop to 
Gentoo.  Forced myself to go from a Stage I on up, including building 
with NPTL and man is this little box fast.

> Best of luck.

Ditto.

I'm pretty happy with the laptop on Gentoo - quite nice eye-candy and 
toys.  KMail's offline IMAP still seems rather broken at this point, but 
mozilla-thunderbird fills that gap nicely.

The only painful part is that the initial emerge is still kinda going - 
still doing firefox, openoffice, etc... and it's been almost a week on 
and off getting the box going.  I focused on ndiswrapper tonight to get 
the 802.11g card fired up -- so at least I am not tethered to the 50' 
Ethernet cable strung up here to the living room from the basement!  (I 
guess it's time to take that back downstairs now.  Yay!)

Nate