Weekend and Linux (mis)Adventures

[vakkotaur]

Friday: Attended a gathering of Siouxland folks, watched some video of the mudfest that was this year's faire, saw photos I didn't take, and ate too much ice cream.

Saturday: Got some supplies for outfit I hope to have ready by next RCFM. Didn't do much else that I can recall.

Sunday: Caught up on sleep with a fairly long nap. And then installed the KATE OS linux distribution on icelandic and discovered two things to my annoyance. First, I goofed and got the ISOs for 2.01 when the most recent version is 2.1. I went on with the install anyway to have a look at it. Overall not too bad, but once again I had to go edit the X stuff so that X used the mouse correctly. The nasty surprise what that the default install has no support for the 3c509 network card. I asked on their forum about that and got a reply that 3com stuff causes problems and if I need it, recompile the kernel. I'm debating that. KATE looks good, but I'm a bit worried. Not about compiling a kernel (okkay, a bit) but that they say that. Every other distribution seems to deal with 3c509 support without problem, so something seems fishy.

I'll probably install 2.1 tonight anyway and see about that compile tonight or at least sometime this week. And then see if it was worth the effort.

Comments

[foolscap001.livejournal.com]

Hmmm... I note Kate OS uses ReiserFS 4. I guess there's always debate about which editor/window manager/journaling FS to use, but Reiser seems to accumulate more criticism than others (from the kernel mailing list discussion about what belongs in a FS to the Gentoo graphical install FAQ entry: "Why can't I create a ReiserFS filesystem with the installer? Because ReiserFS == teh suck...") I don't know enough about it to have an educated opinion, so I need to educate myself.

[vakkotaur.livejournal.com]

That may be the default, but the install let me choose what I wanted so I went with ext3. It also let me choose the window manager so I went with IceWM. There are few mini-emacs editors included that I don't care about, but there is also joe and the full-over-blown emacs is its own option in the extras menu of the install so it was not installed.

So far just the network card thing has really failed to impress me, and the mouse issue with X is something that seems to be a problem for many distributions. The weird thing is that the installer asked me where the mouse was and the non-X stuff got it right, but X seems to insist the device is something other than what it is (at least this time it found it) so I get to edit a file and set things right.