Random Computer Bits

After many hours of struggling, going to several mailing lists, I have finally found the solution to what I was looking for. My xorg installation worked on my MacBook, but I couldn't get it to use my full 1920x1200 resolution that was available on my Dell 24" 2407WFP. Finally, someone suggested to me on xorg@lists.freedesktop.org that it was most likely a driver issue. While I was already using the 'intel' driver, I suspected something may be up with it, and I decided to download the latest source code of the driver from intellinuxgraphics.org. After a successful compilation and installation, everything worked perfectly. Needless to say, I was very pleased.

But then as I began trying to use Gentoo more, I started to realize how broken this distro is, or to be more exact, portage. For one thing, I can't install qemu no matter how hard I try, because a known bug in portage prevents gcc3 from compiling. And of course, using gcc4 has even more bugs and difficulties to deal with. But what really set me off was when I was trying to update 'world', and packages that were previously installed before started crapping out. That's where I draw the line. I'm using the latest unmasked gentoo-sources kernel, set up the entire system exactly to the way described in the Gentoo handbook, and there are bugs that prevent me from using software that I know would work perfectly on some other brands of *nix.

So, I'm backing up my system as I speak, and preparing for a FreeBSD install. Why? There's no one single reason. Maybe it's the fact that it's installed and runs without a hitch on my servers, the fact that so many high-end servers rely on it for solidity that convinces me it's the one to use. Or perhaps I just like Unix, or as close to it as I can get. In any case, I'm looking forward to using X11 on my MacBook -- but it'll be running on a BSD kernel this time.