Eye of the Goof

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I'm on vacation until the 11th. It's not like I won't be doing anything over the next couple of days though. I'll be smokin' with the smoker, of course, 'cuz you can't have a proper Fourth of July without a BBQ, and the weather looks fine, so I may attempt a bike run from Eau Claire to Menominee on the Chippewa River Trail. My yard, giant overgrown patch of weeds filled with creepy moles that it is, needs attention as well.

Work on the tiki bar is progressing slowly, but surely. The ceiling went in last week, and now I have to finalize my designs for the wall coverings and the bar itself. The basement is a mess right now: there's a coating of drywall dust over everything and the smell of paint is pretty nauseating. We'll have a quite a cleanup job awaiting us when the workmen finish up. Hopefully, this will all be worth it.

In other news, MrsBaliHai has been hogging the computer for the past week or so, because she's taking an online course in web design for her Masters in Library Media Science. This is the final class she needs to complete her degree. Next week, she has to drive to the UW Whitewater campus to attend the classroom portion of the course, so I'll stay home with the kids.

Seeing as I haven't been able to use our home computer much, I decided to try and sort out the dual-boot laptop I use for work. I have Windows 2000 installed on one partition, and quite frankly, I despise using it because all the security crap that had to be loaded onto it in order to conform with the *$%#@@# Sarbanes-Oxley act, makes it run slower than molasses in January even with a Gig of memory. Trust the U.S. Congress to invent a cure for corporate fraud that's worse than the disease.

However, the Linux partition of the laptop is unsupported by my IS department, so I'm pretty much free to do and run whatever I want to on it. I decided to see if I could make it my default workspace in order to dial down my frustration level with the sloth of the Win2000 side of things.

Typically, I only use Linux to perform system support functions, so the distro was pathetically out of date (RedHat 7.2). Since my company works exclusively with RedHat and SUSE, and my general comfort level with Linux is low, I decided not to attempt a switchover to SUSE, and instead rounded up a newer, but still obsolete set of RedHat 9.0 CDs, figuring that it would be easier to upgrade than to switch.

In hindsight, I'm not sure that my assumption was correct: the upgrade has been a major pain in the ass. If mine represents a typical Linux desktop user experience, then it's no wonder that it hasn't taken over the world yet (Apple fanboys/girls, please spare me any gushing over OS X; my company ain't gonna buy me a PowerBook in this lifetime, so I'm stuck with IA32). Installing IRIX or Solaris is a breeze compared to to this.

Now I consider myself quite a bit more knowledgeable than the average user, practically a sysadmin, but getting even the most basic stuff up and running in Linux seems akin to building a rocket to the moon. Here's a list of things that didn't work:

- Anaconda didn't configure my Ethernet devices correctly and I couldn't search for a solution online because I didn't have a network connection, so I stumbled around in the dark for several hours before figuring out that the modules.conf file was hosed
- In order to add wireless support, I have to rebuild the friggin' kernel which I can't do because I don't have the kernel header files installed, which I can't install because of conflicts and dependencies with various rpms
- The system can't recognize both my touchpad and my USB mouse at the same time, and it doesn't configure the thumbwheel on the mouse, so I can't scroll
- The typical installer for the Linux version of an application doesn't seem to know how to add a shortcut to the start menu of KDE or Gnome, and I haven't yet figured out how I can add them manually; in addition, the installers for Firefox and Thunderbird leave all the application executables in whatever directory you installed from, and the install notes on Mozilla.org are crap.

On the plus side, whatever apps I can actually run at this point seem to be pretty fast, but I suspect that's because I don't have the virus scanner, policy orchestrator, and firewall all running at maximum settings, not because of any inherent speediness in the OS.

[sigh] Guess I'll hafta suck it up and install SUSE if I want any reasonable amount of supportedness and functionality. From what I've seen of SUSE enterprise installs, migrating from RH is basically a re-install, so I'll probably lose everything I've accomplished up to this point (which admittedly ain't much).

I could grump a lot more about this, but I think you get the general idea, and I'd rather be outside in the sunshine right now anyway.

Happy 4th to all my US readers, and general good wishes to everyone else!