The Misadventures of the Technically Inclined
You can’t leave me alone in the house now that I’m married, because I’m bound to start tearing into computers to pass the time.
Yesterday, I decided to open the chassis on cooler.home.local, which is my AMD X2 workhorse/project office desktop (formerly Media Center computer). This has Vista on a SATA/RAID 0 array, so I’m trying to use a 15 foot pole to touch it rather than the standard 10-footer.
To avoid SATA disruption, I elected to utilize my unemployed Primary IDE controller to install a spare hard drive from my Shuttle (Media Center), zach.home.local.
I had the early scare that I had actually pulled out the primary hard drive on the Shuttle, as it had originally failed to reboot following the drive removal. This was actually a jumper issue with the drives. Joy. We successfully captured Bridezillas and Top Chef last night with no interruption.
Then, cooler didn’t want to boot, so I had to jiggle and re-set some motherboard cable connections. Still don’t know what was causing that, but the power switch is functional now.
So, I have this Frankencomputer on the floor with its guts spilled out (just like any self-respecting tinker would, I didn’t bother mounting the IDE hard drive into the case, so it basically sits atop the rest of the supine computer). I have to use a bootable CD (the Ultimate BootCD – very nice tool) to boot into the IDE hard drive’s superblock without disabling the SATA controller or going through BIOS acrobatics.
Once going, I dropped Slackware 11.0 on with the base system and a skeleton X Windows package set. I grabbed the tool kdesvn-build and started working through a tame, upper circle of Slackware’s unique variety of dependency hell to get the packages to build. Now I have the uncomfortable set of eight hours to wait, knowing the build was successful, before I get to see the latest development snapshot of KDE 4.0.
The reviews have been positively glowing, especially given that this is basically a background libraries rework (and the monumentous Qt 4.x upgrade). GNOME users are weighing an exodus, the Window Manager nut-cases are singing praises, and KDE people are basically foaming at the mouth. Qt 4.x is so good I would be tempted to volunteer my time as a floor-sweeper just to sit and watch people work with it.
I will likely be doing some hair-pulling to get Slackware 11.0 upgraded to the kernel 2.6 series, since my video card does not seem to approve of the old agpgart drivers in 2.4. This kind of sucks, because if I hadn’t been such an eager beaver I could have downloaded Slackware 12.0, which was out in the beginning of last month.
Anyway, it’s a fun project, and I’m looking forward to reporting how it goes. KDE has always been fun but not particularly useful for me, so perhaps that will change.