OK, so I have a low level of patience. My T42 now has Debian Etch on it. That glitch I was experiencing with slackware 12.0’s Xorg and synergy2 was annoying me too much … so out went slack 12 and in went Debian Etch. The glitch is gone. I already run Etch on my core 2 duo so nothing really new to report.

I’d tried Etch in the past on the T42 before Etch was stable and it just seemed a bit slow. Now that I have it installed again … it is still noticeably slower than Slackware or Arch … but I’ve been putting up with that for a week now. On a whim I’m actually trying the brand spanking new 2.6.23 kernel on it with the CFQ scheduler turned on to see if that makes a difference. It’s hard to tell at the moment. Every kernel after 2.6.18 that I’ve tried on my T42 ends up heating up the hard drive to an unacceptable level … and I end up reverting back to an older kernel. So far 2.6.23 seems better, but I’ve only had it for a day or so now.

Annoyances with 2.6.23 so far are that they changed the way NAT is done and the ACPI stuff has changed. I just had to recompile a few times to get it right.

After a few days of this, I’m still getting little glitches with synergy, so there’s definately something odd going on. It’d be painful if this is just a dodgy network cable. I should probably switch back to the Arch setup that seemed to be working just to confirm that everything still works OK.