An upgrade, at last!

Well, I have finally upgraded my IntelSGI workstation. I first installed RedHat 9, which would have been a breeze if I hadn't been to stingy to download the third cdrom .iso image ... it took me about 8 attempts to build a package selection that didn't need disk 3...

Then I cross-graded to Ximian Desktop 2, which was almost a breeze with their cute

wget -q -O - http://go.ximian.com |sh

install - except there was one package conflict that meant i had to manually un-install a whole bunch of ximian packages (plus the single offending RedHat gsf package - ignoring dependancies) before I installed again. xargs to the rescue! That would have been easy if i hadn't decided to reboot in between ... since a few choice packages were missing I had to force init down to run-level 3 and use twm - blech (no Rusty - twm is NOT the best window manager ever designed. olvwm is! ;)

So all is well! I didn't like metacity much, so I have switched to sawfish (the gnome 1 default window manager), but unfortunately the win3.1 theme that i fell in love with doesn't work properly with current versions of sawfish :( and the sawfish-ui preferences app is a bit broken. I guess I will have to compile it myself as I suspect the redhat sawfish rpm doesn't quite understand the Ximian installaion of gnome.

All in all I am now a happy camper. Oh, except the gnome 2 window list applet blows... and despite Havoc's insistance that it does everything you need, try puting it in a vertical toolbar - yuk.

And if you are still reading, I am truly sorry for boring you to tears with my computer shenanigens! (Ok, so that was just a good excuse to use the word shenanigens!)