Tool Shed 2

I’ve been doing a lot of testing. I sincerely hope that’s over for awhile.
Scientific Linux on the laptop wasn’t working. There is a bug Red Hat refuses to fix; dropping into hibernate mode frequently corrupts a portion of the file system on machines with Intel chipsets. While I managed to fix the file system by rebooting, what’s the point in that? Hibernation is all about not having to boot from scratch. If I can’t use my laptop as a laptop, it’s not working. So I did something else.
Debian’s next release — Wheezy — is due out very soon. So I grabbed the pre-release and installed it on my laptop. So far, it’s working quite well. I had forgotten how simple Debian could be once you get it installed and set up properly.
On the desktop system, a part of the Mint way of doing things is so convoluted that it drives me nuts. I’m watching a half-dozen updates or nagging check notices on the desktop. It depends on what it is whether Mint will do it simply or make you fight through a series of roadblocks. I’m not sure why, but it seems Mint does not like the kernel updates supplied by Ubuntu, but then won’t offer the fixes any other way. The same goes with a lot of other packages. Also, flashplayer has to be updated manually. That’s just too annoying when the claim is serving the user.
So I’m running Debian Wheezy on both machines and it’s all good for now. I grabbed the XFCE installer ISO and everything is tolerable. So far, all the packages I need have been easy to find and install and none of that wild and silly tweaking to undo.
I don’t enjoy blowing off half a day installing some new OS when I have plenty of stuff waiting for me to finish.