Netbooks and Linux, Fit the First

So, I broke down and got a netbook. My HP laptop is nice, it runs Fedora rather flawlessly (touchpad and keyboard bugs aside), and it's got a big screen. But after my last trip to see my grandparents, it was a pain to lug around, and it had next to no battery life. So I figured the next generation was here. I got the new Asus EEE PC 1005 that Best Buy had.

I'll go into some details in the morning, as it's late now, but I finally got everything working well enough to use it. I'm typing my first blog entry here, I've got full keyboard, touchpad, networking, sound, and even some custom Asus widgets to do power management. There's some small bugs with display brightness, but I'm happy I can boot and update the system now. It really didn't take much. A BIOS upgrade was the big thing.

I've got Ubuntu running on it, so the next step is to see how Ubuntu does on this as a simple flash/python/ruby development system. Whee.

For now, sleep.

Happy Fun Game Dev Park

(A game developers lament, to the tune of Big Rock Candy Mountain)

One night as the servers glowed and the death march was a crawlin'
Down the hall came a tester traipsing and he said "Folks I'm not installin'"
I'm heading for a land that's far away through the Perfect Dark
So let us fly we'll go apply at the Happy Fun Game Dev Park

Brain Traps and Coding

So, if it's not immediately obvious by my infrequent blogging, I procrastinate. It doesn't affect my work life, though, because there are deadlines to make. But it can make achieving things on the side very, very difficult.

Fedora 11

Well, I'm updated. I started on this crazy train of sticking with Fedora back in 2001 when it was my only option at work. I've since converted to Linux full time, and Fedora has been my distro of choice. Boy has it come a long way. Fedora 10 was my first time using yum to update exclusively, and I have to say with 11, it's gone swimmingly. I still had a few 386 rpm's floating around, but I managed to remove them and not lose anything (sound, Flash, etc.).

Kudos, Fedora team.

Perils of RPM

So, I've loved package management, for the most part. It makes installation of software much easier than installing everything from source. I started using Linux full time in 2001, and since then I've had my share of situations where the tangled web of dependencies caused me hours of configuration wrangling.