It's more a notes for myself, but can be useful for someone.
My target was to build a lightweight X11 desktop system that will perform very basic tasks, but my extra requirements were an ability to use clipboard manager with history.
Previously, I've been using Xfce for a long time, but, when it came to impossibility of taskbar manual sorting in it, I decided to go for something much more minimal.
Though, my first attempt was to build xfce-panel from 4.6 tree, which I successfully...

A bit of scary story with happy ending. Below I describe how failing HDD may look in your syslogs, and how I "resolved" this issue.
NOTICE: when you see I/O errors anywhere, or you see something like this in syslog YOUR FIRST TASK IS TO MAKE BACKUPS AS FAST AS POSSIBLE!!! ONLY WHEN YOU ARE SURE YOUR DATA IS NOW BACKED UP AND SAFE, you may proceed with something like "fixing"!

Recently had an accident involving few bad blocks on HDD. The target was Seagate...

The short answer could have been "utilize analog and digital inputs" but my case here is quite old system having only one input.
I didn't really look into this question until I had to, today.
Some days before, when I was experiencing troubles with sound in Steam I installed pulseaudio and during search for it noticed "network" word in description. So I thought maybe I can set it up so I will send sound from second computer to first(over gigabit home LAN), which...

Few days ago I've built a new gentoo environment: my previous system became a junkyard, so I ended up rebuilding it. First thing I've tested, is how it runs HD.

To mention entire list of updates:
Old system: Linux 2.6.34.8 x86_64 [amd64], nvidia-drivers 260.19.29, libx264 0.0.20101029(portage), mplayer 1.0_rc4_p20100612(--version gives SVN-r30554-4.4.3), vlc 1.1.4.
New system: Linux 2.6.38.4 x86_64 [amd64], nvidia-drivers 260.19.36, libx264 0.0.20110223(portage), mplayer...

For almost 1+ year I've considered XFCE to be stable and well-optimized. And, well, it was. As minimalist, I have to note, there were two bugs annoyed me from time to time. The first one seems to appeared in 4.6.1 or 2, it was an issue with logging you out anyway once you pressed "Exit", even if you click "Cancel" later on.
The second one was not in xfce itself but in Thunar file manager, when copying address from bar, it copies as file:/// URL + newline, which gave me...