I don’t know if it’s just me but there are these days in an week where I tend to worry so much that my productivity drops to near-stagnation. Just nothing seems to happen other than a tense me appearing tense. Anyway, I’m just recovering from a somewhat unhappy experience with my Karmic Beta installation on my laptop. Yes, it’s another ooh-nareshov-does-another-distro-shift post. And here’s what happened.
First, I get a call from Vadiraj on a Wednesday morning, out of the blue, from Goa. Apparently, his friend and he planned a noon-trip to this place just to score something that’s allegedly only available there (in India, i.e.). He wanted me to do a quick Google to give him some pointers. Unsuspend my laptop, I did. To connect to the internet through my USB modem, it failed. No matter what I tried – wvdial, pppd, NetworkManager – I couldn’t connect. And I went on a reboot-and-try spree. No luck. All that happened was me end up with a laptop that’d get stuck at boot trying to fsck my filesystem. Enraged, I was.
I reach office and start moving my stuff off of my laptop preparing for a fresh-install. Of, *shudder*, Arch Linux. Installation was pretty straight forward. But I didn’t really enjoy it as much I did Gentoo or FreeBSD. Not to mention all that sorcery trying to get my USB modem to work being unsuccessful. (At some point I had udev identifying my device as a CDMA modem and hal identify it as a GSM modem).
That night, no internet. The next day, installed Debian testing. But I had the same darned problem of being unable to tap my touchpad to click on, you know, things. The GNOME which Debian-testing featured didn’t have that tab under System > Preferences > Mouse where I could enable “Tap to click”. A quick Google suggested the use of GSynaptics – which had a “Tapping” tab where I promptly enabled “Enable Tapping” and had my Aha-moment.
Phew.
Oh, and, today I get a pay-your-internet-bill reminder. And I did it within minutes of seeing this. And here I am, about seven hours after I did that and back from a pretty decent string chamber orchestra organised by the Bangalore School of Music for raising funds for the Karnataka-floods relief, blogging about why my USB modem wasn’t working and the things I did in the past few days.
And regarding my worries. Wanda the Fish, the fortune teller had this to say:
P.S.: That was my first click on the Wanda-the-Fish GNOME applet after installing fortune-mod earlier today.
P.P.S.: On the upside, I got a chance to do a fresh ext4 install after all this.