Some may remember an aside I wrote over the weekend, that I was preparing to update the kernel on my main desktop machine.
The Linux cognoscenti will relish any opportunity to inform you of the ease and power of their particular favorite Linux distribution. Even the problems are fun, as they provide us with an opportunity to imply how clever we are by having solved them. The more disastrous the problem, the more elated you by having solved it; as Amit Singh puts it, it’s a bit of a psychological trap.
As you may be anticipating by now, the process of upgrading the kernel was not as smooth as one would have hoped.
The first problem was compiling nvidiafb (framebuffer support for nvidia chipsets) into the kernel; apparently, this conflicts with the actual nvidia graphics drivers themselves. That was not a very big issue; another recompile of the kernel without nvidiafb should technically have done the trick.
Instead, after rebooting I inexplicably had no more network connectivity.
I traced this to an out of date /etc/conf.d/net file, which I dutifully updated manually, only to find that my version of dhcpcd (dhcp client daemon, IIRC) needed to be upgraded. For that I needed to find and download dhcpcd-2.0.0.tar.bz2 from another machine, drop it into /etc/portage/distfiles/ and emerge it; which worked fine.
Still no network, though.
The network admin here recommend to me the obvious solution (set a static IP… duh, now I feel silly ;-) ) which I’ll have to try later tonight.
All of this (the few sentences of problem description actually cover over a day’s worth of troubleshooting and several smaller issues resolved along the way) has me reconsidering what should be my primary desktop system. As far as alternatives, I have narrowed my choices to three:
- Gentoo: It’s just too powerful to dispense with; fix the issue and continue using it.
- Ubuntu: It’s debian, made easy. A no-brainer, just use the thing.
- Mac OS X: I’d have to wait a little and budget for it (I want something a little beefier than the Mac-mini), but this is looking like a good option.
So far, I’m not committed to any one choice. I’m going to see if I can’t repair my Gentoo Linux system first; if that gets back to top-notch working order, I suppose I will likely keep using it. If it fails, I will back up important data and move to Ubuntu for awhile.
Even if either of those moves (repair or switching) is successful, I still may wind up moving my primary desktop to Mac OS later this year. I love using Linux, but there are times when it would be nice if things just worked. With Linux, you often need to just make it work, which can be fun… if you have the time.
The same aforementioned Amit Singh has an interesting article called What is Mac OS X?, whose conclusion, Why Mac OS X? is a fine argument in favor of the Mac OS for Linux geeks.
We’ll see.
