Well, I've been busy for the past couple of days. I was working with my x64 install of Ubuntu 9.04... which was nice, until I started to find out just how many of my favorite applications hadn't been ported for 64-bit OS'es yet. In its defense, though, I did like the speed that everything ran at... although the processors seemed to be constantly running at the limit, battery life was abysmal, and it would snow crash/kernel panic all the time. Really didn't want to have to deal with that...

...so I went to the i386 version of 8.04 LTS instead, which wasn't bad, but the brightness control didn't work no matter how hard I tried, which severely limited its usage as a portable computer. That I couldn't have, and after transferring all the files from my old laptop for the second time I was getting bored, so I decided to take the downtime I had to mess around with some different Linux distros that I hadn't tried before.

So, because I like apt and all, I wanted to stay with Debian-based stuff, so obviously I tried Debian 5. It was pretty nice, and even though it didn't have some of the stuff I liked, I could obviously add it later on. In fact, the only thing I didn't really like was having to go though ndiswrapper to get my wireless card working again, which isn't really a headache, but I figured I'd save Debian for later, maybe in a desktop installation.

From there I tried Linux Mint, which is just sort of an optimized Ubuntu variant. I suppose it's nice enough if you can't just go "sudo apt-get install ubuntu-restricted-extras" on your own, but I was exploring now, so I figured I'd give it a shot. And honestly, I didn't think so much of it once I'd gotten into it: the GUI for the program installer was pretty inefficient, and actually locked up a couple times, and I wasn't impressed by the default configuration of GNOME. It sort of felt like a quasi-KDE environment... which is fine, I suppose, but I use GNOME because I don't care for KDE. Skipped over Mint pretty quickly, actually...

...and then just went to the i386 version of Ubuntu 9.04. Now everything is stable, all my programs have been transferred over, and everything is working well. Feels Good Man^TM.

And I found a copy of Rez at a local Gamestop, which was totally awesome! It's really very cool. I think that if you own a PS2 you should at least see it.