OpenSolaris Once Again

Well, just for the heck of it I'm posting this from a computer running OpenSolaris - a Dell M90 laptop. It's certainly a lot more polished than the last time I tried a "community express" edition, everything pretty much worked out of the box - including wpa protected wifi with the wpi driver which wasn't working at all last time a tried (a long while back now.) Power management seems improved too, though I've not tried to suspend to disk or anything yet.
It's kind of neat to be able to tinker with Solaris this way at home. Tinkering is really all it is though I think, though maybe I'll find a real reason to run it instead of a linux distro. I do wish the pre-compiled package repository could be larger, though it's grown quite a lot over the last 6 months. I'm downloading the source for blender at the minute, hopefully it won't be _too_ much trouble to get that working.

Does anybody else get annoyed that while installing most versions of linux (that I've tried anyway, and solaris apparently!) you can't set the uid from the main installer? Even though as soon as it's up and running using any of the "add user" gui tools allows you to set the uid? I almost always wind up making a temporary user for the install, then adding my real user later on.
I have a few computers at home, and like to keep my uid common across them.

Anyways, I'm quite keen to have another tinker with OpenSolaris, see how zfs goes for snapshots and the like (though I can't really use zfs to it's full potential in a single disk laptop). Hopefully I can blender compiled and have a play with that as well, I'm curious if it runs any faster under OpenSolaris than linux.

Weekend Begins

So, it's a four day weekend for me and I'm trying to decide what to do. With the whole "economic crisis" thing, the American elections and the Melbourne cup you'd think there'd be plenty of things to catch my interest.
I however am currently just wrestling a baby who seems as eager to type on the keyboard as I am. Mental note, buy drool-proof keyboard.

I think I want to get back into doing some animation, probably using blender. It's been a while since I've done anything, and I've never used blender to create a real scene before. Done some stuff with 3ds years ago which I really enjoyed, I could see myself doing it full time. I'm not sure I could develop enough skill quickly enough to make a living out of it though.

I had two groups of trick-or-treaters come around for Halloween candy last night. That's double the number from last year, Halloween is getting bigger in Aus!
There was also a third group that went to my next door neighbors but didn't come to my house. Being judged unworthy of providing candy by trick-or-treaters is a surprisingly humiliating experience!