I’ve been working the Feisty Fawn now for a little over two weeks and after my initial trepidation with regards to Beagle being re-installed and Tracker not playing nice with Deskbar as well as Gimmie giving me nothing but crashes things have worked themselves out. Here’s how I’m working my desktop:

I’ve replaced the Applications | Places | System menu bar with Gimmie as I like how it aggregates favorite applications and most used documents along with data from Tomboy and Gaim, it makes for a simple and elegant way to look at applications and data beyond hierarchical layouts.  The crashes with Gimmie just after upgrading were a little baffling but fixed by rolling back from 0.2.6 to 0.2.4.

Deskbar is back and working nicely with Tracker, the catch was that Deskbar would start before Tracker and when it couldn’t see it would try to start it when Trackerd was trying to resulting in Deskbar vapor locking. The fix was simple, uncheck Trackerd in the start up applications under Sessions. Now when Deskbar starts it will fire up Trackerd and everything works just fine.

Now, for the last year or so I have been pounding the ever-loving snot out of the laptop and in the past couple of months have been beating the “I need a new machine” drum so incessantly that Management has been close to terminating my employment. All this time I thought the memory was maxed with a meager 512 MB but the other night I decided to actually pay attention to Top as I watched the laptop crawl through its paces.

The reality? Try 512/2 MB. Yeah. So after I stuck an extra stick in things actually started running better, well enough that I told Management we can push off the new laptop for at least another month.