Whoa.

So a little bird told me that Gentoo makes better use of yr hardware, and I decided to try it out. Ran into some of the usual fun headaches that make life interesting, but finally got going. I'd also heard that fluxbox is a nice little high-speed desktop, so I started that up instead of my usual gnome.

Some numbers:
both boxes have nautilus, a couple of terminals, and a browser open.
Gentoo box is using about 22% of system memory; FC3 is using just over 50%

wanna hear something cool?
the chip that FC3 is using half of is Twice as Big as the chip that Gentoo/fluxbox is using 20% of. Here are the REAL numbers:
Gentoo/fluxbox: 60MB
FC3: 258M

then i realized FC3 was running apache and mysql daemons, so i killed them. Could that be it? New numbers:
Gentoo: 60
FC3: 253

Nope, that's not it. FC3 is just really %$^@^ topheavy. So the question is: do you need a new computer or do you need to use the one you have better?

HE

Wild swinging this month -- on account of the higher stakes


That's mostly 2/4 and 3/6 at pokerchamps ... goes everywhere but ends up: +$9
No-Limit, also at pokerchamps, fared better: +$101
1/2 Limit, at pokerstars, dropped $8 in play but picked up bonus I think it was $42: net +$34
Haven't been to Richard's recently.

Total: +$144

Why pokerchamps? $500 bonus in the works -- will take another month to clear it though.

DPUG

Last night's presentation rocketh, and got me inspired to upgrade everything under my power to PHP5.

Hosting companies: offer PHP5. It's time. One of the attendees said his host co. told him they didn't offer P5 'cause it was still so buggy. This is false. P5 is stable -- it is solid.

It will break your apps. Thank God. Speaking for myself, at least, I could use a little breaking of apps to force me into better habits.

To make a long story short, then, Lamp5 lives. i.e. is being resuscitated.

Wireless at Last

Okay, I try not to be one of those "make it easy on me" types when it comes to Linux. I'm perfectly willing to spend an hour or so getting familiar with GRUB if I want to do something moderately complicated like e.g. install XP, DeMuDi, and FC3 on my laptop.

But ndiswrapper ... I dunno, seems kinda half finished to me sometimes. My thoughts after spending all morning fiddling with it (it flies now):

Hey ndiswrapper, why do you think you're being installed? It's 'cause I want to start using that card. Y'know, the one described by the .inf file I just pointed you to? so how about 1) modprobing yourself; and 2) going ahead and calling 'iwconfig' and/or 'ifup wlan0' ... or at least asking if I want to do that stuff?

That would save me the 30 minutes or so that I spend reading through help forums and so on.

Like I said, I'm willing to meet you halfway and stuff; a guy really ought to be able to add stuff to rc.d/ and the like so that the right stuff activates at boot time and so on. But it just seems that if there's a use to which 99% of yr downloaders are going to put your software, you might anticipate that a little better. That's all.

PS: manufacturers, build some Lx drivers. Just a couple, for the most popular distributions. Release the source. We'll do the rest for our little personalized funky distros. And we'll love you forever. That's gotta be worth something.