Setting Up Lucid Lynx

It's been a long time since I've posted anything, it seems I just don't have the ego required to maintain a regular blog. Oh well, I'll continue posting things that I find interesting at my own pace. Like a lot of my posts are probably going to be, today's post will mostly be for my own benefit. I want to write down all that I did to set up my new install of Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx). That way if things go wrong I won't have to depend on my terrible memory to set it all back up again.

Functional Programming Languages, Code Readability and Multi-core Processors

Two of my computer science courses this year have to do with learning functional programming languages. The other day (actually about a month ago, this post has taken me a while to write as I've got plenty of school work to do and that's taken precedence) one of my professors mentioned that first year computer science courses were now teaching Scheme instead of the Java I learned at the time. More and more I come across mentions of Functional Programming Languages (FPLs) and how they're the next big thing. But why? And what makes them so different from the Java and C++ and other imperative programming languages (IPLs) that I've learned?

Custom Kernel Update

So I've started the research phase of creating my own kernel. Going to do this nice and slow and try and get it right, the first time around. My goals are:

• Built in hardware support (eliminates need for initramfs during boot)
• Optimise for my hardware (and cut out everything else)

HPET problems

I have a Compaq Presario F700 laptop. I love it. The only issue I've run into with it, that's hard ware related, is a weird tendency for the boot process to stutter while under battery power. When not plugged in and booting there are several points where it freezes and I have to press a key to get it to continue booting. This happened both while running Ubuntu 8.10 and 9.04 and Arch, each with the latest kernel at the time. So I'm pretty sure it isn't software related.