brainwagon

Where your host blinks the sleep from his eyes, relates his experience with swapping operating systems on his laptop, and tells the story of how he came to work at Pixar and what he did on the Incredibles.

Expanding on my operating system debacle:

• I never got Fedora Core 3 to have acceptable record quality. I also experienced a number of Firefox crashes which I hadn’t seen before. Not sure what was going on, but I decided to get back on more familiar ground and install FreeBSD 5.3 on it. (I’ve used FreeBSD a lot more than Linux.)
• FreeBSD 5.3 installed easily, but when I tried to do a kernel recompile, I would get random segmentation faults from gcc. Usually such faults indicate bad hardware, and while I hadn’t noticed any problems like this before, I didn’t immediately discount the notion that the laptop could become less reliable when it overheated.
• On the other hand, I thought it might be a problem with gcc 3.4 or something else having to do with 5.3. So I reinstalled 4.10-RELEASE on the laptop. After a problem with incorrect probing of the network device (it autodetected into hw-loopback mode) and noticing a problem with the sound driver (begins lound, but tails off after 15 seconds on the initial use, seems fine afterwards) I did a kernel/world recompile. The laptop shut itself off during the compile. Very strange, and could indicate an overheating condition.
• Now, I’ve come full circle. Back to WinXP SP2, because I suspect I’m going to have to call HP to get this resolved (not under warranty anymore unfortunately). Surprisingly though, the laptop seems to be running cooler now, with less use of the fan than it has previously, even when I began with WinXP.

Additionally, here are the items that I got from Powell’s Books when I was in Portland:

• Operating System Design: The Xinu Approach by Doug Comer. Two volumes.
• Egyptian Language by Budge. Still available as a Dover paperback, I got an original copy. Sweet.
• How to Read Maya Hieroglyphs by John Montgomery. Fleshing out my ancient script book collection.
• Build Your Own Lego Submersible, by Bohm and Jensen. Just because it seemed cool to build a submarine out of PVC and an water tight tackle box.