# The month's Gentoo update
This month's
Two other fairly significant changes in my Linux desktop adventures. The first was scrubbing KDE from my system. I've always preferred KDE over Gnome, but the 3 apps I spend 99.9% of my time in - Firefox, Thunderbird, and Eclipse, are all GTK apps, so even when running KDE, there's a near-complete Gnome subsystem chugging along in the background. So a month or few back, I switched to Gnome and I've been using it steadily ever since. It's not without its frustrations, but it's grown on me - enough to realise that there's very little reason to keep KDE hanging around - least of all having portage download and compile KDE upgrades every time I update my system.
The other milestone was giving up the FAT32 partitions and moving all my stuff to native ext3 partitions. When I first got going with a Linux desktop, I kept most of my 'stuff' on a FAT32 partition, so that I could share everything between Windows and Linux. FAT32 doesn't seem to do time stamps very well though, and I ran into a good few hassles with Eclipse freaking out about files being out of sync on the file system, and Thunderbird constantly re-indexing mailboxes (presumably because it thought the indexes were corrupt). But truth be told I boot into Windows less than once a month these days, if that much, and so I shuffled everything around, ditched FAT32 space and converted most of it to ext3 space. No going back now...
emerge world has been a royal pain. After I got past the initial broken ebuilds (thank heavens for the Gentoo forums), I'm now at my third attempt at upgrading to OpenOffice 1.4.whatever. The first try, on Sunday night, conked out after my root partition ran out of disk space. So yesterday, after I did some clearing up, and with what I'm sure was a gig and a half free on that partition, I restarted the compile. And again, today, when I looked in, it had bombed out again with no free disk space. Madness. I suppose with 200 megs for the source code tarball, then unpacked, then compiled, and whatever other voodoo portage does, then the whole glop needing to be 'installed', a gig and a half could go rather quickly. OOo is pretty much essential on a Linux desktop (AbiWord and Gnumeric are close but no cigar contenders), but this is just one more reason for me not to like the package one bit. Bloat bloat bloat.Two other fairly significant changes in my Linux desktop adventures. The first was scrubbing KDE from my system. I've always preferred KDE over Gnome, but the 3 apps I spend 99.9% of my time in - Firefox, Thunderbird, and Eclipse, are all GTK apps, so even when running KDE, there's a near-complete Gnome subsystem chugging along in the background. So a month or few back, I switched to Gnome and I've been using it steadily ever since. It's not without its frustrations, but it's grown on me - enough to realise that there's very little reason to keep KDE hanging around - least of all having portage download and compile KDE upgrades every time I update my system.
The other milestone was giving up the FAT32 partitions and moving all my stuff to native ext3 partitions. When I first got going with a Linux desktop, I kept most of my 'stuff' on a FAT32 partition, so that I could share everything between Windows and Linux. FAT32 doesn't seem to do time stamps very well though, and I ran into a good few hassles with Eclipse freaking out about files being out of sync on the file system, and Thunderbird constantly re-indexing mailboxes (presumably because it thought the indexes were corrupt). But truth be told I boot into Windows less than once a month these days, if that much, and so I shuffled everything around, ditched FAT32 space and converted most of it to ext3 space. No going back now...
File under: techie : {2005.07.12 22:44}
all posts