It was really weird. The next day, after I wrote the previous entry,
there was no way to reach Devio.us from my location (using my Verizon
"high speed" Internet).
Today is the first time since then that I've been able to reach here,
either by SSH or by HTTP or by Gopher. No, I haven't tried any of the
"Riverdale" protocols (Archie, Betty, Veronica, Jughead) since sometime
in the late 1990s.
What's been happening since the last entry?
I installed GoboLinux on the older laptop. I rebooted. GRuB couldn't
find an operating system. Since it was just a "let's try this out"
thing, I moved on to Chakra. Chakra was attractive, but some things did
not work. I moved on to NixOS. NixOS was initially almost exactly what I
want. But then I went to download a Tclkit and the Rebol interpreter,
but neither one would run. I found instructions to possibly get them
working, but then I started noticing a high number of package conflicts.
Nix (and its derivative Guix) are supposed to help solve that problem.
If they cannot, then they've lost most of their attractiveness to me.
I stuck with NixOS for quite a while longer than planned or expected,
but in the end, those two things (and the non-working WiFi) caused me to
wipe it out. I had planned to try several more distros during this time,
but I decided it was time to settle down. I chose Funtoo (a Gentoo
variant). WiFi works, I can run Tclkits / Starkits and downloaded Rebol
interpreters. There are still a few more package conflicts than I'd
like, but I suspect part of that is my make.conf file. I'll trim it down
some and see whether certain ebuilds suddenly become installable.
I must say that I'm impressed that these people operate this service as
they do.
