Some Intrepid notes

I figured I'd mention this in case other people have these problems (and solutions) and want to know if they're alone.

So on my laptop, Dell Inspiron 6400, I went from Gutsy to Intrepid within a couple days. I tried Hardy very briefly. My Gutsy->Hardy upgrade was rocky, but Hardy->Intrepid was smooth as a baby's bottom.

So, starting with Hardy, Sendmail takes about a minute to start. Though I'm told that it's because I never configured it. I never use it. So I uninstalled it. I don't even remember why I had it. BUT, it never did this under Gutsy.

Starting with Intrepid, something related to dhclient takes about a minute, dare I say maybe two minutes, to start during my boot sequence. I'm working on resolving it at the moment. Pretty sad.

Gnome doesn't have as many compiz bugs when starting up as I've had in Gutsy, but overall I feel like it takes longer before things are usable. Once it's up though, it's just fine. I think Firefox is faster, yay.

Now, some of my run-on-startup program configs got wiped, I think going from Hardy->Intrepid. I hear this has something to do with Gnome sessions stuff. I never was in love with Gnome anyway, maybe it's time to switch. I'm intrigued by wmii, and all the cool kids in my LUG are using it, so I might have to try it if I want to still be cool. I tried running it once, just to see if it had a usable default. It didn't really, but it started up pretty much instantly. Sortof scary. Or maybe it's sortof scary how much useless garbage Gnome starts up. Thank God it's Linux and I have a choice.

Also, I use Tilda. I don't have the package installed since I was doing some development on it. For some reason, twice now, my config got wiped just randomly; it went back to the default config. I'm going to guess it has something to do with the Hardy or Intrepid updates. This has never happened before, I wonder what's up.

Now, wireless, that's delicious. I have:

0b:00.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4311 802.11b/g WLAN (rev 01)

It's been getting progressively better over the semi-year releases. But up to Gutsy, it was still flaky. When I started up, I would have to reload the driver before getting it to work (unless I waited a while before logging in. Hmm.) Anyway, none of that in Intrepid (probably Hardy, I never really gave it a spin, but I think that's when my new driver came in). It also connects to anything reasonable that I've thrown at it, things that I could only connect to after a struggle, at best, before. I can steal the nets from my apartment where I couldn't in Gutsy. The whole issue of "wireless sucks on Linux" seems to be history for my particular configuration. I know your mileage will probably vary.

How did a quick rant become so long?