the corner office

One of the things one needs for a happy Gentoo installation is a lot of cheap bandwidth. Fast is also a boon. I downloaded the KDE packages at the turn of the month, and there are already a heap of updates.

Yep, it's taken me until now to start compiling and installing KDE. During the week, I played a bit with X.org, trying to get X running to my satisfaction. My Gentoo box has a GeForce4 MX onboard graphics card, and I ran into a few hassles trying to get X running at a happy resolution (which for my monitor is 1024x768). After poring through the logs, reading up on the forums and doing some research on the net (which included chasing search engine references into the source code for the video drivers), I figured out that for whatever reason, I couldn't rely on a DDC probe to get my monitor's refresh rates. Pity, I'd thought the good old days of schlepping with horizontal and vertical refresh rates in X config files was a thing of the past. Not so, yet.

At least I'm able to get a plain ole twm session going, at 1024x768. And I know about things like DDC, and almost learned more about things like I2C buses and whatnot. I can also boast that I know a few trivial things about twm, which is something I'd normally never have done had I not stopped and mucked around on this intermediate step before rushing helter-skelter to the save haven of KDE. I'm all geeked out.