It isn't.

After a bunch of Debian lenny upgrades, my pointing devices (that would be laptop's trackpad and the mouse, eh) started to act weird. Single clicks are double clicks, there was no way to single click upon anything, clicking on launchers on GNOME panel will not launch anything, etc. Switching to xfce did not make any real difference, and I'm too timid to go near ion3 again. I didn't want to install another "desktop environment" either. (I'm perhaps too old to have too many operating systems and desktop environments installed; but the wm doesn't really matter since I run terminal/Emacs/web browser full-screen all the time.)

( #485186 )

So I got a ThinkPad yesterday. Nothing fancy, it is the entry-level, cheapest thing in the lineup, one that comes without an operating system. (At the shop I salivated a lot over the X41 Tablet, but that is, of course, waaay beyond what I can afford. Sigh.)

I wanted to bless the baby with some Debian GNU/Linux holy water. The only installation source I had was a Sarge DVD that came with PCQuest Magazine in December 2004. I am away from Debian for the past few years after my old desktop machine conked out and so was expecting to spend a whole night getting stuff to work. (That, after keeping myself awake through Monday night. And all Saturday night at Fireflies, with silent snoring intervals.)

To my surprise, everything has worked without hassle, so far. It booted, X worked, sound worked, and all that without much of an effort. No idea about wireless since I don't have a network. There is a usable yet somewhat oldish-looking desktop. That's okay, I am not a fan of the latest and greatest and I don't give much of a hoot about the desktop as long as things get done - as in, say, as long as Emacs works fine.

But I still haven't got over the shock of not having edited a single configuration file yet.

Big news, the world has changed a lot since 2002.