Back in the Flow

As I mentioned in my last post, I've been suffering from a mild case of Distro-itis, brought on by the purchase of a nice, new, shiny, 160gig sata hard drive. I went with a sata drive because my computer came with a bunch of sata cables, so my natural assumption was that the computer supported sata. Imagine my surprise when I had to go back into town the next day to get an adapter for the power connection. Anyways, Like I said, I went through 3 distros. Fedora 7, Ubuntu, and PCLinux OS. My original plans were just to install Fedora, as I really enjoyed the live CD. I then thought it might be a good idea to try Ubuntu too, as it was supposedly very good.
So I installed both of them, and was having trouble juggling the two. I decided to Install just one, and since Fedora was causing me some frustration over my IP address (It was picking one that was on my network, but which was below the range my router broadcasts on) so I went with Ubuntu. That was going well, for a bit, but I was hitting problems left and right. Not anything you would find in the course of day-to-day use, just some fancy stuff I was trying to get working (XDMCP, or something similar, and MIDI). It would insist things like Xinetd were running, and XDMCP was on, but none of the other computers on the network could see it. So I set forth looking for another Distro that might give me more luck.
I took every "Which distro is for you?" test I could find, and ended up starting a download of OpenSuse. I was feeling slightly guilty about this, what with the whole Microsoft deal, and was looking for an alternative. I found one that none of the tests recommended to me, PCLinuxOS, and I stopped the download of openSuse, and went for PCLinuxOS instead.
It turned out to be a very good distro, within a day I had all the things that I couldn't get Ubuntu or Fedora to do over the course of a week. The only thing that bothers me is that the Beryl effects don't work well. They do work, it just gets a bit choppy a times. I might look into the DRI (I think that's it) project to get it working smoothly, but no rush.

In less technical news, I went to Stratford yesterday on a school field trip, to see The Merchant of Venice. It was an enjoyable experience. The best part of the trip had to be on the way home, when we stopped at a mall for supper. I found myself in a bookstore, following some friends. I had no intention of buying anything that day. But while I was waiting I decided to see what they had by Douglas Adams. I ended up getting myself a copy of "The Salmon of Doubt." So far I am enjoying it immensely.

Well, that about does it for me today. Until next time!

It's really the only way I can think of to end these things.