First Day of Work

I discovered that the drive in takes far less time than I thought. So much for arriving fashionably late. They have me in as a “seasonal” (seasoned?) worker for the first couple of days until the head honchos arrive to finalize things. Anyway….


They set me up at an L shaped desk in the development area and got me a computer. It wasn’t a powerbook as I had hoped, but $newboss are waiting until the new 15″ powerbooks come out to upgrade everyone (or something like that). Anyway, I have a whopping Celeron 700 with 128 megs of ram. It was installed with Redhat 7.2 and Windows ME (someone still uses WinME?). I decided to start fresh and install something a bit more modern, and the Suse 8.2 Live Eval was very sexy (framebuffer console), so I tried that. Download a 30 meg install ISO and…. bleah, craps out. The latest 8.2 isn’t available anyway, only the previous 8.1. Oh well, try the latest Redhat and see. Download a 9meg ISO image and try that. Aside from it not going into graphical mode on install, and not coming with a built in list of download sites (ftp.telus.net is very nice and fast BTW), the install went fine. Even with some lame built in video I’m still up at 1280×1024 with a nice sexy desktop.


I use gentoo at home because I like to tinker, but I’m realizing more and more that in terms of getting work done I want something that “just works”. And much as I hate to admit it, and much as I’m sure that raskal will taunt me for it, Redhat is nice and works.

The first couple of days are going to be (and have been) learning Mason and getting my head around the other programmers coding style. That and convincing them to get me a bit more RAM.


They are also all mac-heads here, nary a PC in sight (I’ve seen two other than my own so far). Everyone is either using iMacs or G3 Powerbooks. Being that they are all mac-heads as well means that there aren’t more than a handful of > two button mice and I have yet to see a ergonomic keyboard (though I’ve requested one). Wonder if they all drive VWs as well….

Posted by

Category: Work

5 Comments on “First Day of Work”

  1. If you are looking for an excellent download site for RedHat/SuSE/Mandrake plus the kernel and samba etc. Check out the ftp site at mirror.mcs.anl.gov I regularly get 350 to 400 KBps and right now I am grabbing the RH9 iso #1 at 460KBps via shaw cable.

  2. I’ve been using Redhat 8 on my file and print server at home here for around 6 months. I haven’t run into the dependency problems but I do have 2 small annoyances with RedHat.
    First, is that they have no mp3 support builtin. You have to go and get the mp3 encoder/decoder and install it yourself. This is just simply a hassle that the other distros don’t put you through. Second is that their default kernel doesn’t provide NTFS support so I can’t access some of my partitions with out recompiling the kernel. Apparently it is licensing concerns that have led RedHat to remove the mp3 and NTFS support.
    Like I said small annoyances that are easy to correct but are annoyances none the less.