YAQ: Mixed drink, sort of

( The Recipe For Vakkotaur )

Art question

If something purporting to be art requires an explanation that it is, indeed, art... is it, really?

Not an explanation of what it is about, but an explanation that says, "Yes, this is really art."

Time to throw in the towel?

The laptop I've been using is a Compaq Armada 7800 which is a 266 MHz Pentium II. Sounds a bit dated, doesn't it? It is.

I first ran Ultima Linux on it, and had the problem of wireless being cantankerous. When Ultima's website went *poof* I looked around and switched to Wolvix, which was an improvement. Then Wolvix had a new release, so I upgraded. That was a good idea, almost. Something in the new version chews up CPU. If I stop udevd the CPU usage drops from 100% to a more reasonable 7% or so. But even then there is an annoying seizing of the pointer that happens often enough that the machine is hardly usable. And the Wolvix site has been unreachable for me today. That's not encouraging.

I tried Xubuntu 7.10 (again) and it wouldn't boot the LiveCD fully, even in the "safe" mode. Same thing for TinyMe (a light version of PCLinuxOS that I'd love to be able to run). Anti-X, which is a light version of MEPIS and not a command line only thing despite the name, did the same. All those boot on a much faster desktop machine.

I tried Feather Linux, which actually booted and ran on the laptop. I might try it again and see if I can get wireless working. Or I might try another distribution, such as Absolute Linux.

In all the searching for answers to the boot problems I happened across a review of the laptop. It was dated 1998. This machine is nearly ten years old now. New machines run a few versions of CPU newer and clock a full order of magnitude faster. No wonder I'm having trouble finding something that it will run and run well.

I expect that if I keep looking and keep at things long enough I could get a workable system again. But now I am wondering if it would even be worth the effort. Also, the PCMCIA card doesn't handle WPA. Or rather it can be made to handle it, but only under Windows.

The only three real options right now are:

1. Compaq Armada 7800 (P-II 266 MHz)
...with all the problems above, including the lack of WPA.

2. A newer Dell (P-III 700 MHz ?)
This would have the lack of WPA problem, and I had similar boot problems with it when I was suspicious of the Compaq a few months ago, and it also suffers from being a Dell.

3. PowerBook G4 (G4 867 Mhz)
This one has OS X (yes, the newest version, whatever cat it is this time) so it is unixy underneath, and WPA does work. Unfortunately the surface isn't quite as unixy as it ought to be and I'd be stuck with the color scheme I'd scrap in an instant if only I could. Really, if I could fix that easily, I'd probably already be using this machine. It *is* unix underneath, right? Shouldn't there be a simple .config style file to edit to fix the colors?

So I have a choice of two machines that don't work and one that works but I'd have to stare into a light bulb to use it. Yuck. Though only when using Apple-supplied stuff. If I treated OS X like I treat(ed) Windows -- running programs from third parties whenever possible -- it might just be rendered tolerable. That's what I'm leaning toward right now.

That does bring up another issue: what programs will I need to find replacements for? Right now I suspect I'd need to replace Nedit (tabbed text editor that I can set the colors on), X-chat (x-chat aqua evidently isn't really ready, dagnabbit), Pidgin (formerly gaim). And I'd need these programs to all let me set their colors and not just use the OS non-choice(s).

At least I wouldn't be stuck using Safari (which has the same locked-in color idiocy as OS X itself) since Opera is available for OS X. Though evidently I'd need to tell OS X to get out of the way and let the keys do the things I expect them to so. F12 means "open the Opera quick menu" and not whatever goofy (and as I recall, utterly useless) thing OS X does with it, to me.

I suppose the choice should be whichever one involves the least amount of cussing. No, Mr. Jobs, that does not make #3 automatic. If only Woz had been around to make sure the configuration tools that ought to be there were included...

It is quite frustrating. The MacBook looks seems like a great thing, but only almost.