This article is about my experiences with my sheevaplug device, which is the original v1 model (rev 1.3). Marvell announced its 3.0 successor at CES, January 2010. Its price and availability is still unknown.

I upgraded my Gentoo Linux box very recently. I don't do it very frequently, so this implied major changes in almost every component in my system. This includes the kernel and the vmware workstation I use. Sadly this did not go as smoothly as I wanted. The KDE desktop became very unstable and the vmware became painfully slow. I use vmware to run certain windows applications, for which I don't have feasible Linux alternatives (very few actually). Fixing KDE was very easy, I tried XFCE and fell in love with it. With vmware I struggled for days to fix this issue, so I think my findings may be useful for others.