troelsjust.dk

So today I ended another attempt at getting an education, *sigh*, this time it was something called AspIT that completely and utterly failed on me. Well, it’s a familiar pattern, luckily this time I didn’t crash-land.

Since Fedora dropped KDE 3.5.x for Fedora 9 and thereby future releases, I was kind of squatting what operating system to use for my main computer. I was getting so desperate that I even considered going back to openSUSE (Which supports KDE 3.5.x in 11.0, which is supported with security updates for two years), which I left in the first place because Novell started to just piss me off with their laissez-faire attitude towards the free software community. Their deal with Microsoft and other things show this to a great degree. Other technical things also annoyed me back then, such as their reluctance to include applications such as Azureus, despite them being completely legal.

I know that Debian 5.0 Lenny, probably coming out in a month or two (Debian loves their delays!), but I REALLY don’t like Debian at all, so that was not a good option.

So what I picked was FreeBSD, since KDE 3.5.x is in the ports system, and looks like it isn’t going away any time soon. Also FreeBSD, in general, is a very solid operating system.
So for the last 10 days I have been messing with FreeBSD on my main computer. However, I discovered how true the saying “Always avoid .0 releases of software” is! I first picked FreeBSD 7.0, and I ran into some serious bugs, the area of networking, where the vr network driver would drop-out as I tried to transfer files to other machines on my local network, or had intensive traffic to the Internet going. I also ran into problems with sound, where the sounded output of KDE’s artsd sub-system would skip and drop. While artsd is very cruddy these days, it still barely works. So I tried installing FreeBSD 6.3 and did a quick test setup, and I didn’t run into those problems. The 6.x series of FreeBSD, has been out for a good while now, and it shows, the system seems more solid than 7.x, I was actually flabbergasted that something as simple as the vr ethernet driver for VIA-adapters was broken, because it’s such basic hardware as 10/100 ethernet networking. I decided to have a look in CVS, to see whether it might have been fixed for 7.1, and I did notice a bunch of changes, so hopefully it will be fixed in FreeBSD 7.1, and if not, hopefully 7.2, because this sort of basic issue would tarnish FreeBSD’s otherwise very good record of solidity, reliability and stability. But anyway, I’m willing to cut them some slack, since 7.0 was exactly that, a “dot zero” release, which often with any operating system and any category of applicaiton, often is a good example of something to avoid, until childhood illnesses are rooted out.

Yesterday I ordered a Promise SATA300 TX4 controller, and it did get shipped yesterday, but yet again Post Danmark (The company that runs the postage administration) took a dump in a beer can, because the package didn’t get moving in the system before today!!! This really pisses me off. My fuse is very short when dealing with these guys, because it’s not the first time these morons have burned me. Sometimes I can see the argument that liberals often make, about how government sponsored monopolies are bad for consumers, because Post Danmark gets away with charging me up the ass for crappy service. The only thing that saves the grace is the PD employees, who have delivered stuff to me recently, they have been very nice.

Early this month I joined a political party here in Denmark called Socialist People’s Party (Danish: Socialistisk Folkeparti, commonly shortened to just SF), which has recently been attracting quite a few new members, after a good result in the last election (Where they more than doubled their number of seats in parliament).

Personally, I hope to attend party meeting and events that I find relevant in the future. If you’re a member of SF and reading this, I hope to meet you some day! 🙂

I’ve also updated the “My Political Position” of my blog accordingly.

Politically, I am in no way a conservative, in fact, I can’t help but shake my heads at many conservatives I see on TV these days. However when it comes to the computer software I use, I am somewhat conservative. The reason is that I love it when my computer works, literally. Certain people I know, love to run the latest versions of everything, and occasionally have to fix their machines because something broke. I don’t like that, I like to just be able to go over to my computer, sit down and just use it. This is why I don’t use Windows, or any Microsoft software at all. If we look aside the fact, that Microsoft doesn’t give you any freedom in relation to your computing, all their stuff is just broken out of the box. I can’t think of one piece of Microsoft software, that doesn’t simply suck, and is broken out of the box.

One thing I plan to do for the foreseeable future is to use KDE 3.5.x, until KDE 4.x is a full replacement for what I do. And that could take a while to come, which is why I appreciate the KDE has got 3.5.10 coming out next month.