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

[Collins Richey]

On Sun, 21 Nov 2004 01:01:32 -0700, Nate Duehr <nate at natetech.com> wrote:



> 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.

No laughter here. Both my desktop and laptop have done well for years
on gentoo. I've had a few niggling problems caused by running the
testing branch, but all in all they're both worry free systems.

> 

> 
> 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.

I'm using the poor man's imap - gmail. I can access it from anywhere
as long as IE, mozilla, or firefox is available, and storage is not my
problem. I've switched all but one of my comcast amounts to forward
automatically to gmail. The only (minor) problem, is that 99% of my
spam comes through comcast. At least gmail does a pretty good job of
labeling spam in a separate folder where I can whack it with a couple
of mouse clicks.

I've come up with one new problem on the laptop. The touchpad is now
flaky on linux, but not on windows. If I scroll rapidly through an
area (like gmail) with lots of links, I get the not-so-much-fun effect
of having clicked when I enter a link. I'll have to research that one,
or just get a mouse.

The only other problem with the laptop is that it has a fsck'ing ATI
mobility video chip. I can't use the ATI modules, of course, and even
the builtin xorg driver can be flakey. nvidia can be flakey when the
kernel changes, but ATI is a complete and utter POS.

> 
> 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!)
> 

Let me know how the wireless works. I don't have a wirelss connection
at home (not too fond of the idea of someone scarfing up my credit
cards), so I've never tinkered with my laptup 802.11g connection
either on windows or linux. Next time we have an install fest, I'll
have to work with that.
I have ndiswrapper and supposedly the right windows driver, so it
should be (famous last words) a piece of cake.

I don't ever bother to compile openoffice; the binary builds work just
fine. Yeah, I know that's not the gentoo way, but I've better things
to do with my compile time. Last time I compiled oo (about 2 years
ago) it required 20+ hours and close to 8 gig of temporary space.


-- 
 Collins