For consulting I decided that I really should have a working Microsoft Office workstation, so I bought a Dell Dimension 3000 with WinXP Pro and Office SBE for just under $1000. (At retail, XP Pro and SBE would cost $710, so I figured I'd spend the extra $250 and get a rather nice PC to run it on.) I ordered seven days ago, Dell shipped it the next day, and I received it today on the third delivery attempt.

Having not owned a Windows system for almost four years, I was rather surprised at the amount of hassle it takes to get an out-of-the-box PC up and running. I can understand having to update the virus database, install a couple patches to Windows, etc (although the drive was imaged at the factory a week ago) and I can even tolerate "Windows Product Activation", but just to get the preinstalled copies of XP, Office, and McAfee running, I was not expecting:

• Clicking "I Agree" on eight different EULAs, not counting Dell's infamous "Press any key to indicate acceptance of all EULAs for all software preinstalled on this system" screen that pops up two seconds after the first boot.
• Seven required reboots, two of which occurred after nothing obvious had happened.
• A 23-meg "critical update" for XP.
• Harassment from Windows Security Manager (whatever that is) every time I boot because I have set Windows Update to only notify me when updates are available, but not to download and install them automatically.
• Harassment from "Dell Support", telling me it wants to upload "anonymous usage statistics". No, there's no way to turn it off. The only relevant option lets you toggle between asking before sending statistics or simply sending statistics without notifying you at all.
• Having to open the help browser to figure out how to update my McAfee virus definitions, even though the McAfee control panel popped up on every boot to alert me that my definitions were out-of-date.
• Language settings in all my Office applications default to "Chinese (Taiwan)". (I'm pretty sure Dell ships legal software...)
• And, of course, having fifty different preinstalled apps that I didn't ask for, telling me to sign up for music downloads, dialup Internet access, etc.

Honestly, how do people put up with this nonsense? Suffering through all this crap makes setting up Gentoo look easy!

OK, so I figured if I shut down my X session entirely, I could let emerge upgrade Gnome to 2.6 and start up a new session afterwards and everything would work fine. I even checked to make sure gconfd and friends were gone, as they have a habit of sticking around after a session ends.

Turns out that's not good enough. Apparently, during the upgrade process, some test suite started up the Bonobo activation server, and when I started my first Gnome 2.6 session there was much weird behavior, like gnome-settings-daemon failing to start.

Probably the best way to make sure everything's reset is to reboot the system entirely, but damn, that feels waaaaay too un-Unixy.

In related news, Gnome 2.6 is pretty much identical to 2.4, although that annoying dialog box in Epiphany asking whether to open or save the playlists from Shoutcast is fixed.

Sad is the world of Linux wireless Ethernet. Sure, the "traditional" chipsets like Orinoco/WaveLAN, Prism, and Aironet work as well as they always have, but newer hardware like the Atheros chipset, the new MPI-350 card from Cisco, and the infamous Centrino chipset are all only supported by broken/outdated closed-source drivers, or are not supported at all.

My new Thinkpad is "wireless-ready" meaning it has a built-in antenna and a mini-PCI slot for a wireless card. Nifty, right? The niftiness of having internal wireless hardware combined with the advantage of being able to select a NIC with good Linux drivers. But naturally, IBM doesn't make it this easy. For "regulatory" reasons, which I guess are understandable considering the anal retentiveness of the FCC, the BIOS is programmed to accept only one of three cards in the mini-PCI slot. You can guess which three cards they are based on the previous paragraph.

The Thinkpad shipped with a Centrino card, which wasn't looking promising as Intel has been promising Linux drivers for over a year now without delivering anything. The best option seemed to be the Aironet card, since older Aironet cards have been supported under Linux since the beginning of time. The "official" Cisco Linux driver for the MPI-350 was a closed source module last updated over a year ago, but kernel 2.6.3 was released with experimental support for the card in the airo module, so I figured my odds of getting it working were good.

I priced out the MPI-350 in the usual places, coming up with about $70, but then it occurred to me that the IBM OEM cards might have a different PCI ID and only the IBM-supplied MPI-350s would make it past the Nazi BIOS. So I bit the bullet and ordered an Aironet MPI-350 for $120 from IBM.

The day before my new card showed up, Intel announced the first release of their Linux Centrino wireless driver. Open-source and everything. I tried it out and it worked. But a bit buggy and no WEP, so I decided not to return the Aironet card.

So today I finally got around to installing the new card. Hardware installation was painless, of course. Then I booted up and found that the airo module had been loaded, but the card wasn't associating with the access point. A Google search revealed that my card's firmware was too new, and that I needed to downgrade to 5.00.03 to get it to work. No problem, I can download that from Cisco, and flash it into the card with... oops.

The open-source driver won't talk to the new firmware at all. The Cisco Linux driver also requires an older firmware, so there were zero options for flashing the card on Linux.

Two hours later, Windows XP was restored on the laptop. Three minutes after that, the card had been downgraded. An hour later, Linux was back.

One final issue. Although Linux could now talk to the card, it wouldn't associate with an access point. It seemed to be a problem with the WEP configuration due to messages like:

Setting key 0
airo: Max tries exceeded waiting for command
PC4500_writerid: Write rid Error 65535
PC4500_writerid: Cmd=0121
airo:  WEP_PERM set ffff

The solution was to download the Cisco Linux Aironet Configuration Utility (ACU), which actually works with the open-source kernel module as well as Cisco's kernel module, and use that to set the WEP key. Since the card stores the key in non-volatile memory, this only needs to be done once. Now when I boot the system, I use iwconfig eth1 enc on to enable WEP without trying to set a key, and this uses the stored key to associate with the access point. Success!

I believe at this point, my laptop is now fully functional. All I need to do now is figure out how to do some of the fancier power management to squeeze the maximum life possible out of my battery.

Over the past week I've been installing Gentoo on my workstation, faboo. I've probably done 10 Gentoo installs so far, and I'm still figuring new things out each time.

Things I learned this time:

• The genkernel utility does a poor job of configuring the kernel. Or at least, the default config files suck.
• The "Hot plugging" option in the kernel config menu actually does something, even if you don't check any of the options inside it. You have to turn it on to get hotplug kernel messages, which Gentoo uses to configure network interfaces, sound cards, etc.
• Beware of copying an XF86Config file from the old RedHat install to the new Gentoo install on the same box. You have to remove the font config paths and change the mouse device path or X won't start, or worse, lock up your console.
• Old stage1 images may have dependencies for bootstrapping that are too old. Bootstrapping last September's stage1 will cause a bunch of stuff to be unexpectedly merged, including Python. It's all stuff that would be merged during the system build though.
• Upgrading GRUB doesn't require a re-setup, oddly enough. This is because stage1 and stage1.5 which actually get embedded into the boot sectors use a "standard" entry vector into stage2, which stays on the filesystem and therefore is upgraded directly by emerge.
• Dot files in your home directory from GNOME 2.0 will seriously screw up GNOME 2.4.

So I'm back online now, for those wondering why I haven't been on Gale in a while. :-)

Puck now has 512 MB of memory! Woohoo!

So the funny part is the memory I ordered the first time is the right stuff. Dell was right; the system shipped with registered memory although the DIMM inside was not labeled as registered. So I guess I'll be returning the second stick I ordered. Man, I feel dumb.

The upgrade went fine for the most part; puck is now running Gentoo on the system image and is plugged into a nice SmartUPS with monitoring.

The memory was not upgraded. Although Dell's support system claims the server was shipped with registered memory, when I opened the case I found unregistered memory. This is unfortunate, because the memory upgrade I purchased is registered, and therefore cannot be installed next to the OEM memory.

I guess I'll take the 20% restocking fee to return it and purchase the non-registered. Stupid Dell.

With the impending termination of support for Red Hat Linux, I have been working on getting all my old Red Hat systems moved to Gentoo. I'm mostly done with the ones I care about, but the big one still remains. Puck won't be completely moved off RHL by December 31, when security patches will no longer be released, but I'm aiming to have the boot system moved over to Gentoo. (Users only see a system image inside a chroot, so there's not much in the boot image.) Ariel's boot image has already been converted to Gentoo and is working fine, but with puck there's much pressure to get it right the first time since so many people are relying on it and it's a bit of a drive to get to.

Hardware upgrades are happening as well. I'll be adding another 256MB of memory as well as a longer-lasting UPS. Of course, with the addition of a SmartUPS, I also feel obligated to set up proper UPS monitoring software, so that's consumed a bit of my time as well. It works fine on ariel, and hopefully the configuration will transfer easily.

Downtime this weekend should be a couple hours at most. Those who use puck regularly will receive a separate announcement, including a specific time for the outage.