i should be working (but i'm fixing my computer).

The thing that annoys me most is -- computers that used to work just fine, updated to death. 

...

If you are going to be on the internet, for security reasons, you have to keep your computer up-to-date.  That means a Windows computer is dead in uh, oh, about a year. And by "dead," I mean "cheaper to buy a new one than waste your time waiting for paint to dry (and/or programs to actually execute)."

But, this post has nothing to do with Windows.  I upgraded to OpSu 11.4.  And, no, this is not really a rant on OpSu 11.4 -- because the computer was already greviously slow and so I figured, "what the heck."  Yes, it is my oldest, most useless computer, with only 512k of memory.  But ... not that long ago it was working fine.

The upgrade went fine and as far as I can tell, things did not get particularly worse.  Some random observations:  Conky no longer reads the correct temperature sensors -- the KDE monitor widgets do, but conky reads at steady 32 deg F for no apparent reason.

KDE 4.6 still works generally ok, though I have to hit <alt><f2> after boot and run "kwin --replace" to actually get the desktop plasma running correctly and have panel.  I'm pretty certain this is a lack of memory problem.  Once running, I actually have pretty decent 3d effects and generally acceptable Plasma execution.

But, my main login remains LXDE, because it uses less CPU.  I'm at the moment running Mozilla Firefox 4.0 Beta 12, and although 4.0 is supposed to be faster, it randomly maxes out the cpu.  Thunderbird, Firefox, DavMail (or perhaps Java) randomly crash.  It's just what it is.

So, I guess I will go buy a new computer.  Quick, before the Japanese Nuclear Meltdown drives computer and particularly memory chips prices, through the ceiling.  (And not just that, the dollar meltdown and USA runaway inflation, too).

Well, it's complicated.  I need new hardware at three locations and a better netbook (or I can't do my work very well).  But, I have been thinking of trying out a remote desktop style system.  A lot of what I do requires remote connections to a Windows server, anyway -- and I thought, what if I set up my own Linux remote server/client system?  Except, however, there is a learning curve involved.

And quite frankly, even on LXDE, this old worthless computer is not doing very well on the RDP connection.  So, my server/client concept has limitations out of the box.

It does have the advantage of "install once."  Which, btw, I am about to try linking my zypp respository files via dropbox.  My "upgrade the crappy computer" experiment had a point, after all -- I wanted to see if I would successfully upgrade to 11.4 just by changing all the repositories to 11.4 respositories and running zypper dup.

If you are wondering, yes -- it worked (as did the 11.2 to 11.3 upgrade).  But, it was very time consuming to upgrade my repositories, as I use a lot of them.  So, I'm thinking that if can successfully sync the repositories, that will be a time saving tool.

Then again, without doing a clean install, I can't really say whether some of my sucky performance problems are not the result of legacy configuration problems.  And, on the other hand I do a clean install I have a lot of reconfiguring to do.  (Among other things, the computer is set up as an ifolder server -- though I haven't had it actually running correctly since 11.2.  But, that's mostly because I haven't tried, too busy.)

Two weeks ago my horse died.  I meant to write something appropriate, but couldn't think of anything, then along came the earthquake/tsunami/meltdown thing and my problems seemed rather personal and petty.

Endian Outlaw was very cool and if we weren't a global collection of planet desecrating village idiots, there's a great deal he and his species might have taught us, were we to have listened.  But, you will have to have some knowledge of horses to understand what I mean by that.  And by "knowledge of horses," I do not mean "ride around on horses and make them do stuff," which any village idiot can accomplish -- a lot have done so much better than I.