I dropped back from Crux Linux on the Celeron yesterday, and reinstalled Arch Linux. The abbreviated reason for that is that I wanted to make sure I had wireless access and proper SCIM behavior, as I will need this machine at work in the next few days.
The long answer is that, no matter how I attacked my weird font problem with SCIM, it wasn’t playing along. I’ll have to pause for a little while and rethink things, but I have a feeling that a new reinstallation with the parts built in a different order might help me solve it.
I also wanted to move that machine to wireless, and Arch is working better for me with a wireless connection than Crux was. For some reason, I can compile the proper modules for my ancient Linksys WPC11 wireless card, but Crux couldn’t attach a name to it. That’s probably something I did wrong, but didn’t figure out (okay, I admit it: I didn’t try very hard to solve it).
Either way, I have more experience with Arch and can get those things going a lot quicker, and the only real inconvenience is a start time that’s 10-12 seconds longer. I know, I know. I’m such a speed freak. I should be thankful my 550Mhz Celeron starts in 28 seconds. I know Gnome users who don’t have a machine that starts that fast. In fact, my Ubuntu system is one. 
In similar news of my personal failures, Kazehakase and WebKit are still not playing along for me, in spite of WebKit’s sudden friendliness and willingness to compile. Last time I tried it, the problem had reversed itself, and Kazehakase was suddenly crashing when compiling. I noticed the bump to 0.5.4 recently, so that might be involved. Regardless, when I did get it to compile, Kazehakase couldn’t sense webkit-svn, even when I tried to hard-wire the variables in the configuration files to allow for it.
But I’m such a rank amateur when it comes to that stuff, all I probably did was put a few hash marks in the wrong places, and confuse it completely. Oh well. You never know what you might learn from something like that.
And that’s my philosophy — keep breaking it until you’ve learned something.
try webkitgtk-nightly (build 31667); it installs in a different directory and kazehakase, somehow, “sees” it