Mandrake 9.0's kernel is definately broken, and very broken. Sound playback of mp3 or ogg files drops songs mid-file, May can't run mozilla and openoffice at the same time on a 256M machine, and my USB flash reader was flaky beyond belief -- it was sad: our linux machines had dropped from the envy of the office to the bottom the barrel in reliability and usefulness, and for May (who's not a programmer) she was beginning to wonder if it was even worth the bother.

I'm happy to report that doing what I should have done in the first place (ie "compile from source!") fetching the tux.org sources and doing the whole xconfig thing from scratch (geez that thing is getting long in the tooth!) fixed all our problems 100%.

Yeah, I know. Hacker 101 basic training rule #3, compile from sources and flee from all package managers, but I so want package managers and pre-built binaries to work out because that's (so far) the only way we have to get updates and new software out to Linux users who may not be that comfortable with tweaking Makefile rules. So I get what I deserve, but I also learn that Unix for the masses, at least from Linux, is maybe not quite there yet. Yeah, I know, I'm going to get flamed by the Apologists for that one. Take a tip from a cop who does: Don't bother, I've heard it before and it's still lame.

Someone posted an article a few days ago lamenting the loss of the SGI Magic Desktop when the proprietary vendor abandoned it. Here's something else the SGI Irix systems had c.1991 that blows everything else away: When you first turned on your brand new SGI machine, or if you changed any hardware or did an OS upgrade, the sash-shell boot screen would detour into a long self-diagnostic routine that ended with a complete and fully automated kernel reconfiguration and recompilation.

If you ask me, and you didn't, that's what we have to shoot for for package delivery! Forget all this package nonesense, machines are just too varied and tweaked for one size to fit all. What we need is autoconf on steroids, to fetch the source and run it through the ./configure script, build it for that machine and then, if all goes well, (optionally) wipe the sources and pronounce the software installed. No more shipping every conceivable option, no more lowest common denominators. Shit, we're opensource so why hide the source? Just because we don't want to frighten people? Tuning to bind perfectly to the bare metal is one of the hallmarks of Unix, and IMHO, we're losing it trying to be more Windows-like.

Wait a minute. We already have that source-package installer! It's called CPAN! Once again, Perl is annoyingly way ahead of the pack.