Marc's Blog: linux - Sometimes, I'm wondering WTF linux is going

In the old days, we had ifconfig, dhclient, APM, and things were simple.

First, came ACPI. This is not linux's fault, but boy did it make something simple as putting your laptop to sleep a real pain in the ass sometimes. I'm not sure how many hours I spent learning the acpi system, and getting it work on my thinkpad back before distros made it mostly work in most cases (but seriously APM, just worked, and ACPI was a pain in the ass)
I recently upgraded to a new laptop (thinkpad Z61p), on which I figured I'd put a brand new ubuntu feisty (now upgraded to gutsy), and I'm still running a recent kernel.org kernel instead of the vendor provided one. Maybe I'm getting punished for refusing to run gnome/KDE (I really tried, but gnome still sucks, and KDE still didn't quite do it, so I'm back to enlightenment), but simple things don't work:

For some obscure reason, Fn+F4 calls acpi_fakekey, which then does nothing (apparently, it might still be talking to the wrong /dev/input/event0), instead of just simply calling the sleep script. Why so complicated? I mean this crap:
```
cat /etc/acpi/sleepbtn.sh
#!/bin/bash
. /usr/share/acpi-support/key-constants
#acpi_fakekey $KEY_SLEEP
/etc/acpi/sleep.sh
```
Seriously, WTF is acpi_fakekey, and why is there no documentation for it?
tpb (thinkpad display) just worked, but was replaced by some complicated hotkey-setup package that does autodetection and still did the wrong thing for my laptop, and still doesn't do anything useful on my laptop with enlightenment (I had to hand re-install tpb, which ubuntu nicely made incompatible with hotkey-setup and ubuntu-desktop)
pulseaudio just did not work due to a misbuild (/tmp/.esd vs /tmp/esd-uid), yielding broken sound laptop-wide
but the best one is by far avahi, dhcdbd, and other network autoconfiguration stuff. Long are the days of simple ifplugd autoconfigure and /etc/network/interfaces is simply empty. Keeping up with all this stuff is starting to be really a mess, especially as documentation there is pretty light too.

I suppose that by the time all this is working, I'll still end up with a better config than what I can do on windows, but damn, it seems like it's getting unnecessarly hard...

1996/11/18-21:	Linux Pavillion Comdex Fall 1996 (photos only). I've been going since then to help at the linux pavillion.
1997/11/18-21:	Linux Pavillion Comdex Fall 1997 (photos only)
1998/05/28-30:	Linuxexpo 1998 (photos only)
1998/11/16-20:	Linux Pavillion Comdex Fall 1998 (full report)
1998/11/11:	Silicon Valley Tea Party (report with pictures)
1999/02/15:	Windows Refund Day (report with pictures)
1999/03/20:	SVLUG KTEH night (photos only)
1999/03/01-04:	LinuxWorld Expo Winter 99 (complete report with many pictures)
1999/03/31:	Mozilla Party one year anniversary (photos only)
1999/05/18-22:	Linuxexpo 1999 (complete report with many pictures)
1999/06/07:	June 99 Balug meeting with Linus
1999/08/09-12:	LinuxWorld Expo Summer 99 (complete report with many pictures)
1999/11/15-19:	Linux Business Show at Comdex Fall 1999 (full report with pictures)
2000/08/14-17:	LinuxWorld Expo Summer 2000 (complete report with many pictures)
2001/01/17-20:	Linux.conf.au/LCA 2001 (complete report with pictures)
2001/07/25-28:	OLS 2001 (photos only)
2001/08/25:	Linux 10th Anniversary (report with pictures)
2001/09/27-30:	LinuxWorld Expo Summer 2001 report with pictures)
2001/11/05-10:	ALS 2001 (photos only)
2002/06/26-29:	OLS 2002 (photos only)
2003/01/20-25:	LCA 2003 (photos only)
2003/07/23-26:	OLS 2003 (photos only)
2004/01/12-17:	LCA 2004 (photos only)
2004/07/21-24:	OLS 2004 (photos only)
2005/04/18-23:	LCA 2005 (photos only)
2006/01/24-28:	LCA 2006 (photos only)
2007/01/17-21:	LCA 2007 (photos only)

Marc's Public Blog - Linux Hacking