Screw Lenny

Now I remember.

I installed Lenny (Debian 5.0) before it was stable. I was looking for a Linux version that didn't have problems with VNC4. They all had problems. It was a nightmare.

A lot of people gave up in favor of the VNC 3.x clones (TightVNC, UltraVNC), which are junk (they are CPU and bandwidth hogs and have a serious built-in Denial of Service vulnerability that has been around for years).

I read somewhere that Lenny didn't have the VNC4 problem, so I did some reality testing. VNC4 actually worked, but it was broken in a different way. It's hard to describe, really. The X windows decorations would pulse in size and cycle through different styles. It was totally unusable.

Now, a year after that, they still haven't fixed it, although it's not as bad. It's worse on Gnome than it is on Xfce but I don't consider it usable.

And I hate KDE so I didn't even test that. I will not use KDE.

Lenny runs fine otherwise, but EXP4 will be a headless system (no keyboard, monitor, or mouse), so a decent, stable remote session tool is absolutely required.

That settles that.

The new kernel on BOT House is running well. For some reason I lost some of my hardware sensors (I have CPU and HD temp, but the fans and mobo temp are gone) but I'm getting file transfer throughput of 11MBps instead of the usual 1-3MBps (maximum on a 100 megabits/sec - mBps - link is 12.5 megabytes/sec - MBps).

And that alone is enough to toss Lenny, since Lenny uses the same kernel version (within a few minor revs) BOT House used to run until yesterday.

Everything's back on track but it looks like EXP4 won't be online until this coming weekend.