Wednesday, July 8, 2009

X is Dead

Just a quick update:

After being away from my systems for a week because I'm in the process of moving, I set up my workstations in the new house, along with two new toys. I had the opportunity to throw Windows 7 up on a VM, but haven't had much time to play with it. So far, I'm more impressed with Win7 than I was with Vista, in terms of usability, notification handling, and its more enterprise-friendly configuration options.

For the past week I've been working on getting my system back up and running- since upgrading to kernel 2.6.29 and a newer intel driver, X no longer starts correctly- basically everything I've experienced is documented in this gentoo bug report. I now have an intimate understanding on configuring Xorg-server, using masked packages, and installing X11-drivers on gentoo. I'm still struggling to get X to work properly, but so far am still having issues with it starting then freezing. As of right now, I have recompiled x11-drivers as well as followed the steps in this Gentoo how-to.

At work, I've finally been granted some Active Directory privileges, so I'm trying to take a crash course in AD group policy. I have learned basic AD administration, such as user and computer creation, managing organizational units, and user privileges. Right now, I'm working on creating group policy to implement auto logoff and something along the lines of Windows SteadyState. I'm also in the process of configuring Mac OSX to authenticate users using the University's LDAP tree. I've also had the opportunity to toy a bit with SmartDeploy, but have yet to actually start deploying workstations with it.

That's it for now, hopefully I'll be able to post a bit more frequently now that my move is almost complete.

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