Elf Sternberg

Well, I woke up this morning to discover that my desktop rebuild had not actually finished. Almost, but not quite.

There are two primary desktops for Linux: KDE and Gnome. These are the toolkits that provide much of the functionality of the windowing environment: the toolbars, widgets, and window management. Both use a PDF management library called "poppler." Apparently, my first major build-through had build Poppler with a KDE-optimized API, but not the Gnome-optimized API, so when I tried to install Gimp, it halted the build with this message: "Please add GTK to the Poppler USE flags and try again."

I mean, crap, couldn't they just do that themselves? Anyway, I added 'app-text/poppler gtk' to the USE database and restarted.

At least 500 packages have gone in; it was only the last nine or so that had to be restarted. But those nine were all the final products, things like Inkscape (vector art program), Wine (Windows API layer), Gimp (Photoshop replacement), Scribus (Desktop publishing) and Thunderbird.

Still, this has been a hell of a lot more smooth than the 2006 install. I'm told that the 2007 was completely borked, so maybe it's good that I just skipped it and went with a fresh install anyway.

Well, so far so good. I've enabled the CPU's auto-frequency governor, which reduces power usage quite a bit, as well as TICKLESS (turns off the kernel's internal heartbeat) and USB suspend (turns off USB connectors when not in use), and so far it still suspsends to RAM nicely. According to Intel's powertop program, I'm saving over a Watt of power, which will increase my battery life some 8% or so. Not too shabby.

I've chosen the name Chi. It's short and easy to type, and just because I wanted to. Kurumi was my second choice.

This morning, I accidentally issued the wrong command to the laptop: instead of suspend, I sent it hibernate, which does not just suspend all operations yet keeps the system "live" in memory, but actually writes out that live image to disk and shuts everything down completely and powers off. To my pleasure, the system came back to life without a hitch when I got into work: the OS booted, saw that there was a pending image, and loaded it. It worked great.

And according to Intel's powertop program, I have about 4.5 hours of battery life if all I'm doing is word processing. Now that's good news. I can take it to the cafe' with me without having to lug the cord.