Nerd alert!

So when I'm not working, or playing with my blog, I've been puttering around with Arch Linux on my eeePC 901. It's something to do while I'm waiting for my work computer to finish rendering out whatever it's working on. Well, I've been deluding myself into thinking I could run as root all the time.

Sure, every time I open Thunar (I'm in xfce), or try to compile something, I'm warned I shouldn't be in root. However, this is a non-essential computer. I'm planning on imaging the drive once I get everything set up so I can replace it down the line if I feel like it, or in case I really do screw something up. I have XP on another drive, I can always use that in an emergency. I must say, not having to type "sudo" every other line was a breath of fresh air. Working in root was in it's own odd way like being on vacation. I'm root. I can do whatever the fuck I want.

However, VLC doesn't run in root. That's right. Why I don't know, but it was the slap in the face I needed. I need VLC, most of my videos are in uncompressed DVD iso format, which VLC is the best at playing. Within 30 minutes I had my proper user set up, everything re-configured, and yes, I now consistently forget to use sudo. Ah, the pains of responsibility.

It's running well now. I ditched Dropbox in favor of SpiderOak, as SpiderOak installed and was set up the fastest. DropBox is cool, but the reason I went to it in the first place was for cross-platform compatibility. It runs fine, but to get around nautilus (which xfce doesn't use) I would have had to become a third level voodoo priest. SpiderOak ran right out of the box, er, the AUR. I found out Puppy Linux, in itself a pretty fine distro, is also the best recovery disk you could ever want. Even supports ntfs with no tweaking.

I also found out my 901 will never, ever boot up as fast as my 701 did. 5 seconds just to get to the bios screen. Tell me about it. 33 seconds to xfce desktop, I think I can get that down to 20-25. My 701 might have done 10-15. I still need to get hibernation working, but I'll have to switch out my install partitions (move arch to where xp is and vice versa), and that's a task for another weekend. When I get a free weekend.

David