Linux 2.4 vs 2.6

I keep bouncing around between kernel generations. My kernel mood changes with my setting and interests. Often I find myself feeling all daring and cutting-edge, so I'm running the 2.6-test series to see what's new and lend a hand testing. For my day-to-day tasks, 2.6 usually serves me well.

I put up with certain shortcomings on each side of the fence. In 2.4, I need to build alsa myself, and it's just not as interesting. Luckily, the ck patch gets me many of the good toys like O(1) and preemptible kernel.

In 2.6, alsa's built in, but drm-mach64 always takes some hand-patching, suspend doesn't work, and over the weekend, I found out ppp is broken. I don't usually need ppp, but when I'm trying to connect to my mobile phone while out of town, it's essential. The scheduler's also a bit off, so playing music isn't totally smooth.

I'd love to play with software suspend again, if I could figure out how to properly call it. It's much faster to intelligently suspend what's actually being used instead of the dumb BIOS dumping all 384MiB.

So, I'm on my way back to 2.4 for a bit for the sake of my GPRS connection, but I'm sure I'll be back in a couple more versions, if it even takes that long.