New toys

Got myself a new laptop this week. Not that the other one broke down or some such, but it was getting old; and its single-core 1.3Ghz PowerPC was starting to be somewhat slow in comparison to what's available on the market today. Additionally, while it was still functional, there were some issues with wear-out; for instance, sometimes the battery would just fall out while I was walking around with it, or the network cable connection would not fit entirely, and similar minor problems

The new one is quite a bargain; 2G of RAM, 2Ghz Core2Duo, one of those newfangled 'n' wireless network interfaces, plenty of diskspace, and other interesting things; and all that for only €600ish. You'd say it's a netbook, but it isn't—although I guess the low price of those netbook systems is pulling down the bottom line of these machines.

Anyway. After using it for slightly more than a day, I'm quite happy with it. I did have to upgrade a few packages in order to make all the hardware work properly; for instance, kernel 2.6.26 does not yet support the wireless (so I'm running 2.6.28 now), and the X.org in unstable can only get at the screen in vesa mode, which means I'm running the 7.4 X.org packages from experimental. But overall, most of it (that I care about) works flawlessly.

With a single exception: I have no audio. The weird thing is, the audio chipset is recognized, and I can play around with alsamixer; but no matter, there is no sound. Which is kindof annoying. It doesn't appear that I'm the only one with this problem (witness this debugging page on the alsa wiki), so I'm sure I'll get there. Eventually.

Oh wel.

While fetching the laptop, I was told that the NSLU2 which I had on backorder had arrived, so I took that with me, too. Add to that the 160G disk that I'd fetched earlier, and the USB NIC that I also got, and the Thecus N2100 that's still running at my parents' place will soon be moved to my home again—and its 500G RAID1 with it.

Whee.