A Cajun-Asian View

It's been a while since I last posted here. Just a short little update on a few things. First of all, I've changed employers; I'm currently developing in Flex, which has been an interesting and fun learning experience. I use Flex Builder 3 as my development Environment, but since the Linux Beta of it is somewhat limited at the moment, I've end up running the Windows version on Windows XP Pro in a virtualbox on my work laptop.

Now, my previous employer gave a Dell Latitude D8101 to me when I was let go. I wanted this particular laptop from the different laptops I could have picked as all of the components on it (wireless network, bluetooth, video card2) worked well with Linux and featured a 15.4" 1920x1200 resolution screen. I've found that screen real-estate is a real boon for development work, and I can more easily adapt a Linux environment to my work flow, even if I have to run Windows apps in a virtual environment.

The problem with this particular laptop was the processor was underpowered as a single core 1.8 GHz Intel processor, which I think was a Mobile Pentium 4. The laptop was also maxed out at 2 GB of RAM. Between running apache, postgres, and mysql for my various projects, plus Zend Studio for PHP work3 or Flex Builder in a virtualbox, I find the processor is overworked on a regular basis.

So it when it came down to it, getting another work laptop became a pretty high priority.

1. 1. And my iPhone!
2. 2. With the open source ATI drivers; though it didn't give me the full capabilities of the video card, it works well enough to run Compiz on it if I wanted to. I rarely did due to performance issues
3. 3. And I use the same Eclipse install for mucking around with Ruby

Some of the notebook stats:

• 2-year old Sager NP4780 ULTRA Laptop

Well, I managed to upgrade to Ubuntu Edgy 6.10, though the path to this upgrade was a bit rocky. I've tried to get the ATI proprietary ("fglrx") drivers working with Beryl, but apparently, the latest release of Beryl has something that is incompatible with the ATI driver. After about 4 attempts at making this Edgy-fglrx-XGL-beryl combination work, I decided to give the open-source "radeon" driver a try with the AIGLX extension to X.org.

Currently in the process of upgrading my Sager notebook. I had Ubuntu Dapper 6.06 on there, and I'm upgrading it to Ubuntu Edgy 6.10, following these instructions. Unfortunately, I've customized my install of Dapper with a few tweaks...