Went to one of the local pubs late last weekend to meet up with Vyanne’s colleagues for drinks. Heh, it’s never really been my thing to go to pubs unless they served beer on tap that they got fresh from local suppliers. The place featured a jazz band of sorts. Ordered a Guinness Draught, something I used to drink lots when I was in New York as me and my ex boss loved the stuff. It’s dark, malty and full of flavour but 2 pints used to give me a headache. This here was from a can and nowhere near as tasty as it should be.

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Time passes so quick at times. Had a weekend busy looking at places, getting groceries and meeting up with friends. Did manage to spend a little time with some personal interests. The new design is coming along fine. There’s no milestones or deadlines set, so I’m just chugging along as I see fit. Also dug out the old laptop I bought a couple of years ago to try my hand at installing Arch Linux on it. The installation went fine, using my Eee PC as a manual looking up the wiki guides off the internet. The system was quick to boot up (this is an old laptop with a 1.2GHz Pentium III and 512MB of RAM, definitely not a slouch) and I was all happy until I was greeted with a Bash command prompt. Ok, so what do I do next. Heh, I had to go configure bits and pieces one by one, like getting basic Internet capability on the thing.

Arch Linux is a cool distro where you get a basic working OS to put layers upon it customised to your needs. Unfortunately for me, I don’t have the patience to go slowly read up and try to configure it bit by bit. I got my networking up, and basically stopped there as I tried to configure Xorg to give me a graphical user interface. I wasn’t quite sure what I was doing and after being greeted with a blank screen a few times I gave up.

Now I’m waiting for CrunchBang to download overnight. It’s a trimmed down version of Ubuntu with less resource intensive parts to make it functional yet snappy. I’ve tried it on my Eee before but running it off a USB key isn’t really ideal as boot times was still over a minute for it. I want to see the performance gains of putting it on the hard disk and how much juice I can squeeze from it with only 512MB of memory. It was only five or so years ago I was using Windows XP on a laptop with half the specifications of this ‘old’ laptop I have now as a daily machine. Heh, my expectations regarding performance are quite high as I like machines that you can start using within 30 seconds (which is where the Eee PC performs remarkably well at the moment as the default install of Windows is still relatively clean with no new programs installed).

It’s all a good distraction from other everyday things.