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Bits & Bytes — Gentoo Linux |
| Fri 15 Jul '05 | Upgraded to VMWare Workstation 5.0, which promptly resulted in a kernel panic, because it couldn't find the virtual SCSI disk. After some trolling in the Gentoo forums, I enabled MPT Fusion support in the kernel, and everything started working again. For others who are wrestling with Gentoo as a guest OS under VMWare Workstation 5.0, here is a working .config file for a 2.6.12-gentoo-r4 kernel. The only thing it doesn't currently include is USB support, but that's only because I don't need it. |
| Fri, 15 Apr '05 | Happy Tax Day! Updated |
| Thu, 16 Sep '04 | Command of the day:
Reports how long it took to build (emerge) <package>. |
| Tue, 14 Sep '04 | Major updates to KDE, X.Org, and the release of Reiser4
means it's time to rebuild the system again. It is highly subjective
and utterly unverifiable, but the Reiser4 file system really does feel
zippier, particularly under VMWare. Command of the day:
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| Thu, 17 Jun '04 | Time for a project: the last release of
karamba before it morphed into
superkaramba is broken and won't respect
the alignment of text labels if the DEFAULTFONT
setting is used. Since I'm not interested in the Python or XMMS stuff,
I've forked the karamba-0.17 source
and started work on humblekaramba,
which is a return to the 'lean & mean' mindset.
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| Thu, 10 Jun '04 | An unexpected power hit during an
emerge -uD world did enough damage
to my VMWare Gentoo image that I decided to rebuild it. This also gave
me the opportunity to try Gnome 2.6 instead of KDE, as well as some alternate
window managers (fvwm and
waimea). After the obligatory
overnight download/compile/link session and several days of testing, I promptly
wiped the image and reinstalled KDE 3.2.3 for
one simple reason: I'm an eye-candy junky. If I'm going to spend
hours staring at something, it had better be visually pleasing. I will
happily spend extra CPU clock cycles for non-rectangular widgets, shadows, and
anti-aliasing if it makes the screen easier to look at. On a dual 1Ghz
Pentium III system with a gigabyte of physical RAM, I can spare some clock cycles
for self-indulgence. |
| Mon, 24 May '04 | Rather than trying to remove XFree86, I opted to rebuild the
entire system from scratch and use X.Org instead. This worked flawlessly,
except for some really ugly font problems that were quickly solved by uninstalling
TrueType® fonts. To be honest, I haven't
noticed much of a difference between the two X Window servers, but it did give
me the opportunity to get rid of almost a gigabyte of file system cruft and
tweak my global compiler settings (again). |
| Mon, 3 May '04 | I'm actually getting better at the insane Linux upgrade cycle:
KDE 3.2.2 is now running on top of a 2.6.5 kernel, and I got the kernel configuration
right on the first try! I guess trying to remove XFree86 and replace it
with X11R6.7 from X.Org ought to break everything
again. |
| Sat, 10 Apr '04 | With everything stable, it's time to do something useful: after
installing the Knights-0.6
chess application for KDE, I encountered a well-known bug: when playing against
a chess engine (such as Crafty) the computer never moved. It turns out
that the default search time was being set at 218 minutes, or
slightly over 91 days! Rather than play a game where the computer
moves once every three months, I discovered that commenting out line 142 of
core.cpp and recompiling everything
fixed the problem.
Of course, to get to the 'recompiling everything' stage meant messing around with automake and autoconf, which are terrific examples of the 'brilliant voodoo' being spread by the crew at GNU. I've worked with regular make files before, but creating and configuring a KDevelop project to correctly import (and re-generate) the necessary automake and autoconf files was a nightmare. After the third rm -rf *, I swallowed my pride and went through some of the "Hello World" tutorials; now if only I could figure out why KDevelop won't add the modified splash screen to the executable. |
| Mon, 15 Mar '04 | The good news is that the new kernel is now stable, as is KDE
and KDevelop; as a final flourish, I even got my favorite OpenGL game (Quake
II) to work. Everything has been tweaked, honed, and generally configured
to within an inch of its digital life: the color scheme, user interface, and
even the underlying directory structure has been relentlessly customized to
suit my most trivial desires. The bad news is that I really haven't discovered
a practical use for a Linux box at home! Since 99% of my home usage is playing computer games—all but one of which are only available for Windows—I seem to have built the ultimate in high-performance paperweights. But two weeks of rampaging around in the Linux world has taught me a valuable lesson: once you look beyond the "I Hate Bill" T-shirts and the "Windows is Evil" attitudes, open source software is no longer a disorganized playground for amateur programmers and geek-wannabees. This stuff is almost frighteningly sophisticated in places, and is definitely pushing the 'bleeding edge' of technology; I am beginning to understand why IBM and others are pumping a lot of research dollars into Linux, and why that is starting to make Microsoft worry. |
| Thu, 11 Mar '04 | Life is better: KDE 3.2.1 and a new version of the ATI video
drivers have fixed a lot of things that the new kernel broke. The more
I use the Gentoo Portage system, the more I like it: figuring out how to download
all the source files first (emerge -fuD),
burning the distfiles directory
onto a CD, then building everything directly off the CD makes it almost embarrassingly
easy to update multiple systems. Of course, now there is an overwhelming
temptation to fiddle endlessly with the bazillion or so possible compiler settings.
Time to recompile everything…again. |
| Wed, 10 Mar '04 | Since my home computer isn't connected to anything, I decided
to turn off all the networking to save space and memory; what I didn't realize
is that just about everything in Linux, including the entire X Window subsystem,
uses TCP/IP and UNIX sockets to communicate. My new kernel was wonderfully
compact and speedy, it just didn't do anything! Time to recompile everything…again.
Unfortunately, Jacob noticed this morning that my computer was still on (a full
rebuild takes about 12 hours, so I had left it on overnight) but since I had
turned off the monitor, he simply hit the power switch. Time to
recompile everything…again. |
| Mon, 8 Mar '04 | Go figure: just as I get Gentoo release 1.4 stable (KDE 3.1
sitting on top of a 2.4 kernel) Gentoo 2004.0 is released; already I can see
why opponents claim that Linux changes too often. Moreover, after downloading
the appropriate CD images, I am thoroughly disgusted with the new
universal and
packages format: there's not much
source code, and what little there is doesn't match the versions listed in the
portage snapshot. Thanks to some tidbits gleaned from the Gentoo Forums, I was finally able to build a 2.6 kernel, but it was a painful and ugly process, hampered by several glaring errors in the "new & improved" installation manual. Once everything was up and running, the next phase was to discover what the new kernel broke: the KDE 3.2 konsole application now features invisible fonts, the drivers for my ATI video card won't load, and I can't share files using VMWare Tools anymore. Sigh. |
| Mon, 1 Mar '04 | I wasted most of the weekend wrestling with Linux: initially
it was very cool watching the Gentoo Portage subsystem automagically synchronize,
download, compile, and test various bits of GNU software, but it got old really
quick (Downloading package 3 of 176...please
wait). After my fourth attempt at building a kernel failed
(at 2+ hours per go-round) the fifth build ran out of space on a 2GB virtual
disk—KDE must be almost as bloated as Windows by now—so I pulled VMWare's virtual
plug and gave up in disgust.
Today I stumbled across Install Gentoo Using 2-CD LiveCD Set in 5 Minutes which worked like a champ: after reformatting an old 4GB hard disk for the cause, I followed the directions and had everything up and running in about 30 minutes…with no network connection required! I did experience a moment's panic when about 400MB of files weren't found, but proof-reading the command history found a fat-fingered directory name (cdroom?) that was easily corrected. Bottom line: it may look pretty once installed, but building a Linux system is still a very user-hostile process and definitely not recommended for the faint of heart. |
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2005.07.15-14:19