The Ongoing (Upgrade) Battle

For me, Linux is a labor of love. I enjoy digging in the innards of the operating system and configuring and optimizing- tinkering and making enhancements here and there, literally custom-making my system by hand to my specifications. I liken my love for Linux to that similar of sport car enthusiasts- those who personalize their machine to look, perform, and feel uniquely their own. A cookie-cutter Windows box will never do for me again- my personalization goes far beyond changing my 'wallpaper'.

Of course, such customization comes with a price- usually measured in time, and patience. This past weekend I decided it was time to refresh my configuration and make some necessary upgrades to my system. No hardware upgrades (yet)- instead, I wanted to focus on the performance and stability of the system as a whole. There have been some 'issues' that I have come to live with for far too long- so I figured this would be a good time to deal with them and maybe give myself a little refresher on the innards of a Linux system.

I started with upgrading the kernel- this was my biggest fear, and to be honest, I'm not 100% sure as of yet that I'm out of those woods yet. The good news is that the system is stable and hasn't suffered any performance hits. Yesterday I solved a upgrading nightmare involving several base-level Linux libraries that was preventing me from running the Cedega emulator which allows me to play Windows games under Linux- notably, WarCraft III. Unexpectedly, the upgrade also resulted in my system being properly configured to actually play those games again under my dual-monitor configuration! Assuming this isn't a lie- I may be looking forward to playing a game of Warcraft on one screen, while browsing the web and chatting online on the other screen.

Tonight I was able to get things booting a little cleaner- including utilizing the correct video driver upon booting. Today I was planning on recompiling X.org from source to replace my aging v.6.8 installation. Unfortunately compilation instructions are very difficult to understand as they have significantly changed the structure of the X.org source code. So that may have to wait. Unfortunately during the process of preparing for a new XServer- I recompiled my font server and am now having problems accessing my Truetype fonts- which isn't terrible, just annoying.
I seem to have managed to get access to my DVD drives back as well- though in doing so I was introduced to a new foe known as 'udev'. Fortunately I was simply able to disable this from my initialization scripts and everything has been working fine- which leads me to wonder whether I even need this, or whether there truly is some benefit to having it. Apparently Plug-and-Play plays a bit role in this- but I've gone 2 years with hand-configuring my device connectivity, notably the /etc/fstab file, so PnP isn't a big deal to me. Is there really a good reason to be using 'udev'??

Unfortunately the upgrade battle is far from over yet- I need to get my fonts back, I would like to investigate this 'udev' thing a little bit more- plus there is probably plenty of tidying up I need to do with my configuration files and installing additional kernel modules- such as kqemu which will allow me to run an emulator so that I can run Windows XP inside of Linux.

It'll all be worth it in the end- it's just sometimes a long road getting there. But if you can do it and love doing it- then why not?