Tom's Insights - Week of 10/22/01

Week of October 22nd, 2001

Last Updated: October 28, 2001 20:26

Most Recent : October 26, 2001
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Friday October 26, 2001

I can't believe it's Friday. Last time I looked up, it was Monday and it had just started to snow again.

I think the week gone by could be technically viewed as WSOGMM, or Whole Sort of General Mish Mash (Douglas Adams). Which, according to Adams, doesn't really exist, but is the "sum total of all the different ways there would be of looking at it if it did." Sigh and grin.

The weather sucks, and will continue to suck for roughly six more months. Bother. The snow arrived early this year (last year we didn't have any snow that stayed until late November), and doesn't appear to be in much of a hurry to leave. The temperature is "coolish" (about -10C), until the wind kicks up. Then my mind wanders to visions of a sunny beach somewhere in Mexico.

-oOo-

Dell makes a hell of a laptop, and I continue to highly recommend my Inspiron 8000 to anyone who will listen (which is not a lot of people these days...). Their customer service, however, smells of fetid camel dung. I ordered a DVD drive two months ago. It arrived two weeks later, sans a faceplate. And the way the door mechanism is designed, it needs a faceplate on it to keep it closed. So I phoned customer service. After waiting on hold for 35 minutes, I finally talked to someone -- who didn't have a clue (Er, what's a faceplate?). She promised to email me with a resolution. No Joy. So I phoned customer service again. And again waited 35 minutes for the pleasure of talking to another moron. Finally, after about six phone calls someone made an executive decision -- this guy is a pain in the ass, and the only way we're going to get rid of him is to solve the problem. So they sent me another DVD unit. It arrived today -- without a faceplate. WTF, people? Who in their right mind ships a DVD drive without a faceplate???

I was going to phone them back today but thought better of it. I think I'll leave things to simmer for a day or two.

Sunday October 28, 2001

I had a very ambitious weekend planned. Planned, of course, being the operative word...

The reality of the matter is, I spent Saturday cleaning house, Saturday night watching a DVD, I slept in until [gasp!] 10 AM this morning, drank coffee for two hours, and watched football for the balance of the afternoon. My biggest contribution to society all weekend came in the form of BBQ'ing a half-dozen buffalo burgers for dinner. I feel a tad woozy after all that effort -- I can't decide whether to have a nap, or simply go to bed early.

I tinkered with Slackware for about an hour Friday night, but I quickly ran out of patience (and ideas) and gave up in disgust. I continue to learn lots about the inner workings of the OS and its companion apps, graphics systems, file systems, et. al., but in reality I'm no closer to having a solid, reliable, task-oriented copy of Linux on my notebook than when I began months ago. I've got all the foundational stuff down cold (kernel, filesystem, nfs, smbfs, cvs gcc, ya-da, ya-da) and working as advertised. Unfortunately, the backbone of my working day -- the graphical desktop -- continues to vex me no end. The show-stopper is NVidia's "Go" driver. In short, it sucks. It's buggy, has been for numerous iterations, and from my personal perspective, appears to be getting worse not better. It locks up. When I exit 'X' it leaves me in a font so small I can't read the screen. I can fix it with a 'FN' keystroke --sometimes. Other times it locks to a hard reset. And every now and then, just to throw me a loop, when I start 'X' I get a "no useable screens found" error. Took me a while to troubleshoot that one. Nothing wrong with any of the screens, or any of the configuration file settings. The driver's simply pooped all over itself. All I have to do is reinstall the driver and everything works like a hot damn again. Until I quit, or my desktop locks up for no particular reason, or...

Then there's Gnome (1.4? ... whatever ships with Slackware 8.0). It won't hold its configuration settings. Every time I start it, I have to reset my desktop to the way I like it. Icons disappear, colors change. Update Gnome you say? Can't. When I try (via Ximian), the updater doesn't recognize Slack as a Linux distribution. Bah.

Thank god I've got Windows 2000 on my other partition. Say what you will about MS, but Win2K is my rock of sanity of late. When Linux leads me to the brink of desperation, I know I can always boot into Win2K and get the job done. When I arrived home from my trip to Indianapolis this summer, I scrubbed Dell's factory setup and installed clean. Win2K, my favorite utilities, Office, FrontPage, NoteTab Pro, a service pack here, a service pack there... and I haven't touched the partition since. I've added and removed a slew of programs. Outlook locks up on me at the most inconvenient times possible. I've even managed to get Word XP to lock up a time or two. But I've always been able to kill the offending app with Task Manager, restart it, and continue on with the task at hand.

I only wish I could claim the same reliability from Linux.

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