Yes, yes, yes. I know. I know. I know. I know.

Speaking about Linux distributions is intresting only to, er, three people in the world, and that’s because they each have committed some root piece to each of them.

Anyhow, my ancient mac is beyond painful for Java – it’s 550Mhz, which translates to (sorry, those of you who believe Jobs), about that of a 200Mhz MMX P5 when compiling, linking, oh, and, er, slower when loading, debugging, and testing – provided you can get it to import everything.

I’ve got a funky collection of computers here – having given up the majority of them, I have my laptop, a celeron that is posessed in some manner that causes either the IDE controller to fail a chain every few months, or blow a disk whenever there’s a power outage, and my space heat – er, Athlon.

Well, long story short, I want to be compatible with the vast majority of the users out there, just to make my life easier, and, of course, to make my developments a bit more attune to those who will be most likened to use my stuff. (Makes sense, right? You don’t crosscompile nowadays, unless you really have to.)

I need Linux. I need something I can compile stuff on, display remotely, and has functional Java. That means most BSDs are right out – Well, no matter what kernel, what hardware tweak, what install mode, what bit of hardware I append or take out, including motherboards, RedHat won’t work on my Athlon. Debian’s a few years out of date, Slackware? Er, well, yes, I ran Slackware – in 1995. It hasn’t progressed all that much since then. I’ve installed Mandrake 9.1, and updated all of my tools. The installer is pretty slick (read: functional GUI), and it doesn’t just leave you hanging at the end.

It does have a few caveats with my configuration: My Atlhon, in it’s current incarnation, has both an AGP and a PCI video card, and two mice. It was smart enough to detect this, and provide me with a very basic X configuration, but then it screwed up it’s own devfs entries, leaving me to either ctrl-alt-backspace and try to login very quickly, init to a different level, or ssh in remotely.

I fixed this, and found that it also lacked inherent permissions for various hardware bits, despite querying me of them at install – audio, cd, et al were 600. I fixed devfsd.conf and localizations, setup a couple aliases, handgrafted an XF86Config, and it’s all running nice and pretty – now to get back to work!