Monday, the first day that involves actually taking time off from work. Monday morning, I figured out why my 2.4 boot floppy had absolutely refused to work no matter how many tricks I tried or how diligently I followed the HOWTO instructions. To save time, I had been using an image from one of the newer Debian kernel packages, thinking I would build my own later. When I looked a little closer, I finally realized the mistake: The image I had been using had no IDE drivers whatsoever. Doh!

I downloaded the 2.4.14 source onto Dagobah and built up an image. Imagine my surprise when my boot floppy worked perfectly the first time using a correctly built kernel!

Then there was the matter of the network driver, the original reason that upgrading to 2.4 had become such a priority. Having read Jaeger's report, I wasn't expecting great results from any of the code that came with the kernel tree. In fact, I couldn't even find the correct driver in the make config options. I did some grepping, and discovered that there was a driver, but for some reason, the config option had been left out of the menu.

I manually inserted the CONFIG_NATSEMI=m option into the .config file, crossed my fingers, and ran make modules. After a couple of odd little dependency stumbles on my part, the natsemi.o module built without error. I installed the new module, and tried inserting it. I tried to ping Argo. It took me a minute to bring out the idiot level 0 tech support diagnostic subroutine, at which time I realized that I would have to switch the cable from the old card and plug it into the new one before any worthwhile results could be achieved.

Once everything was sanely plugged in, it took a reboot before the link light would come up, and from there... success! Dagobah and Argo, connecting at 100 megabits per second. (So the hub said, although I think Dagobah's ancient bus brought the actual throughput down to something more like 30 megabits.)

Having achieved 1 success, and feeling joyfully sluggish due partially to the hash browns I had cooked while Dagobah compiled stuff, I took a nice long nap which lasted well into the afternoon.

Then there was coding. After refreshing my brain as to what was going on, I discovered that most of the initial work for integrating Jaeger's map navigation Content Collective patch had been performed on the Phest Fest. I finished up what I would later call Phase 1, started in on Phase 2, and then decided that Phase 2 was going to involve some big changes, so I decided to polish and commit Phase 1 before proceeding further.

My evening consisted of running out to Chipotle for a big takeout burrito, watching Buffy (x2), hanging out in mass irc, doing up graphics in Gimp for the Phase 1 patch, watching / listening to live Dream Theater on DVD (besides great music for listening enjoyment, watching those guys play their instruments with such talent, precision, and passion is simply mesmerizing), and trying to figure out why Dagobah's X Server has been acting so flaky and crashing cold every now and again.

As far as Dagobah's X server is concerned, I think I've hit a brick wall, at least when it comes to using 4.1. I may try downgrading it to 3.3 tomorrow and see if that helps at all. In the days of yore, I never had any problems with the old Trident video card running on XFree 3.x, so I'm hoping an old familiar driver might like it better.

The Phase 1 patch was a success, although the bug that will be fixed in phase 2 is already proving to be quite annoying. The fact that it is in the live collective code will give me extra motivation to fix it, so I can move on to coding more fun filled new features.

But right now, I'm going to return to the bed, and rest happily in the knowledge that I can sleep as long as I please.