I don’t know that I’ve announced this anywhere outside of #gentoo-kernel, but I’m maintaining systemtap in my development overlay preperatory to inclusion in portage. People might want to check it out, if they’re interested in systemtap. They’re weekly snapshots, and they’re pretty good, in my experience.
Well, I’ve finally done it. I bought a RAM upgrade for my laptop to 2GB. It arrived on Friday, and I rushed to put it in and reboot only to find… nothing. Well, not nothing, of course, but no significant difference. Frankly, I was disappointed. The 512 -> 1024 upgrade was huge, in terms of how the desktop felt to use on a daily basis. 1GB to 2 GB, not so much. The only noticable difference was that the dark-green bar (mapped memory) was half has high on my system monitor, and the light green bar (disk cache) was twice as big.
As I used it over the last two days, something has slowly dawned on me: memory isn’t a problem at all now. Less disk access, as more files are kept in memory. Better NFS performance, for the same reason. Emerge in the background doesn’t cause slowdowns anymore when untarring, because it’s not evicting the files I’m actually using. The kicker was, I just realized I’d left OpenOffice open on another tab. OpenOffice. Sitting open. In the background. And I hadn’t noticed! So, I guess the upgrade does make a difference. Well see how much next time I’m emerging something big like firefox…
Unfortunately, Linux wireless is not the best. And, something about the NFS support in Linux makes it not deal well with network failure. I swear that the last 5 hangs/crashes* I’ve had in linux were due to NFS over wireless. I’m a biscuit away from switching to CIFS…
Thank the gods for journaled filesystems.
*Okay, the last 5 not counting the proprietary kernel module we use at work that panics constantly…
I’m now the maintainer of usermode-sources. This makes the fourth herd I’ve joined (amd64, gnome, printing and now kernel). It’s all part of my master plan to own the entire stack from hardware to GUI. 
tsunam: Welcome to the (extremely small) brotherhood of AT Op Leads.
About damn time!
Now I feel all superior about not breaking down and buying the “special edition” star wars movies.