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So, holiday is nearly over. I'm taking Monday as well in the hopes that I can fix my sleep pattern, as well as to compensate for the day I came in (Tuesday, when nothing useful was done for various reasons). It's still too soon: I want more downtime, but the work can't wait.

So it goes, and such seems to be life right now. I'm looking forward to this project being over, even if I've been working on it so long now I suspect I'll have trouble switching to something else. Diversity is good, and all that.

Still, content... I'm sure I meant to write something mildly interesting when I opened this window. I suppose I'm doing some tidying up... Ah, yes. Slackware 13.0 is out. I use Slackware as my OS of choice: for the most part it serves me well, but a failed graphics driver update caused some trouble for me a while back. Vertical tearing, instability, the usual. Since Slack 13 is out, I figured, why not? A reinstall solves the problem, and gets me a KDE 4.2.4 desktop, which is probably going to be interesting, as I've never used KDE4 before. So, download ISO, burn, install.

The installation process was pretty painless, since I had my wits about me and gave it the correct information. The installer picked up the RAID volume holding my home directory without any trouble, etc, etc. It was all going so well...

Yes. ATI. Red-headed step-child of the Linux graphics drivers market. The company whose drivers cause untold woes for Linux users everywhere. I'm sure they're quite lovely under Windows, but next time round I'm just buying a damned nVidia card. It seems the latest release of the driver doesn't run under the configuration used in Slackware 13.0, at all: it crashes the window manager reliably, and locks the system about one time in three at the moment. Hence, it is currently uninstalled, and I'm back to one monitor and two or three frames a second OpenGL performance until ATI get their finger out and realise they need to fix things. There will be a bug report later, when I am calm and awake and so on.

Driver support. It's always the damned driver support. I wish I knew why so many companies get it wrong. Are we not paying customers, or something?

EDIT: And now the gas-lift in my chair has given up the ghost. I'm going to bed.

The Glass: empty