Many things happened since last entry. Let's see. First of all I moved to a new laptop. Gave my old one to my wife (she uses it for writing) and got a nice ThinkPad for myself (A21e). I chickened out and installed Red Hat 6.2 on the laptop (I shouldv'e gone Debian) and I still kept a small Windows partitions, mostly to deal with some Windows annoyances at work.

The RH 6.2 install was nearly painless. Just figuring out how to get the sound to work took a little while. It's up and running now with ALSA drivers. I have to make a page describing my configuration to help others set up laptops.

Meanwhile I've fiddled a little with my Debian box. The user enviroment with Gnome and WindowMaker for window manager needs a lot of tweeking. I also have to get some basics going. For example, I need to configure printer filters to be able to print Web pages and I need to set up dialup. I haven't had that much time to work on it.

Last Friday I stopped by Linux Expo and I picked up some neat toys. One was a CD with Ximian release of the Gnome environment. I'll try it out on the Debian machine when it is set up better.

I also got a copy of "Evil Geniuses for Dummies" signed by Illiad (see http://www.userfriendly.org) for my son. My son was very impressed with the autographed book, and it's not easy for a dad to impress a 13 year old son. :)

The funniest part of the signing was that there were supposed to be two authors signing their books: Eric Raymond and Illiad. Illiad was late and a long line formed waiting for him, while Eric just sat there waiting. While thunbing through the User Friendly book I got to a cartoon which featured Eric Raymond, so I had him sing the cartoon. I know it's silly, but so what.