Experimenting with bleeding edge using an iBook

Last weekend, after successfully upgrading my 1 GHz PC from Debian stable to unstable, I got the crazy idea that I should upgrade the fully functioning Debian stable on my iBook (600Mhz, 384 Mb) to either Debian testing or unstable. I had already forgotten the udev problems I had encountered and finally solved on this Pentium box.

It was a bad idea. I did not succeed in getting the X configured -- I just had a black screen with a colored horizontal stripe on the bottom half of the screen. Reset, reboot and again. Reset, reconfigure and reboot. Again. And again.

Second try: I burned the CD for Arch Linux. Arch did not give me any more usable X. After some googling around I succeed in getting at least a weird split screen TWM on the screen instead of the now familiar black screen. But still I had no functioning keyboard nor was the touchpad functioning.

After this, I was willing to live on the command line for a while as the Arch at least booted extremely quickly. But then I realized the PPC repositories were not nearly as good and up-to-date as the repositories for 386 Arch.

Ok. After two days of experimenting I decided to go back to the point where I started all this. I had, after all, been quite happy with Debian stable...

Problematic Debian update: udev and kernel

Normally, I try to remember googling for any problems before doing a major update in any of the Linux systems I use for doing something more important than simply surfing on the Internet. I forgot to do this before updating my stable Debian system to Debian unstable last night.

Of course, I ran into problems that were almost too difficult to solve in the early hours of the morning. My system was not able to solve issue caused by the conflicting version of kernel and udev. It took me some time before I found the solution in the Debian forum.

Now I'm a happy user of Debian unstable. It remains to be seen, if the unstable branch of the distribution is too bleeding edge for my taste. I have used both Debian stable and testing for several years, but I can't remember ever having installed or used Debian unstable. I hope my life does not become too unstable after this upgrade...

Using a mixed environment - OS X and Debian

Some time ago, I wrote about my first experiences with an old eMac I got from my parents. I've been pretty happy with the system, even if the OS X 10.3.9 is not as fancy as the latest incarnations of this extremely user friendly OS.

I decided to keep the best of two worlds: I kept the OS X installed (no Debian or NetBSD on this system!). Thus I can still use Excel that is unfortunately absolutely necessary for anyone studying economics and business administration. Of course one can probably calculate everything with OpenOffice Calc, but using OpenOffice at home just does not help me in learning for the spreadsheet exam I have to pass using Excel in the computer lab at the school.

For word processing and some occasional hacking, I decided to install Aquamacs. For typesetting the texts, I installed MacTeX.

As I have too much old boxes in my room in the dorm, I decided not to install more open source apps in the eMac. At the moment I mostly use the Debian box (eVectra 1 GHz, 256 Mb RAM) in the console mode using a ssh connection. The box is not connected to a monitor or to a keyboard, but it does have a pair of loadspeakers for playing my collection of ogg files ripped with ripit. In addition, the Debian box is used for doing some math with GNU Octave.

I am sure, there are many readers who would just "liberate" the eMac but, alas, we are not living in a perfect world where we could freely decide which software to use. The world is a dirty place, just like Ivo Welch writes in Corporate Finance: An Introduction after a discussion of finance in perfect markets:

The real world is definitely dirtier than our perfect one, and you can't just close your eyes and wish you were still in Kansas.