After giving up and generally being annoyed with gentoo, it was time to look for another distro.

I was told archlinux was one of the best upcoming ones. The more I read about it, the more I liked it. It sounded very similar to slackware (a distro I used to use as my main OS from 2000 to 2002 - before gentoo).

The install was very easy, I'd say it was basically the same as slackware was all those years ago. No pointless graphical rubbish, and it installed a nice base system to build everything else onto.
Installing & configuring xorg was very simple due to the package manager (pacman) & the fact the packages are in a compressed .tar.gz archive (like slackware). I installed openbox to get a higher resolution (640x480 looks horrid on a 1080i 24" screen) & continue the installation of gtk, gnome, xfce, fonts etc.

I am really pleased so far with archlinux. It boots 2xfaster than gentoo and the performance is a lot better than ubuntu. So far it seems like it's got the speed of gentoo and the ease of ubuntu. Everything is working as it should and there are no hours of compiling needed when installing stuff.

Here's my openbox desktop so far.

The memory usage is very low and the desktop is nice and responsive.

I decided to change distro's as ubuntu seemed pretty slow and a bit buggy with some kernel problems etc. I decided gentoo might be a good idea as I had ran it as my main OS from 2002 to 2005 without many problems. The speed was astonishing due to compiling everything with custom use flags etc.

So, the idea was to install gentoo (stage3) as it should be nice and fast.
After a night of compiling the kernel, xorg & gnome it was ready to go.

Everything was going well until I decided to install compiz. Then things started going slow and seemed buggy (window decorations were completely messed up). After hours of trying different ways of implementing compiz & getting random results, I decided to give up as who needs all those fancy effects?.

After thinking about it, I thought why not drop gnome as a desktop and go for something a bit more lightweight and faster. So I installed blackbox, fluxbox & openbox. All was going well, I had openbox running with conky and pypanel.
Then I thought I'd just try a OpenGL app and it segfaults.
I thought ok, I'll see if DRI is working (it was previously) & check if the system is using the right OpenGL & drivers.

~ $ glxinfo | grep direct
direct rendering: No
~ $ glxinfo | grep renderer
OpenGL renderer string: Radeon X1900 Series
$ fglrxinfo
display: :0.0 screen: 0
OpenGL vendor string: ATI Technologies Inc.
OpenGL renderer string: Radeon X1900 Series
OpenGL version string: 1.4 (2.1.7412 Release)

Arg!! ok, lets try re-installing the drivers... No difference .. lets try checking the xorg log file ...

# cat /var/log/Xorg.0.log | grep fglrx | grep -i DRI
(II) Loading /usr/lib64/xorg/modules/drivers//fglrx_drv.so
(II) fglrx(0): board/chipset is supported by this driver (original ATI board)
(II) fglrx(0): 1. 500/594MHz @ 0Hz [enable load balancing, overdrive]
(II) fglrx(0): 2. 398/594MHz @ 0Hz [enable load balancing, overdrive]
(II) fglrx(0): 3. 621/720MHz @ 0Hz [overclocked, enable load balancing, overdrive]
(==) fglrx(0): NoDRI = NO
(==) fglrx(0): OpenGL ClientDriverName: "fglrx_dri.so"
(II) fglrx(0): driver needs X.org 7.1.x.y with x.y >= 0.0
(II) fglrx(0): doing DRIScreenInit
(II) fglrx(0): [drm] created "fglrx" driver at busid "PCI:5:0:0"
(II) fglrx(0): DRIScreenInit done
(II) fglrx(0): Kernel Module version matches driver.
(II) fglrx(0): DRI initialization successfull!
(II) fglrx(0): [DRI] installation complete
(II) AIGLX: Loaded and initialized /usr/lib64/dri/fglrx_dri.so

No problems there .... hmm

After another few hours of messing around I was unable to get DRI back.
So far - Compiz doesn't work properly & now the drivers have lost DRI.

Moving on to ALSA (thought I will come back to it later - clear mind sometimes helps) well ALSA was as easy as it always has been, ran up the config, un-muted the mixer and wow it worked. So lets get some MP3's from the NTFS partition - try to mount and it says "device already mounted or busy" hmm.. check mtab and it isn't mounted at all. Ok lets try the VFAT partition (on the same drive) ... I get exactly the same.

So now, compiz is buggy, DRI is not working anymore & neither FAT32 or NTFS drives are mounting due to something blocking access to the drive.

Time to give up tbh, compiling has taken hours, configuring has taken almost as much time & fault finding has taken even longer!!!.

Banshee 1.0 was released yesterday.
It's an amazing media player and has some really cool features including albumart, album browsing & last.fm.

I have tried most of the other mediaplayers (except amaroK as I'm on Gnome I don't want to install loads of KDE-Libs).
Out of the programs I've tried for playing and organising my MP3's, it is about the best.

To install the latest version of banshee on Ubuntu 8.04 all you need to do is edit the sources.list and add the banshee source, update the sources and the install "banshee-1"

sudo nano -w /etc/apt/sources.list
add:
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/banshee-team/ubuntu hardy main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/banshee-team/ubuntu hardy main
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install banshee-1

I decided to re-install linux again just to clean the filesystem up and tryout some new stuff.
I have made another basic conkyrc config as I cannot find my old one I wrote. The basic setup is ubuntu 8.04 64bit running gnome with compiz effects, the launcher bar is avant-window-manager & the conkyrc is my own with lm-sensors.

You can download my conky config here.
You just need to have conky installed with dependencies and lm-sensors setup with the modules (coretemp for cpu).

The setup is a bit boring and blank atm as I've only just installed the base system.