Technology

Turns out I'm a "Modern, Cool Nerd" - some kind of freakish half-nerd, half-geek beast I guess. Take the survey yourself if you're interested....
Modern, Cool Nerd 56 % Nerd, 56% Geek, 30% Dork For The Record:

A Nerd is someone who is passionate about learning/being smart/academia.
A Geek is someone who is passionate about some particular area or subject, often an obscure or difficult one.
A Dork is someone who has difficulty with common social expectations/interactions.

Before I upgraded to FC4 I was using the ndiswrapper drivers for my el'cheapo Netcomm NP7032 802.11b WiFi PCMCIA card - and I felt dirty because of it.
Come FC4 I found that my ndiswrapper config got blown away by the upgrade, so I embraced the change and went hunting again for suitable, Open Source drivers.

This little project wrote off 3 days for me. Yay. Getting the new 2.6 kernel's native ipsec, Racoon, FC2's ipsec setup scripts and a FreeSwan implementation (with x509 patches) at the other end of the pipe to all play nice together was a bigger job than I expected.

My wife had a printing emergency earlier today, so we now own a Lexmark z603 inkjet printer. Lexmark being one of the first manufacturers to bring out winprinters meant that I would probably have never agreed to buy one, but since I was asleep at the time the decision wasn't really up to me :-)

Update: Better than building from source, AT-rpms has a perl-Tk rpm in their yum repository - this is a far cleaner method of installing Tk. Add the following to your /etc/yum.conf:

[at-stable]
name=ATrpms for Fedora Core $releasever stable
#baseurl=http://apt.physik.fu-berlin.de/fedora/$releasever/en/$basearch/at-stable/
baseurl=http://apt.atrpms.net/fedora/$releasever/en/$basearch/at-stable

Wow. I just whacked in the Fedora Core 2 x86_64 DVD, went through the upgrade steps, rebooted, and everything just worked. Could not believe it.

Despite all the hoopla around regarding 4k stacks and the nvidia binary drivers, this is not an issue on amd64. I've heard that the 64-bit kernel in FC2 still uses 9k stacks, but I've not found out for sure if that's exactly why, or if it's something else. So far alsa seems to be working (I got it running on a 2.6 kernel with FC1, so perhaps I avoided some pain here since I was already configured for it), now we'll see if I can get jackd to build without core dumping when it tries to set the sample rate.