2008-09-16-1008Z


Lately I've been getting pissed off even more than usual at Windows, so decided to upgrade the Debian system on the old Compaq laptop I use at home. Why sit there for minutes staring at the disk activity light going bonkers, the system slowed to a crawl, while all the Task Manager can tell you is that the System Idle Task is the only thing running, based on CPU activity and nothing else? Fuck it. But I ran into some problems.

First, for various reasons I want to keep my Cygwin home directory. For that, I had to put the options uid=1000,gid=1000 in /etc/fstab. But then, ssh wouldn't use my keys for authentication because all perms showed up as 644. So I had to append the option umask=0077. So far no problems with that.

Then, after the first time that it worked, Xwindows failed to start. Various misleading error messages occurred, but since it started fine if I changed my home directory to /home/jcomeau rather than /mnt/c/cygwin/home/jcomeau, I figured it had something to do with the funky FAT filesystem due to the xauth errors regarding the .Xauthority file (and the fact that it showed up as .Xauthority-c in my home directory), and the same with the .serverauth* files after fixing the previous problem by setting the environment variable XAUTHORITY=/home/jcomeau/.Xauthority in my .bashrc file. So now I start X so:

HOME=/home/jcomeau startx

All better on the home front. Computer boots in seconds, and no disk activity without me knowing what it is. Much less cursing.

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