- My Sword Is Broken
So, less than a month after the warranty ran out, my laptop bit the dust. It doesn't even boot up 4/5 of the time, and when it does, Linux freezes early in the boot process. It's definitely a hardware problem, probably the mainboard or the G4 processor. I'm looking at $1000 to fix it, which really, really sucks. Luckily I managed to get more or less all of the data off during its slow spiral of disintegration, but it still sucks. I kind of thought of my TiBook as my shiny silver sword in the fight to advance free software.
I have a tough decision to make. If I pay the $1000 to fix it, it still won't be under warranty, so if it breaks again, I'm screwed. Given how heavily I use my laptop, I'm starting to think it makes more sense to get one of those cheap iBooks and have the warranty. But then again I would lose the extras I put into my old laptop like the 1G of RAM. Plus the iBook doesn't have a nice big screen like my TiBook does (did...). Sigh.
- Free Software
I spent a bit of time getting my old PC (dual P2-350) set up as my main hacking station again. Probably what took me the longest in setting it up was recalling how to set up Postfix/TLS in order to send mail, which was a bit of a bitch. But everything seems to mostly be working now. That's one nice thing about free software; I can get every application I use from the Internet.
Used the workstation setup to squish fontconfig bugs. Seems the recent upstream change to not include bitmapped fonts in fonts list affected a number of people, so I added a debconf question.