Red Hat sent me a new laptop, replacing my ancient powerbook. It
is an excellent machine, notably more powerful than its predecessor.
For instance, I can actually build gcjx on it in a reasonable amount
of time. Finally a machine I can give Eclipse demos on 🙂

The FC3 install went very smoothly, though I haven’t yet worked
out every detail (getting wireless working looks fiddly).
Unfortunately, installing the OS is only the first step in really
configuring a new machine. Copying over my customizations is kind of
painful, especially random things I use but can’t be bothered to
properly package. Then there is also the task of configuring yum,
installing apt, and installing all that extra software I use that
isn’t in the OS itself.

This process is way simpler than it was back in the bad old days.
Configuring yum and apt is ridiculously easy. The significant barrier
right now seems to be simply remembering everything that I know I want
installed. Still, there’s room for growth in the “making it easy”
department here.

gcc.gnu.org

gcc.gnu.org is taking an little vacation, after having unexpected
and serious problems a couple of days ago. To make it possible to
get work done in the meantime, I’ve imported my working tree into monotone. This will make
it easy for me to keep my various patches separate for later copying
to the gcc repository. This is working out quite well… maybe we
should have just immediately set up a more public server for people to
use in the meantime. If gcc used monotone, I wouldn’t care nearly as
much when the machine crashed.