I FIXED EVERYTHING YESS

I forgot to blog yesterday! So this is for two days. Also, I'm back in Seattle as of about 5 hours ago.

I've spent the last two days mostly working with Debian, although two days ago, I was out for most of the day listening to music at the music festival that Mom was attending in Port Townsend.

So here's what I've done: I made Debian work! I realized that we actually did have an Ethernet cable in the house, so I plugged it in, because Ethernet cables are more likely to Just Work(tm), and sure enough, I got internet, which was enough to download stuff.

However, realizing this, I ended up reinstalling with the Ethernet cable to do it The Right Way. I was able to shave off a ton of time by not randomizing my crypto disks again, because that'd already been done on the previous pass, and I saved a ton of time by not downloading GNOME. Of course I still wanted GNOME so I downloaded gdisk and used it to find the exact boundaries of the partitions I'd created in my VM. Then I was able to use losetup to create a loopback device for each partition, and finally, mount those loopbacks as filesystems. Then I just ran "cp /media/virtual/var/cache/apt/archive/*.deb /var/cache/apt/archive/", and presto! Much more populated APT cache. Then I installed GNOME. Ad then zsh, awesome, etc.

I thought that NetworkManager would solve my wireless problems, but it didn't. The solution turned out to be simple, though: upgrade from WEP to WPA2 (although this did require a router firmware upgrade). I installed a better driver for Apple's trackpad, which basically makes everything but right-click Just Work(tm). The only thing that isn't working is 3D acceleration, for which the solution is to install firmware-linux-nonfree. Unfortunately, installing that hung my initial ramdisk while waiting for /dev to populate, so I had to chroot and get rid of it, then overwrite the dirty ramdisk image. I spent a long time working in it before I found that information, and even tinkered with xorg.conf.d (I had to do this for the trackpad driver too, IIRC), before finally finding the solution, which then hung my system. At that point I realized that even though GNOME Shell kicked me into fallback mode with the mesa driver, the gears GLX demo still worked (so clearly it wasn't completely broken), and I wasn't going to be using GNOME Shell anyway. Then I went and configured Awesome GNOME.

There are big changes coming to my server, and there's been a lot of downtime recently, but I'll blog about that tomorrow.

Back to reading Plan 9 papers.