嘘とワンダーランド

Today, I’m an anti-buddhist. You know, like an anti-christ, i.e. someone who perverts all christian ideals? Specifically, I have perverted the 4 Noble Truths and broken all 8 principles of the Noble Eightfold Path. How so?

The 4 Noble Truths teach us about suffering and how to overcome it. In short, suffering is caused by our attachement to the world. By wanting things, we suffer because it is fundamentally impossible to fulfill this desire. I have perverted this, for I craved for a bigger desktop. I have assembled 3 monitors where I previously had only 1. I suffered for this, so much is true. (I have suffered a lot. Linux is my own personal hell. I am repenting for very grave sins, it seems.) But, I have overcome this suffering without letting go. I have achieved my goal – I have 3 working monitors. But to do this, I had to break everything on the Noble Eightfold Path.

All my sins are:

1. Right View – I have forsaken the path of the Console and The One True Display. I have merged 2 monitors into one (via TwinView) and added a third one to watch blasphemous movies while working.
   
2. Right Intention – I wanted more screen and more windows. I did not want a simpler, easier display, but visual bloat instead.
   
3. Right Speech – I have cursed, of course, but I have also lied. I still lie, for every single application I start is a lie – a lie to my xorg-server. It still thinks the monstrosity, the 2-monitors-into-1 is just one screen, but I run a hacked libXinerama instead that tells every application the truth. The server doesn’t know this, it is completely unaware. Only my conspiring GUIs do. [0]
   
4. Right Action – I have broken the holiest of rules – I have downgraded. (I now run X.org 1.6 instead of 1.7.3.)
   
5. Right Livelihood – I am a slave in the worst of professions – I maintain my own libraries, ignoring all advice from my package manager.
   
6. Right Energy – I have spent a whole 3 days setting this up. Do I need to say more?
   
7. Right Mindfulness – I have forgotten the pain of changing my xorg.conf and ignored the past. I will forget today’s lesson and, at some point, patch again.
8. Right Concentration – I have drunken caffeine a-plenty and spent 2 days fiddling with emacs. I was never focused on my ultimate goal, only ever jumping from idea to idea.

Yet, everything works. (Well, except the actual window manager, but this requires patches that are trivial in comparison.) This whole endeavour must have gotten me massive amounts of negative karma.

[0] http://ktown.kde.org/~seli/fakexinerama/ pure awesome-sauce (my modified version: Xinerama.c)