karniv0re's Journal: Hey, Boooooodhi!

Well, I'm officially a nerd again.

After almost 3 years of living it up as a playboy - which has been mostly awesome, mind you - I have returned to my roots. Whilst undergoing my transition, I all but dropped my geeky background in favor of hard drinking and rough sex. But now I've met a beautiful girl who gets me, and thus, the conquest for conquests has come to a halt and now I need another hobby. I really have missed my projects.

But in the past, most of my projects have been self-serving. I've been wanting to get into open source for a long time but never knew where to start. It was always so intimidating and complex. But since working this developer job, nothing seems impossible anymore.

So I decided to start with a small, but meaningful project: Vrapper. Vim key bindings in Eclipse is the holy grail of development environments for me. The fluid movements of Vim combined with the robust error-checking, auto-building, and shortcuts of Eclipse makes for a tasty deal. But it is by no means a complete project. Vrapper aims to implement all of Vim's features inside an Eclipse editor. Easier said than done.

Nevertheless, I began implementing the :sort command to get a feel for developing on the project. Just as I was making some major headway, my old Debian system crashed, and failed to come up right. I couldn't login using Gnome, and XFCE just failed to open. When booting Single User mode, GUIs were non-existent. I got frustrated and went and bought a new Sony Vaio T Series Ultrabook, and a new 6 gig HP. But I can't pick up the desktop until mid-December, so I went back to my bricked PC and played with it a little more.

I found I could fire up TWM - that godawful super old window manager. It was good enough to download a new Linux distro and burn it to CD. I decided to try Linux Mint. It looks beautiful, but it ran slower than a dog on downers. So I downloaded a few more distros aimed at older PCs and tried each one out. Puppy Linux threw a kernel panic, DSL didn't boot to a graphical environment, but Bodhi is rocking and rolling. Like, screaming fast for an old 1 GB Intel Celeron-based Compaq Presario.

So it looks like I'll be back on development soon, which is good. I've been chatting with the maintainer of Vrapper, and it sounds like he could use some help. And I'm more than happy to help.

A few more topics I would like to cover in the future:

* Putting Linux on a Sony Vaio T Series Ultrabook (shit is not going to be easy)
* Putting Linux on my new Desktop
* Copying all these Journal entries to Google Docs, to have a backup in case Slashdot ever decides to stop hosting journals, since they seem to have really made them not much more than a footnote on the website.
* Vrapper, and how awesome it is

It's good to be back.