New laptop, finally!

Today I finally got my new laptop, a siny and happy MacBook Pro 2.33GHz Core2Duo. I was quite pleased with my iBook (exception being the sucky wireless support under Linux, main reason why I usually used it with Mac OS X), and this ew Intel incarnation of Apple’s hardware seems to have the same touches that made me like the previous laptop (that’s now being usd by my mother): the backlight on the keyboard is good to have while I’m writing in my chambre, the non-glossy display still has an incredible color and does not reflect so much, the design is sleek and sober, compared for instance to HP’s Pavillions, and it’s quite fast.

Gentoo will come on this box soon; for a couple of days I’ll leave Mac on this and then I’ll start working on that. I was thinking of building the system from the other box, but the ROOT= support is quite limited and this CPU has SSE3 while the other hasn’t, so I can’t really use a pure chroot.

Now, on more Gentooish notes, I started to port nss-mdns to FreeBSD, as the current implementation only works on GLIBC; the reason of this is just that I needed a way to identify the two laptops that have dynamic IP addresses depending if I connect them via cable or via wireless, so I decided to give an inner try to Avahi and ZeroConf as a whole.. the result is pretty neat, although I had to disable the return-on-not-found for the minimal nss module or it was failing to resolve everything when searching for local domain. Maybe I have to play with it a little more to get it to work as I need.

Instead, on the ALSA front, after yesterday’s release of ALSA 1.0.14_rc1, I’m probably going to work a little bit more on the ability to disable on request the plugins of alsa-lib; especially considering the embedded devices, often you don’t need most of them; even for simpler user systems you probably need just an handful of them.. I think this would be simple to solve with use groups, but in the mean time I’m probably just going to ask for a new USE_EXPANDed variable, to be converted in the future (and poke Zac again about getting something usable for that).

I know there are still glitches with that (for instance there’s a too low dependency for alsa-lib in alsa-utils), but considering I always say to leave as much as the same verison for everything there, it’s hardly a priority to me.

Okay, let’s see what else I can do with this boxy before going to sleep 🙂 And for who’s wondering, considering the other laptop was named Voyager, this one is, obviously, Intrepid 🙂