geek stuff

got a new laptop. i wanted an affordable machine that could run linux, be fast enough to compile things for Gentoo (torture was installing Gentoo on my old PentiumII 366MHz ThinkPad), and have sound that would work with ALSA (my best effort at cracking sound on the ThinkPad resulted in slow playback). so after my all my attempts at getting a fully functional mobile linux box, i had to settle for XP, and that’s been the case since late last year. and it just felt weird having to use that OS. i feel much more comfortable behind a *nix box. so i decided to save up some money (having all this OT certainly helps! =)) and research laptops that were more linux-friendly. my first choice was to get an apple powerbook but those were just too expensive. in comes the new HP Pavilion ze4325, just a couple hundred dollars more than some of the used laptops i was looking at. after a $100 rebate from HP and another $100 from Circuit City, the total cost including taxes will be just under $1k. not too shabby at all for a laptop with an Athlon XP 2000+, 256MB DDR RAM (1Gig Max), 40Gig HD, DVD/CD-R, and 15″ LCD. although it will all be obsolete by the time i get the rebates back. heh. so once i got this bad boy home, the first thing i did was to make sure that everything worked. once i did that, i trashed XP, repartitioned the hard drive, and reinstalled XP. i gave XP 10 Gigs and 30 Gigs for linux. after that was done i proceeded to install Gentoo. after spending quite a bit of time getting over some initial stumbling blocks, i’ve got a minimum Gentoo install working, along with X, and it’s currently compiling KDE as i write this. i’ll soon submit a How-To on what i did on Linux on Laptops, as my model isn’t listed there. so while KDE was compiling, i did some work on my desktop machine…

i figured out how to get my digital camera to work in linux. previously, i had to boot into windows to get the images off the camera, but being a geek (or lazy, depending on your POV) i don’t like rebooting, so i started looking at how to get my camera working in linux. i knew it didn’t have built-in support in the kernel, and it’s been like that for a while (i’m running a customized 2.4.21 kernel and usb cam support hasn’t changed) so for the longest time, i thought i was stuck having to use XP. i just found out that this is not the case. by installing hotplug and using the gphoto2 library, i now have support for my S200 in linux. so now i have one less reason to boot into windows. the only other thing left is getting good printing support, although that itch really doesn’t need to be scratched right now since i don’t do much printing, and when i do i can just use vmware.

note to self: really need to kick myself for having zero content on my linux pages. i will hopefully have some useful stuff on there soon.