So my RAM actually came in today. Next day air rules like all get-out. I quickly proceeded to void the warranty on bron-yr-aur and got the ram in. Spent a bit more time getting the suspend-to-disk partition working, but it wasn't all that hard.
I know that adding RAM to a machine is the best way to make it faster, but it still surprises me. So now I think my laptop probably might be faster overall than serendipity. Which is kinda sad, since I am neglecting that machine so much these days. And I used to love it so.
More 6.4 work.
I decided it'd be nice to have a nice hard drive in my laptop, but I didn't see any IBM laptop drives with 2 MB of cache, which is disappointing, since the IBM drive in serendipity is quite nice.
So it seems that the big memory "black hole" in the updater / installer only hapens on 2.3 kernels. Also, we can't do DNS lookups in the installer since there are some bin incompat changes (since the dns libs are dynamically loaded, even if you compile as static), so we are going to have to get around this some how for the Akamaized installer.