Path: Illogical

It's on its way. I ordered the Kenwood TH-F6A from the local place. It should arrive at my office later today or tomorrow, along with a copy of an up-to-date study guide for my basic license. My old study guide is "new for the year 2000 exams", so something tells me it wouldn't have been up to snuff, with all the rebanding and whatnot that's gone on. Graphs that don't look generated by a Commodore 64 will be a nice thing, too. :)

Some weeks ago I backed the Jot project. I was won over pretty quickly, as was at least one of my co-workers. Last time this happened was for the PadPivot. That time around I got my PadPivot before she did. This time around I think I'll be the one waiting. If I remember correctly, one of the Jots I ordered was the turquoise Jot Pro -- unfortunately, the anodizing process didn't go so well on that colour, so they're having them redone before they fill the order. I've got to hand it to them for doing it right, though.

A little while ago I bought an HP dm1-3040ca. Around three pounds, good battery life, 4GB of RAM (hey, this is before the dm1-3240ca came out...), and the price was right. First thing I discovered is that the Syntaptics Clickpad isn't at all well-supported under Linux. Soon after I discovered that the Ralink wireless chipset was also a no-go. No problem -- I reinstalled Windows and figured I'd wait it out.

Recently OpenSuSE 11.4 seemed to have both problems nailed. I installed, upgraded, and was mostly happy until a couple of days later when it decided to start showing video problems. The full-on system lock-ups were also inconvenient. I started casting about for an alternative distro.

Kubuntu 11.04, Arch 2011-08, Fedora 15... None would boot, all complaining about a disk error. I soon tracked the problem down to the USB optical drive I was using. After some deliberately chosen insults thrown at the drive, I switched to using a USB key. Fortunately, this works.

I tried Kubuntu, and it's a big old no-go -- no support for the wireless out of the box, but the real deal-breaker was the video flicker, seemingly at random intervals. Now I'm trying Fedora 16 alpha. It's still installing the last 200 or so packages, so I've got my fingers crossed that it'll work.

I tried Arch on my other laptop last night. Aside from giving me nostalgic fits as I was reminded about my countless errors selecting packages from the Slackware installer, it didn't give me any warm fuzzies. I just don't have the patience to install the system, convince X to work, and build the system up in bits and pieces. If it doesn't give me what I need pretty much out of the box (or after installing a few software groups), it's pretty much dead to me. I do enough sysadmin duties in a day at work to last me.

On the whole, this isn't Linux' fault at all. The new generation of hardware is pretty much brain-dead. I discovered that the PNP bridge in my little HP actually overlaps video memory. Seriously -- WTF? There's probably some driver in the Windows install that makes that all okay, but it's not useful if I don't want to run Windows (which is probably the precise reason they made it that way). Kind of like a Winmodem, but you can't just ignore it.

HP announced recently that it's getting out of the PC hardware business. If this is any indication of what HP finds acceptable for a retail product, I suggest they not let the door hit them on the way out.

Update: Fedora 16 alpha detected the wireless right out of the box, but doesn't seem to recognise the Clickpad, so that's a bit of a bummer. It also showed the video-strobe problem, which I'm afraid is probably bad for the LCD or backlight. Windows will be making a reappearance on the little HP today. Bah, humbug.