As a dyed in the wool /bin/csh user [1981-] I must admit that the current version of bash is quite the sweet treat. It has been the default shell on the linux laptops I've been working on for Tadpole and my fingers have grown used to it, so much so that I changed my Sun account to bash and will be changing my home accounts as well when I get home tonight.

The compelling feature? Emacs-style command line editing. I got used to this when I was with Cisco, and even enabled it in the csh-variant I used there on their Sun servers. It wasn't a big enough win that I went for it at home, but I have been a file-name-completion fan since I hacked it into an early version of csh back in '83.

Time for more Jelly Bellies....

Of course, they don't have ACPI enabled by default - this requires a recompile....which takes forever even on a 2.4GHz lapdog. Yawn.

Not only is the Sun Java Desktop, aka "Mad Hatter" a collection of useful Office-like desktop apps, it's also a nice linux distribution based on SuSE. It's significantly improved in end-user friendliness over the base SuSE Professional, more polished for sure.

JoeBandy says "Check it out."

Returning to a fresh copy of RH9 I was able to enable the ACPI support, but it doesn't accurately reflect the battery/ac status. Naughty naughty.

SuSE is still rocking, with the caveat that although I turned on 3d support in the vid driver, the games still report it as not being enabled.

Vine Linux 2.6 has problems with the lapdog, but 2.5 seems quite well-behaved....aside from not having ACPI support out of the box. It's time to break out my "Noodle Words" book and learn some katakana and hiragana.

After a very long time I'm back to installing Linux again. Way back when it was Slackware, if only because it had a picture of J.R. "Bob" Dobbs on the cover. It ran decently well but it wasn't my main operating system.

Some time after that, I again wanted a Linux to try out and a friend gave me Red Hat cds. No go. Just wouldn't install, no matter how hard I beat upon it. My friend runs Red Hat and doesn't have a problem with it, but he indicated that for those of us he has given a set of the disks to, there have been zero successes. Oh well.

Now I'm working for an outfit which hopes to sell Linux laptops in addition to laptops.

As time has passed during my seven plus years in ISDN land, the distro landscape has changed a little bit, and for the better. It seems as if Red Hat is the dominant player in the US market, possibly because of all that publicity during their IPO. Europe, on the other hand, wants SuSE. SuSE, it turns out is descended from Slackware, which is now called a hackerish release.

SuSE's laptop support is near-superb, although it required a re-configure and re-compile of the kernel in order to enable the battery info. I'm typing on it right now. The gecko is cute, too. The mini-PCI 802.11b works right out of the box.

Red Hat, on the other hand, seems to be stuck in the past. It has some APM support, or so it claims, but it doesn't register anything on our laptops. The guy from RH told one of our guys to try the "Taroon" beta [2.4.21 kernel] and it would "just work". Chy'eah, right. APM is still brain-dead, ACPI support is in the kernel but there's no way to turn it on, and "make xconfig" is plain broken. The wireless card doesn't work, either. I'm backing down to a fresh RH9 install and will patch in the ACPI code from SourceForge.

In stark contrast to the quick install SuSE gave me after I had managed to scramble the kernel and its modules a few days ago, Red Hat's seems to be pessimised. The CD spins up, it reads something goes to install it, the CD spins back down, then the system hangs for a bit before going on to the next package.