Bodhi Update

GCC 4.6 and Bodhi


I found the Ubuntu 10.04 gcc-4.6 packages that we use at work, but they are all 64 bit binaries, and as of this moment, Bodhi only supports 32 bit packages.  I asked on the Bodhi support forums how I should go about installing gcc-4.6 on Bodhi since I couldn't find any PPA (personal package archive) that had 32 bit versions of these packages.  Jeff Hoogland (founder of Bodhi) was very helpful and grabbed the required libraries (taken from Oneiric I think) and put them in the testing branch of Bodhi.  Unfortunately, the libstc++-dev package relied on Oneiric's newer version of libc6.  This required rebuilding it from source.  He was nice enough to offer to do that himself, but he was not successful.  I also tried to do it, but building from source required other libraries that I couldn't seem to install and it started to feel like a 10 headed hydra.  Although rolling distributions are nice, this exposes the downside of them, because while most packages will upgrade easily, some, especially packages that developers need like compiler and standard library upgrades might not be so easily accomplished.

Enlightenment Stability


After using Bodhi for a week, I have noticed that Enlightenment (seemingly) locks up on me much more often than Gnome does under my Ubuntu 10.04 desktop at work.  Sometimes I get the F1/F2 SEGV window allowing me to reboot Enlightenment, which usually works.  Sometimes Midori seems to lock up, which seems to prevent me from doing anything in E.  I have to go to another terminal to kill Midori and everything is good again.  Also, when running Wine, everything else seems to be completely locked up, and switching between programs does not seem possible.  I don't have much experience using Wine, so I'm going to have to run it under a vanilla Ubuntu 10.04 and see if there are any differences.

Conclusions


Bodhi seems nice, and I might even come back to it (especially if it gets 64 bit support and they jump to Ubuntu 12.04).  But now I think I am going to install Xubuntu and try that out.  I've realized that I need to try out other distributions to get a better perspective on issues that I have.