The best laid plans, No. 73.

I was going to spend some time tonight writing a big warm and fuzzy blog post about looking forward to Fedora 10 and all the good times ahead. That would have been awesome.

Instead, it’s my sad duty to report that my spiffy little Dell XPS M1330 took its own life tonight somewhere between shutting down iptables and powering off. The screen turned white for no apparent reason, to which I thought, “Hm, that’s odd, haven’t seen that before.” Then my eyesight seemed to blur a bit and I looked at my glasses to see if they were smudged, and realized they were fine — it was actually “the magic smoke” escaping from the back of the laptop.

It did manage to power off, but the powering back on? Not so much.

However, the good folks at Dell were very responsive even at half-past midnight on Friday night. They will have a new laptop here in 7-21 days, and until then I suppose I can get along with my crappy home office desktop, IMAP, and a couple well-placed shell accounts. And I feel pretty confident in saying it had nothing to do with Fedora 10, which has been increasingly spectacular since after the Beta.

Of course the Fedora Infrastructure team burst into action when they heard my sob story, and made sure I’d have something faster than the old hunk of junk desktop in my office on which to build the Fedora 10 release notes zero-day updates. Thanks guys, you rock hardest.

I guess I’ll have a little more relaxing Thanksgiving than I’d planned.

I think the worst part is that I’ve spent 9 months building up a nice, healthy covering of beautiful, colorful free software boosterism on my laptop’s lid, and I’ll have to kiss it all goodbye. Maybe the folks at Dell will get a kick out of it and give the lid a good home on one of their machines… Or maybe they’ll make a “mistake” and send the lid on a unit going to Redmond. ?