I retract my last two entries...for now.

I like Gnome again.

I don't know anything about how KDE is doing. I just don't use it.

Okay. I don't think I am meant to have a solid experience with Windows Environments. I just got finished reading this article. Scary stuff. Not only is KDE a bungle, it appears that the latest version of Gnome is out to get me as well.

According to the article, browsing for files has "reverted" to old Win95 days when browsing meant opening multiple windows for each folder you drilled into. Also Nautilus (the file browser) has removed the option to type in a file path!

Not good. Not good at all. I think it's time I sat down and really looked at what makes a good Environment.

Let me start off by saying KDE sucks. You don't like my last sentence, then bugger off.

Let me start this off by saying that I went into the whole idea of installing and using KDE with a very open mind. Although there is plenty good to say about KDE, there is also plenty bad.

This all started when I had the itching desire to reinstall Gentoo for the "n-teenth" time. As I was bootstrapping Gentoo, I decided to come up with a better plan then installing whatever came to my fancy. I decided it was time to do some serious digging and come up with exactly what I needed to do and what software would be best for my purposes.

Most of my time is spent on a rickety old Dell CPxJ laptop. Not too slow, not too fast either. I knew the hardware "ins and outs" and felt pretty confident that it was time to move to the 2.6 kernel series. I won't get into the gory details of that install process in this rant. That's for another day and a few more weeks of trying out 2.6.

Along with 2.6 I felt it was time to try another windows environment. I had given Gnome 2.4 a shot and felt pretty good about it. I did have some concerns over it's memory and cpu useage, but that's the price you pay for good looks and integration of just about everything. I also happened to like the GTK look and feel.

I have read and discussed the "flame" wars that occasionally flare up every now and then regarding which environment is better. I must admit that I used to take a very neutral stance towards either Environment as I normally ran open/busy/fluxbox. Minimal used to be my way of thinking.

Being the fair-minded person that I am, I felt it was only right and proper that I give KDE a whirl. I had used a few good applications from KDE, but never had I used a full KDE installation. It was time for me to give KDE it's chance.

So after bootstrapping Gentoo and getting my system up to snuff, I started my installation of KDE. The installation went smooth, although I did notice it took a while to install (a full 24+ hours). This was noticeably longer than Gnome (about 15 hours).

One reason I never really gave KDE a spin before was due to the QT licensing issues. My worries have been abated for a while as there is now a GPL version of QT available. I must admit however that QT was a major portion of the compile time.

After the installation I decided to use KDM to get me up and running. This is where I started to run into some negative feelings regarding KDE.

A little background is in order. I originally started out with XDM. Not the prettiest manager out there, but it was clean and to the point. It worked well and didn't confuse anybody. When I moved to Gnome, I gave GDM a chance. I must admit that GDM is the best manager out there today. A clean and easy to navigate layout always makes me smile. Along with it's clean design, it also allowed themes. I love themes. I often disagree over minor placements and asthetics.

KDM really turned me off on the get-go with it's "chinsey" look and feel. I felt like I took a few steps down from even XDM. Text area boxes were used with a listing of which users had access to use X. Not the prettiest solution by far!. On top of which, button placement was just plain wrong. Strikes one and two.

After logging in, it took no time for me to get to my desktop. I must admit that it loaded a LOT faster than GNOME. Scratch strikes one and two. The reason I like minimal is because it's fast. If you can make something look beautiful, easy to use and fast, you have my attention. KDE and it's apps are noticeably faster than Gnome. But speed isn't everything. I needed to be able to navigate as fast as I used to with Gnome and openbox. This is where I started to get frustrated.

The first problem (and I consider it a problem) is that the close button on title bars were on the wrong side. This doesn't seem like such a big deal to most, but I like to open an application and close it immediately after I am done using it. This sounds like lazy to you perhaps, but look at it this way, every other modern WM uses a close button on the right side of the title-bar, often using the same min-max-close scheme that MS has been using for years.

Other scary things included multiple locations to select settings, huge graphical icons for everything and poor default font quality. Anti-aliasing is prevalant and defaulted in just about every WM available. KDE didn't have this enabled by default. It took me a while to find the option to turn it on and once I had it on, it didn't work for half the fonts.

As I started to customize my desktop, I started to notice other little glitches. The "start" menu became disjointed. Any submenus were "detached" from it's parent. That can be quite disconcerting for anybody who is used to easily determining what menu came from which parent menu.

Along with menu issues, I ran into a huge and gaping issue with Konqueror. I was unable to install any of the Netscape plugins. I didn't initally panic. There was good documentation on how to do this. Good documentation is great, but it isn't helpful when the help isn't correct. I was led to believe that there was a plugin item in the "Configure Konqueror" settings. To my surprise, there was none! I did some research and talked with a few people. They all seem to say that I am abosultly crazy. I looked and looked and tried configuring from several other places. To no avail.

This is where I stand right now. I am still finding more and more to dislike. But I am too busy recompiling Gnome to care right now.

I haven't had much time to do anything. It's summer. Too many nice days to waste inside toiling away on router. BTW the soekris box works WONDERS.

Got rid of cable modem from Cumcostly. DSL is definately slower, but it is more stable.

More later. Back to reading.

Yet another slow day. Not much to do. Work is slow. Who would be working on such a FINE (sarcasm) Saturday? Well...One or two people would. After all, I am.

But that will be a thing of the past, at least for a month. For the first time in almost a year, I will have a regular schedule that allows for weekends off! Perhaps I will be able to catch up with friends? Perhaps I will be able to get pissed off at how packed stores are on the weekends? Perhaps I will just continue to do what I always do on my days off (Sleep)?

That still doesn't settle today in my mind. It's just a depressing day. Dark, dreary, wet and blah. Enough to leave a man in a complete daze.

I gave up on meta moderating. It honestly is too time consuming to do (and do honestly) every single day. God bless those who are able to drive through them.

On a completely other note. One of our managers at work is finally considering two port KVM switches for those techs who feel that too much of their desk is taken up by two monitors. I was given a chance to look at one of the switches they are conisidering. I would have it tested by now, but they didn't have all the correct cables needed for two PCs. I am NOT going to go out and buy the cables. That's most of the cost for a simple KVM solution in the first place. If work is seriously considering them, then let work pay for the whole mess.

Hrmm...Rock Linux...Almost cut it. They just need to actually release a usable version.

So back to rolling my own. Ouch. Spent way to much time working on that. The problem I am running into is getting uClibc working right w/ openssh. After that, its a matter of borking around with init scripts and getting a bootloader to play nice w/ the new roll-your-own.

My overall first impression of the distribution is that it lacks some of the polished documentation that Gentoo offered. There is no explanation of where files go when you do certain steps.

I was honestly afraid that when I did "./scripts/Build-Target" it would totally trash my current setup. Turns out it didn't, but it did leave me stumped as to where all the "builds" wound up installed. After doing some searches, I believe they are in a folder called "VS" under the packages sub-directory. Problem is, linux doesn't think it's a file or directory. In fact I have no clue why "ls" shows it in the first place....

Documentation. Plain old documentation. Although there is a users guide, there really isn't any good meat and bones to the document.

If you look at Gentoo's Documentation, you get not only EXACT command lines needed to get Gentoo built, but you also get some useful information as to what each command does, where files wind up, a good dose of caveats and some possible stumbling blocks to watch out for.

ROCK Linux gives you a listing of what to do, but it isn't quite in the order you need to do them in. There seems to be a lot of jumping back and forth within the document itself. I also don't feel comfortable with some of the commands as they really don't explain what they do EXACTLY. As I stated before, it doesn't have the same polish as Gentoo.

Am I mad about that? No. As with any young distribution, it takes some serious time, trial and error before you get better documentation.

Am I giving up on ROCK? No. I haven't even started to bother people on the mailing lists or on irc.

Looks like it's time to do some information digging...

So...Just as I start to think about making requests for better "roll-your-own" router distribution. I stumble upon ROCK linux in freshmeat. After reading about it, they have several "sub" distributions withing their build system. ONE of them just HAPPENS to be a "Router" distribution as can be seen at
http://www.rocklinux.org/people/pjotr/guide.download/html/ (drop the space between "O" and "A" in download [Stupid Slashdot text editor...]). Oh my. Time to try!

One of my biggest beefs with distributions today is the lack of a "minimalist" approach. Even Gentoo, a source based distribution winds up being around a 500MB install. Now that doesn't mean that you can't find minimalist distributions under 50MB. It's just that you have to do some funky install procedures to get what you want.

I am just slightly above average when it comes to installing, understanding and using linux in it's various forms. I don't want to have to do 10 million things and edit 10 million files to get a decent distro working.

I spent several solid days (on my weekend, might I add) doing research to find a quick and easy way to get a linux router running. Problem is, there are just too many different routes to go. I started out trying more common distributions:

Redhat: Too bloated for router duties

Debian: I haven't played around with it enought to enjoy it's usefulness

Suse: Passed it up REAL quick

Gentoo: I am probably the most familiar with this as it is what I use solely on all my machines at home. Still had problems with bloat. 500MB for a ROUTER?!?!

Slackware: Potential. This is the distro I started out with, but I really don't feel like downloading and burning CDs just to get installing.

Zip Slack: Hrmm...haven't really tested it too much. Again...100MB is just a little heafty for doing only router duties.

As you can see. Not much luck. So I turned to some of the lighter, lesser known distros.

LRP: Not bad. Just a little dated. Floppy. Ugh. Who wants to wait for a floppy to get your router back up.

Bering: Getting there. Still on a floppy. There are some pretty sketchy instructions on how to get this distro on a hard drive. Problem is, you are still stuck using "Packaged" systems. I still haven't figured out how to insert and retain any modules I need.

Trinux: Don't really want to touch that one. If waiting for a floppy to load was bad, try loading THREE floppies. There goes your "hands free" booting as well!!!

Sigh...what must an average joe do to get some hardware working quickly? I did some serious thinking. What about using a regular distro to build a tiny distro? It is possible, Zip Slack was the closest anybody has come so far. But I want to be bleeding edge, I want to make sure my software is up-to-date. Where do I go for this?

I think the long and short answer is, suggest somebody do it on a decent distro, maintain it, then let me try it :)

I like Gentoo. It's build-from-scratch approach is laudable. Now, the only question is: how do I get it to work for me? Perhaps it's time for me to do some serious research, testing, building and maintaining? Nah...I can't even finish my rant here :)

Oh...my poor, poor Netopia router. How did I hate it. It is finally starting to show signs of giving up the good fight.

I would give anything to throw an old PC at our network to replace the old Netopia beast, but to be quite honest, I just don't have the time or devotion to finding out all the funky quirks necessary to get this card or that hard drive to play nicely with linux.

Time to look at something newer, faster, stronger...BETTER! One such possibility somehow managed to land in my trembling hands (that's just too much Coca-Cola).

http://www.soekris.com/net4501.htm is the address. Check it out in all it's glory. Finally a machine that is just PERFECT for a router. It has exactly the correct amount of ports I would need. One for Wan, One for LAN and one for Wireless. I can drop as big of a flash card as I would need for a VERY basic install of linux. Perhaps I will look into Trinux or Embedded Linux.

Every now and then I like to stir things up on our home network. There is just something about leaving my roomate without wireless access for a day or two that makes a mans heart feel all warm and fuzzy :) Time to piss off the roomate....

I am not a very organized person. I don't like making lists and even if I did, I very rarely look at them again. I have a big stack of papers that I keep on my desk at work. Each piece of paper is a todo list. Oh, I get the work done, but never quite the way I initially intended.

I spent some quality time today working on a decent Win98 machine for our Fire Chief's family. I forgot how much of a pain attempting to work on somebody else's PC is. For starters, there is no organization (at least that I can tell) as to where they save files to. The PC wound up having a bad hard drive and NIC. The time spent attempting to troubleshoot the problem was just dumb. There isn't much in the way of resource reporting. You don't get annoying console messages stating drive read/write errors without third party software. You can't get detailed NIC status information without third party software or drivers. One of the best moves Microsoft made was the inclusion of WMI in their OS products. Even thought WMI was available around the time Windows 98 was released, I don't believe WMI is included with 98. Again, the need for downloads. SO, after spending hours attempting to install Windows 98, get the old data back on to the drives, and software downloaded and installed, I finally get everything running in just under a full 24 hours. I need to build up my library of utilities for MS products again.

I would like to mention that I was still having problems getting all the data moved over until I popped a Gentoo Live CD in, mounted the drives and transferred the backups back from another Gentoo box. Maybe I don't need to find new resources to repair MS boxes after all...

Ahhh...The sweet smell of spring is in the air! For now anyway.

Nothing like sun to make a man want to get up before noon. Not as effective as a fog horn, but it makes for a more graceful awakening.

Subjects are subjective. I am not very good at coming up with Subjects. They make my head hurt.

I don't know how people write in jourals. Big, long, intricate journals with long, drawn out thoughts on how one brushes one's teeth. It's good to write things down every once in a while, but let's keep it to grocery lists or something.

Technical Achievement of the day:
www.myitforums.com has some amasingly good scripts for Microsoft (VBscript and the ilk). One I liked in particular allowed me to run an SMS remote control on a PC based only on a username. This makes life at work a dream as I work in a rather large helpdesk that has to support a little over 40,000 employees. gone are the days of attempting to explain to the users what "cmd.exe" means. I needed to do some tweaking to the script. I really didn't want it messing with the users' registry files. All I wanted was a quick and dirty way to access their machines when they came a-callin'.

Not sure what to enter here. Figure I would take up a small portion of Slashdot's available storage space.

More space....

Sigh...

How do people write in their journal daily?