Public SourceMage Discussion List

[Juan Carlos Torres <jucato AT sourcemage.org>]

Greetings mages,

Sorry if I dropped off from the face of Freenode so suddenly. Had a bit of mixed problems the past weeks: academic, personal, and SMGL-related as well. I'm going on a sort of self-imposed vacation for a while. Just at home, but mostly offline. I will still read emails, so if something important needs my attention, let me know.

But less importantly, I'm considering at the moment temporarily switching distros, hopefully just for a while. The main reasons are convenience and skill. Convenience because a lot of the times, I need stuff now, and not an hour later after compilation. These aren't the regular updates that I can do while sleeping. But even those usually take a day to finish (since I don't do them everyday). Of course, the logical solution would be to upgrade, which I'm planning to do and accomplish hopefully by the end of the year or Q1 2010. By then, this "convenience" factor will be moot. (Sometimes though, I wish we had split KDE builds, but that would go against the spirit of SMGL. And I don't really mind. I just need a faster box :P)

And skill, because I really don't have the time or know-how to track down everything to make things work. My experience with CUPS, X, udev/hal, and recently even KDE gave me a really painful slap in the face that most of the times, I'm as clueless as "average Joe". When I started in SMGL, I hoped that I would learn more about GNU/Linux, sort of like a guided LFS. Unfortunately, I have had very little time to do so. In time, I will of course improve. But on my own time and pace, not forced into a corner because something broke or isn't working.

The good news is that I find nothing wrong or broken about Source Mage (yes, not even the "environmental" factor). The expectations I had when I chose SMGL were all met and still hold true. Which is why I'm sort of looking at Arch Linux as it seems to be the binary distro that's somewhat closest to what I loved in SMGL, sans the fantasy theme (recommendations welcome as long as it's a binary distro and not Ubuntu :P). Hopefully I can get a new box soon and I'll be back.

P.S. Sorry for not having been able to faithfully perform my duties as a scribe and for leaving Tome in a state where almost all its members are.. um... missing.


Regards,

Jucato.