Tcepsa's Thoughts

New ThinkPad e420. Ubuntu got me through GiveCamp last weekend, but then I tried to upgrade to the official drivers and the display stopped working, and also it was having issues compiling my favorite window manager (stumpwm). So I've switched over to ArchLinux, which is a lot more hard to set up than I thought it would be, but maybe that's because I never tried to use it with a dual-monitor system for Arduino programming before.

I have managed to get StumpWM (and X.org) up and running with the proper driver. Having a heck of a time getting the Arduino stuff to work, though/

• Can't run the super-simple programming environment because it can't find the Java GTK PLAF (translation: it can't find the collection of resources that tell it how stuff should look. Hopefully I can find it later or tell it to use a different one)


• Can't compile the code because it can't find one of the libraries, even though I've installed avr-gcc and avr-libc and avr-binutils and avrdude. Not sure what's up there.


• Can't actually talk to the chip because of something wonky with the FTDI cable. It says it's on /dev/ttyUSB0, but when I try to connect PuTTY tells me it can't open the serial port. (This has worked on previous systems; no clue why it's failing today).

Three strikes and I still refuse to yield. However, it looks like I'll be continuing to boot off of the external hard-drive that I set up to use with my wife's laptop for the purposes of doing my homework assignment for this Monday...

(Linux may only be free if your time is worthless, but it's still cheaper than all of the leisure activities that you have to pay for!)