Netpurgatory

I’ve been pretty much Windows free for a while now. My desktop at home has Gentoo on it and my school desktop has Mandrake (whatever the last version was before the name changed to Mandriva) and neither are dual boot. Even Beth’s desktop runs Gentoo. My laptop is a Powerbook (still working on Ubuntu on that, but the live CD has a stupid bug with the Synaptics trackpad).

So that is just a long way of saying I’ve been away from Windows for a while. I thought things were supposed to have improved with the random reboots and blue screens. But maybe not.

On Black Friday, Beth and I got up too early for my tastes and got a Magellan RoadMate 2000 GPS. I really like it. Probably the most excited I’ve been about a new toy since the TiVo.

I would never have know it ran on Windows CE (or whatever they call it now) except for the little sticker on the back. But since the OS is in ROM and you cannot interact with it at all, this isn’t a big deal. Except when it reboots for no good reason. Twice. In a row. While driving. Maybe it isn’t fair to blame Windows. But I would expect a more graceful way to deal with a loss of sync with the GPS satellites. And it is just a little funny that the one time I have something with a Microsoft OS on it (even if it is a totally embedded one), it reboots for no good reason (hardware failures or software updates are the only good reasons I’m away of).

My work computer (thales) is back up with a new CPU. With no data loss. It was a pain, but no big loss. I however miss the gigantic Apple monitor I was using as a backup (although I won’t miss the slow, loud dual G4 that went with the monitor).

And I even managed to finally get my desktop at home (ganon) working properly after a fairly problematic emerge -u world.

Turns out there is just no way I’ll ever get pyopengl to compile. But I was able to get rid of the dependancy for it by by putting the line:

dev-python/pygtk -opengl

in

/etc/portage/package.use

I actually had more trouble with this update than any update other than the one when gentoo first switched to a modular xorg.