So, my new IBM T42 is working out very nicely. All the features (bluetooth, wireless, graphics) worked out of the box, and without a hitch. Battery life seems to be good, too.
In other news, I'm getting sick and tired of all the deprecation that seems to be happening in Gentoo GNU/Linux. Deprecation is quite common in the open community, especially in the Linux kernel, and tons of software packages. However, when Gentoo deprecates a feature, it becomes increasingly difficult to reproduce the previous functionality with the new recommended methods. Two examples, the -U (upgradeonly) flag is now deprecated, and requires the user to create files in /etc/portage for each package they don't want downgraded. This is annoying, when there might be a couple dozen of those packages present on a system. Another example is the emerging by path feature. Apparently, you need to make a PORTDIR_OVERLAY and maintain your own portage tree (or something like that) to retain this functionality. This is drastically different from other examples of deprecation in open source, like the replacement of devfs with udev, which was an easy switch.
Ok, I'm done ranting now. Maybe I'm just annoyed because I can't seem to get some old (important) data off my old laptop, which I need for work tomorrow.
