you, too, can upgrade to edgy

edgy eft was released today! (Ubuntu Linux version 6.10) my thinkpad is downloading about 996mb spread amongst 1500 new software packages right now as part of the dist-upgrade! for the curious, a photo of an eft

My car passed the dreaded engine recall check; just got a PCM flash and the leading spark plugs replaced. since I had just replaced them recently, I complained, and they gave me two brand-new leading spark plugs for free!

well, it’s been 3 weeks, and the new ups I exchanged has worked perfectly so far (no sudden computer shutdowns). I’m ready to tenatively declare success. my first one must have been bad.

the optical drive on my ibook is dead. I was going to burn a cd today. the drive opened normally, but when I closed the door it didn’t want to latch. once I finally got it to latch, it wouldn’t see the blank cd I had put in. then it wouldn’t eject. got out a pin, stuck it in the manual eject hole, and the display went dark. hmm. eventually got the disc out, and booted up again.

the Tripplite OMNI1000LCD UPS which I had raven (my server) plugged in to was still shutting off on me. at this point, I had one computer, 1 ethernet switch, 1 ethernet hub, and a kvm switch plugged into the battery. it should be able to handle that. then I moved the little stuff off battery, leaving only the computer. Even then, I’ve had it power off. Today I exchanged the UPS for another one (same model) hoping that perhaps the one I got was bad.

I like KDE, and one of the reasons I prefer it over something like GNOME is the IOSlaves framework (fish is one of my favorites). basically, any part of kde can interact with any type of data or protocol as long as someone has written an IOSlave to handle it. a very powerful paradigm, which gives you lots of functionality in suprising places, much of which is unduplicated on any platform (yes, including Windows and Mac OS X).

in the last few years, I’ve not had a power outage last more than a second. but that second wreaks havoc with the kvm switch, and also Raven (AMD Athlon Thunderbird 1.33GHz, server) tends not to boot after a power outage because of the kvm being weird. so a 1 second (or less) power loss usually results in nearly an hour of unplugging and replugging kvm cables to get the kvm going again.

my poor ibook g3, after 5 hours of surgery last night and this morning, is a changed computer. the ibook had long suffered from a bad gpu connection on the logic board, resulting in a mostly unreadable display. now, thanks to some web insight, a nice slab of copper (thank you, Chelby), and a cabinet door bumper, the ibook display is perfect again. I took advantage of the disassembly requirement to replace the hard drive, with a slightly fast and larger capacity drive.

As I’ve mentioned previously, I’ve switch Linux distributions, from gentoo to ubuntu. I was having too many hassles with gentoo. anyway, I was searching the gentoo forums to try to solve a problem on one of the left-over gentoo machines at work, and stumbled across this thread (don’t bother reading past the first page). sounds like others are leaving too.