I’ve been running KDE for the past several weeks, much to the dismay Jorge. It’s mostly because kwin has features that metacity does not, such as window memory. I went to fire up GNOME a few nights ago and discovered that the alt-F2 shortcut to launch the file launcher dialog didn’t work. After much help from goatboy (who doesn’t blog nearly enough), I was able to track it down to a bug somewhere in gnome-panel. Metacity sees alt-F2 and sends the message to gnome-panel, but it never gets activated. I’m still working out enough of gdb to trace down exactly where it is. A project for another day, though. It’s fairly isolated. It works for a new user on the same machine, but not my existing user (even after killing ~/.gconf*, ~/.metacity, and ~/.gnome*

I recently put my Fujitsu P5000 laptop into semi-retirement, replacing it with an N-Series Fujitsu with Dual Core. The only problem has been the ATI x1400 video card that doesn’t have any linux support yet. I’ve been stuck running Linux via VMWare. It works well enough, but not the ideal solution. Unfortunately now there seems to be some hard drive issues. It’s been running chkdsk for an hour now, after several VMWare crashes, a BSOD, and timeout errors reading from the drive in the event log. It’s replaced some bad clusters that appear to be in my VMWare file. If my VMWare disk is dead I’m going to be one very unhappy camper. Enough to consider returning it and pick up something a little more Linux-friendly, like a Mac Book Pro. Laugh all you want, Jorge, but it’s roughly the same price as any other Dual Core, and it will run OSX, Windows, and Linux natively. You can’t get that anywhere else yet without a bit of hackery.

Work is going extremely well. I’m still putting in an insane amount of hours. I’m getting ready to make at least one full-time hire soon. I’m still looking for a good Perl programmer, capable of handing my mess of mod_perl2 code.