Nothing spectacular today. Well, ok - there was that head-on collision at the top of MacQuarie Pass this morning. Guess that counts for something. Glad it wasn't me.

Dug into the mysteries of 'udev', or why your Linux box can't seem to use 'eth0' ever again with another hardware address, insisting on eth1, eth2, etc... Well in fact it can re-use eth0, but you've got to find the file (/etc/udev/rules.d/z25_persistent-net.rules) where they store the MAC addresses of every adapter that ever gets plugged in and fix it. It's not exactly something that comes up on a web search for re-configuring net adapters under Linux. You kinda' haveta' figure out that 'udev' is the culprit and track it down from there.

Worked a bit more on this website. Lots of under the covers changes that will make a lot of people happy. But I'll let them figure it out.

Now I'm settling down to a homebrew. It's done. It's not the best I've ever cooked up, but considering what I've got to work with - it's absolutely the best beer (the first decent one) I've had in this country. It'll do (quite nicely). I've got 5 cases to go through before I have to make some more - and I can only drink a couple bottles at a time before the walls start spinning. So this should last a month or two.

It cost me about $15-20 a case all told. Over time I should be able to make it better and drop the cost to about $5/case. If you consider that anything better than toilet-water beer costs $50-$60 a case - and lasts about a week, it's a pretty fair savings overall. Should be able to trim my monthly beer budget at least in half, and not have to drink the disgusting swill that sells as 'premium' beer here.

Still struggling with device drivers on Windows Vista. The sound card drivers have an update, but I'm skeptical. Several folks reported BSOD when they installed it. 

And I've lost any good feelings I had for Debian. Recently I moved my old RedHat installation to a newer PC - one that was only 8 years old rather than 10. All went extremely smooth. On bootup, it found the new motherboard, new network card, mouse, monitor, etc. - and configured all of them.  Everything worked fine.

Then I upgraded to Debian. The RedHat was a couple of years old, and I didn't want to mess with building PHP, MySQL, and Apache upgrades as well. Just boot up a newer Linux. Debian is currently one of the more popular Linux flavors - and I especially like the APT package management utility. Need PHP? 'apt-get install php'. You don't need to build and configure it and mess with library dependencies. These are all taken care of. If it needs new libraries, these are installed as well as any libraries that they depend on. 

Anyway, now (a couple of weeks later) I put in another newer PC - this time only 4 years old. I was expecting everything to go smoothly like it did last time. But it didn't. Debian doesn't have very good hardware (re-)detection, and they also don't load any other drivers than what is absolutely necessary. So I'm faced with an incomplete operating system that doesn't recognize the monitor or ethernet card. And I can't load in the modules for these devices over the net, because it doesn't recognize the network card. It's a Catch-22.

The only solution now is a re-install. Spend a few weeks getting everything configured and then start over. Right. I've been here before. Way too often...

But if you're one of those folks considering moving away from RedHat/Fedora, beware. It's nice to be able to plop your disks into another box if the one you've got goes bad - and keep running. Debian won't do this.