Long time... again.

Wellp, I'm taking a quick reprieve from video games at the moment. Bush came over, hauled my ass around, and then we played some good, clean CS. When we got back to my apartment from errandsy-things Mike was entertaining some folks, so Bush and I set up in my bedroom; the problem being that my apartment is WiFi geared, and Bush's machine is not. What we ended up doing was shooting a crossover cable from his box to mine and then "shared" the internet connection. I hate windows. I've found I've actually become worse at using it because I'm so use to the Linux answer. I started by peeking through the registry, turning ENABLEIPROUTING on, and then attempting to configure the machines to behave properly. I spent a good 15-30 mins looking at routing tables and checking addresses before I realized there was a "share internet connection" feature built in. I had to set the registry back the way it was before the 'feature' would work again, but once we figured that out it was smooth sailing. I'm tossing the idea in my mind to drop a few bucks and invest in the latest version of Cedega. I have a partially-dual boot setup now, as in I actually pull the hardrives I'm not using from the machine (I don't use windows much at all). If I could make Cedega and Steam play nice, I really wouldn't have much reason to dual-boot. Not that I've been using the desktop much anyways in the past few days (weeks?). I compiled the latest kernel version 2.6.10 and a few things went wrong with the machine. Firstly, on a positive note, burning audio CD's is possible again; which was the reason I felt compelled to upgrade. On the other hand, my WiFi card's driver decided that it didn't want to compile under 2.6.10. Also, xterm no longer works. I'm not sure how I managed to break xterm, but it's a fact. The problem with not having a wifi driver installed at the moment is it's awfully hard for me to get inspired to find a method of transferring an updated driver to the machine. With no internet or Xterms I quickly reverted to the laptop. The laptop is a sexy beast. As I said before, lappy is an oldschool PII 333, but it handles linux quite well. I honestly couldn't be more pleased and am certain that I'm maximizing the bang for buck. I'm still running Vector 4.3, but with extras I stuffed in there, including XFCE 4.2 (default window manager) Firefox, and the latest thunderbird build. Thunderbird is a little sluggish, but if one were to just look at how well most programs run, they'd figure the lappy was running at least a 1Ghz. I've also re-invested time into the pocketPC. It's now running Familiar 0.8.0, a shiny new release which is built open the Open Embedded's structure. The overall distribution has appeared to have matured greatly since my last dabblings. It feels more and more like a solid Linux than a hodgepodge of software tweaked to behave somewhat. I've been trying to make strides in personal organization, and have been succeeding to a small degree. If you remember my previous rants about GPE and OPIE, you'll recall that I'm drawn to GPE because of my Gnome preference, but the apps for GPE are scarce. OPIE has once again become the interface of choice when using the PPC. It's very slick. Well, there's the update. That is all that's new. I also have come accross a second monitor for the desktop, but it's in my car, which is in the shop, so I'll have to wait to mess with that. Another quick blurb; I mention that I hate windows quite a bit. I don't believe Bill Gates to be the antichrist or anything, and I don't think of MS as being a terribly corrupted company. I don't like windows because I don't like windows. I don't like the feel of it all. I enjoy switching my window manager every coupla weeks. I like the openness and the ability to more clearly see and understand what's going on "under the hood." I know that there are ways to do this in windows too, but it seems such a hassle, and isn't as readily available. I also would like to see more healthy competition in the commercial OS business. That'll help push companies to churn out better products. I don't know if I'm ready to claim that Linux is ready to take the computing world by storm. It has some clear advantages, but I haven't been following the work of companies who focus on making a simpler desktop for novice users. K. I'm done. I'll billow more garbage later. -Me.