Linux Love

A while back I posted about my Gentoo Linux Laptop. It served me well, but it was becoming a hassle keeping it up to date. I was checking for updates like daily and then watching all the updates compile. It was an addiction. I found myself visiting http://packages.gentoo.org several times a day to see what new stuff was out, then I would curse myself for not being able to remotely SSH into the box to do upgrades. I'm admitting that I have a problem, and that I have addressed it. I wiped my Linux partition on the laptop and installed Ubuntu 6.10 (Edgy). The update process only includes necessary security / bugfix updates (not full system upgrades). The release process is every 6 months, so I can expect a full system upgrade every 6 months. That's manageable. Plus, all the updates are binary so they'll just install smoothly. Someone else has already done all the footwork for me. THIS is what Linux is all about, making life easy. However, don't get me wrong, I'm still a big Gentoo fan, but just not for my primary laptop that has a Pentium M 1.7GHz with 512MB RAM. It's not a beast, but does the job. Compiling stuff takes time and I don't want to have to deal with it. My desktop, on the other hand, is (well, was) a beast. Now it is slowly becoming obsolete. I need to replace it with a sexy Core 2 Duo system. Mmmmmm.... tasty. But that will have to wait. Right now I don't really use it all that much, favoring the laptop for day-to-day stuff. I don't do much independent development either. Plus, the northbridge and GPU fans are crapping out on me and I need to replace (or supplement) them. I think I should put the graphics card (Radeon 9800 All-In-Wonder) in my brother's desktop and then sell the motherboard (dead NIC, messed up NB fan), and processor (2.4GHz with a big-ass heat-sink and fan) on eBay or something. Speaking of Linux love, my girlfriend is teasing me with thoughts of putting together a Linux-based multimedia system for streaming Chinese soap operas into the living room. That's hot.