fuck the bleeding edge

After yet another abysmal failure trying to upgrade lots of packages to get Beagle to work, I have decided I really, really have to abide by my rules: Don’t bother with bleeding edge crap, just wait until it comes out for your distro officially. It’s just not worth the headache of tomboy suddenly not working, and NetworkManager suddenly not working, and all that to get search — especially when I don’t want to get inotify working too!

nerolinux and gtoaster?


There are differences, but doesn’t the new “you have to buy the windows version in order to download” nerolinux look awfully like gtoaster? Is this legal?

I mean, who codes in gtk1 anymore anyway?

laptop fixed I think

So after getting mucho annoyed with my laptop, I filed a bug on freedesktop.org, enlisting the help of the amazing Alan Hourihane to solve my problem. After some back and forth and trying of new drivers, we decided it was probably a hardware issue. He suggested something that had never occurred to me: swapping the RAM sticks around.

I did so, and my laptop hasn’t crashed since.

This was a very weird problem, since normally RAM errors cause problems all over the OS, like crashing programs and weird segfaults (unlike on windows, on linux you can assume extreme crashing is a hardware problem). But in my case it was always the same video crash. This is probably because on my laptop the video card actually uses system RAM to store data. There might have been a slight incompatibility in the way my RAM was installed, but it only showed up in this reserved section. I ran memtest86 and never found anything, so I had thought RAM couldn’t be the problem.

It just goes to show, big huge crashes are almost always RAM, even when you think they aren’t.