I’m back from an intensely relaxing and awesome holiday in our nation’s capital, Ottawa. I’d forgotten how close it was in proximity to Quebec – and as such, how nearly everything within the city is provided in both official languages. As a former French as a second language student in elementary and high school, it was interesting trying to pick out the differences between the two. Most phrases and slogans are completely different, while literal instructions are exactly… literal. 😉
Right now my main decisions with Gentoo will revolve around timing. Firstly, I expect to have about five or six days to get the system up and running in a mostly full capacity – not only am I completing a contract and resuming a new position at my day job, but I’m off to Las Vegas for several days. I’m still debating which laptop to bring along – either my MacBook Pro or Asus eeePC (likely with Ubuntu installed.) Since Internet costs about $15/day in most of the Strip hotels, and tethering my Rogers-homed BlackBerry would be cost-prohibitive, I doubt I’ll be using the machine that often. Still, I’d be interested in opinions on how to make the “away from home” experience less like cheating. I’m already pretty capable of using SSH, but something like X window forwarding is something I don’t have any background with.
Another important consideration is the main desktop environment. I’ve had experience with recent versions of GNOME, but none of the newer KDE or XFCE packages – so it will likely be one of these. XFCE has the distinct advantage of being lightweight and looking nice, but KDE seems to be more widely supported. More than likely I’ll end up compiling and installing both environments for the experience, and so I can switch back and forth as desired.
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