I wrote my last final exam yesterday afternoon. And there was much rejoicing (yay…yay…).

I then set out to install SUSE Linux 10 on my Thinkpad. Aside from the fact that acpi still doesn’t work and the presence of some weird video artifacts, it runs much better than it did before. I installed the latest ndiswrapper driver so I could use the Windows drivers for my wireless ethernet adapter, and then I installed a little utility called wlassistant. It scans for available networks and then reconfigures the card based on what I want to connect to. It’s a great timesaver!

The video issue is weird, though. If I want to turn 2d acceleration on (which is necessary for watching videos/dvds), then I get some strange black pixels on the left of the screen when I move the mouse over to the far left. Strange, but for now I can live with it.

The one thing about the new kernel that I’ve noticed is its speed. I plug my USB thumb drive into the port, and it is recognized within a couple of seconds. The old kernel would take forever. So this is much, much nicer – more like how it should be!

KDE 3.5 is also on the laptop (and my desktop). It’s very nice. I especially like the new Kopete (instant messager program), and the whole desktop has a more professional feel to it. In some ways it duplicates things that SUSE already does, like assigning programs to interact with hotplugged hardware and media. But that’s not a huge problem.

So, I’m washing clothes today and cleaning my room (thinking of rearranging things, actually). Hopefully I can get a haircut somewhere in there, too. Tomorrow morning I’ll be leaving; Andy and Nonso will also be going at the same time so we can follow each other to Saskatoon.

Have a very merry and blessed Christmas!