Housekeeping

I was probably one of the few hundreds of people who didn't stay at home and watch the Spanish royals' wedding (as much as I respect them, Portugal is an entirely different country, despite the close ties we have).

Besides a boatload of shopping, I took the time to burn the Core 2 ISOs and reinstall my old Toshiba Tecra 8100 from scratch. I never do upgrade installs on my laptops - anything on them is supposedly backed up someplace, and I like the "clean slate" approach.

Everybody else seems to be doing reviews (1, 2), so here's mine. It's short and to the point, mostly because I can't spare the time.

The fist hint of trouble was that the installer persisted on creating two network devices (eth0 and wifi0) for my wireless card (I never use laptop docks, either, so it hasn't detected the dock's network card). The second was that both audio and Wi-Fi failed to work after the install - courtesy of the 2.6 series kernel.

Since this is a breach of my "it should just work" principle, I'm going back to Core 1 - any distribution that doesn't get this sort of thing right is wasting my time.

Not that this is unexpected, mind you. The 2.6 kernel is a very different beast, and Core 2 is bound to be optimized for newer hardware - but the 8100's PCMCIA controller was very well supported in 2.4, and there's no real excuse for the buggy sound support.

So, like the 2.2 traditionalists did when the 2.4 kernel was all the rage , I'm sitting this one out until someone else has legacy hardware support licked.

And before Core 1 settles back in, I'll probably see what FreeBSD can do these days - after all, and despite years of habits, it still feels like home.

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