I understand the FDIC 2nd Quarterly Report for 2009 has been staged for release tomorrow. That in itself means nothing, since bureaucracy seldom operates optimally. However, given the situation, waiting until a Thursday may well be a low-level tactical move. We won’t know until it happens, but I counsel you to be cynical: Never underestimate the capacity for the US Federal Government to lie, cheat, steal and otherwise ruin your life, merely to insure some tax-swilling elitist thugs don’t surrender their comforts and convenience.
So the test with Kubuntu 8.04 wasn’t so good, after all. It’s not working too well with the oddball hardware used by HP, and there is precious little information I can grasp on how to manipulate things to work better. For example, the BIOS on many HP desktops does something non-standard with the thermal sensing and controls. In Linux, there is a gap between the hardware gurus with their esoteric jargon, and the average power user who tends to know how to fix this or that. The former aren’t willing or able to make it simple, and the latter don’t seem to know much about this case, and their “fixes” all appear to be too shaky. OTOH, FreeBSD has lots of documentation on the issue, not to mention a fairly elegant mechanism for controlling such things, and I’m confident I can resolve it. I’m currently running it through the paces of building a FreeBSD installation from scratch.
I’ll be running 6.4 and the GNOME 2.22 desktop. Back when I was using the Pavilion as my only computer, I remember what a radical difference it made when I recompiled the desktop with optimized code for “pentium4” on this thing under FreeBSD 6.0. No, it won’t do miracles or tricks, but I am pretty sure I can work out the kinks better with FreeBSD than with any Linux distro. I simply can’t find enough info on building Linux that without wading through books or joining yet one more forum group. From what I can tell, it’s largely because Linux is simply more complicated in design. I started with Linux many years ago, and never did understand the kernel, but I understood the FreeBSD kernel within a week or so of my first exposure (as much as I am probably ever going to understand it). While it still suffers from the rolling-release mania, there are ways I can get around most of that in FreeBSD.
In some ways, this may be the right timing for such a move. Given the vast quantity and depth of unknowns coming down the pike — not the least of which includes full economic crash and martial law — it’s probably wise to get the latest and greatest of the most stable stuff. Taking the time to build something which I can use for the foreseeable future, a future which might see easy updating disappear, the advantages of FreeBSD would give me at least an edge on security and stability. I already have the laptop in shape for the long-term, and the old Pavilion will be there shortly.
Frankly, I’d rather not see a bank holiday right now. I suspect TPTB don’t want it, either. What little I can gather indicates to me we still have everything pointing to an October Surprise. There are a few more things I’m trying to puzzle out, things which I need to resolve whether we muddle along for a few more years or the world stops tonight. Chaos comes on God’s schedule, but I’m hoping I have some time to settle these issues about my calling before I have to begin operating too heavily under it.
