Urban Puddle

I accidentally screwed up my Arch System last week. I was installing a rather big package (kde) and ran out of room on my root partition. I made the mistake of manually erasing some files which resulted in some wonky errors. Eventually my bash shell died and rebooting gave me a kernel panic. I'm unsure as to what led to this downward spiral, and frankly I'm not interested in repeating the experience to figure it out. However, I am infinitely glad that I keep my /home folders on a completely different partition. Chalk one up for foresight!

I've been coming to Bombay about 3 or 4 times a year since 2001. In that time not much had changed. Every once in a while a new building would go up but for the most part the status quo was the norm.

This year, however, changes are afoot.

I've just come back from a week touring a few of the Irish provinces. First stop: Belfast!

Take a moment and breathe in as deeply as you can, expanding your lungs to their true capacity. Hold for just a second and then exhale just as deeply, expelling all the air you can. By making your lungs use their full range of motion, just once per day, you can keep them young even as the rest of you ages.

I've been going around the OS ferris-wheel for about a year now. Last year I got rid of my PowerBook G4 and bought a lighter thinkpad X41. Apple is a great company (heck, I worked there) but the lack of a light notebook left me scrambling. There are millions of people who walk to work or take public transportation and we need laptops too.

After unwrapping my matte-black-beast I needed to figure out what to use with it. Naturally, since it came with Windows XP that was the default choice. Being a long time mac user it took a while to get used to XP but eventually I did. Unfortunately there are a lot of UI issues that plague XP and, unlike Linux, there is no recourse for fixing them without delving into the registry. That, and the fact that I'm a huge nerd, led me to load linux on the lappie.

I've been using GNU/Linux since 2001 so it's not like it's new to me. At the same time I'd never done a laptop install and so many things are different. All over the web there are reports of various drivers not working or features that are incomplete. Still, I gave it a whirl.

I went though several distros to see which one I liked best for the laptop. I use Debian on my servers but like any objective user will tell you, it's all about the right tool for the job. I started with Arch Linux , headed over to Ubuntu, went to Debian, tried OpenSuse, went back to Debian, again to Ubuntu, and finally I am back to Arch.

There are great things about each of the distros above. Debian gave me lots of flexibility and a great selection of packages while Ubuntu was very solid. (It was, and remains, the only distro that just worked 'out of the box'.. suspend to ram, wireless, sound, and all.)

But Arch has me hooked. The clean style let me accomplish a lot more in a way that was easier than the other distros. Most importantly, when I have a problem the forum residents are relentless in helping me sort them out. It is fantastic.

I still have occassional issues with sleep not working though it seems to be getting better with each kernel release. I am happily typing away on an e17 desktop comforted that my fully configued fluxbox environment remains just a short uncommented line away.

I'm living as close to the edge of the latest community software while still feeling secure and that, amigos, is a great feeling.

Welcome to the first post at urbanpuddle.com. This is my personal whitespace on the web where I plan to rant and ramble about a number of things including city living, gnu/linux, the envionment, politics, travel, and other things from time to time.

A little about me -- I live in the heart of the District of Columbia, am married to a totally beautiful & warm woman, and have an engineering background which I've used to work in fields ranging from Railroads to Technology.

Now sit back, relax, grab a martini, and bookmark this site. :op