Another Opinion Among Many

I sure hope so!

I’ve just noticed that on the Gentoo home page, which has been pretty much stagnant, as far as news or activity is concerned, seems to have had a burst of activity.  Since January 12, there have been 9 posts on the home page.  This is more than in the previous 5 months.  The news is encouraging.  I’m happy with what I see.  Awesome!

Run, Skye!

I’ve not quite done this before, so I wasn’t sure if the rules were the same or not.  There have been times that I’ve relied on chroot to fix a dual-booted machine, but not to install an OS from a booted Operating System.

So, what I did was install Gentoo on a spare hard drive from my existing OS, Ubuntu.  I used the same method that I would have had I used the minimal installer, which seems to be the only method that works, despite the graphical installer on the 2007.0 CD.

What prompted me to do this? I’ve missed the snappiness that I had with my Gentoo system before (this system, actually) and i wanted to try Gnome on Gentoo, as I’ve never done so.  I did try the CD installer but it really messed things up big time, and the screen was nearly unusable on that super slow frame buffer driver that the Live CD used.  So, surfing the net, etc, was unbearable while doing the install.  Once installed, X was not working (apparently the video drivers aren’t even on the CD)  and the system was full of unneeded packages.  The only way that I’ve been able to quickly get a Gentoo system up and running was to do it from the command prompt, which was fine with me.

After finding a little tidbit in the Gentoo Alternate Install Doc regarding installing from another operating system.  It turns out that if you have the normal toolchain required to compile code and the chroot tool, you’re in business.

This is a basic install so far, just to see if I remembered the right modules to compile into my kernel.   I could have used Genkernel, but I wanted to go leaner than that.  My old P-III doesn’t have SATA or SCSI, for example.  So, I didn’t compile them in.  I know that there’s still more to yank out, but I wanted to get it up and running first.

I chose to use the bootloader that I had installed already (which was actually on the drive I installed Gentoo to), so I added a stanza to my /boot/grub/menu.lst to include Gentoo and I was off.

Perhaps, I’ll update the news when I have more installed.  I’m curious as to how much I can do in the chroot.

Actually, I’m referring to this site. I see with Internet Explorer, here at work (the browser that Macbros blatantly insists that I upgrade from on every visit to his site from work), that the header and body of the page seem to be squished together a bit, showing only the top half of the links between. Is this happening for anyone else? This only happened since we upgraded the center’s computers with the latest patched version of Windows.

At home, the page renders as intended (except that my monitor is getting old and everything is getting darker and darker) on IE6, Firefox2.2, and Opera10 on Windows and also fine in Konqueror, Firefox, and Opera on PCLinuxOS, Gentoo (no Opera), Debian, and Kubuntu.

If you see this behavior and you know how to fix it, I’d like to know. I know its gotta be an IE hack, but I’m not to well versed on them (I barely can code to standard, let alone to non-standard, oppressive, restricted proprietary code).

fixed.  see comments for details. kludgy.  blech

I am here, shamefully still in my pajamas, compiling more crap for my franken-toy. **BEGIN GEEKY PART** I tried to do the installation as wished through the Live-CD. Unfortunately, I had the 2006.1 CD, which is getting long in the tooth. Its 2007 now, and I should have started either with something a bit more recent or installed a more basic setup from the CD. To be truthful, I wanted to see what kind of trouble that I’d get in if I proceeded this way with such a fast-moving distro - and I did encounter trouble. After upgrading the whole system with the “emerge -u world” command, it broke and Gnome is nowhere to be found. Its there, but I cannot get into a graphical desktop. The first problem was a conflict with some of the newer parts of the X-window system, which I fixed. The next problem was to get Gnome to work again. This is the continuing reason why I don’t use Gnome as my desktop. At one point or another along the lifespan of the desktop, Gnome seems to totally crap out in a way I don’t know how to easily fix. Its not the lack of tools that seem to be more available and more intuitive in KDE. I live with that (especially since more thoughtful and powerful Gnome apps are being developed and included in the main installations of many distros). I just don’t feel the desire to tinker at fixing somebody’s bad hooks or buggy code. The advantage of Gnome is that its been “free” all along, which has attracted a lot of developers. This is also its disadvantage, as nobody seems to want to adhere to a common standard. Freedom and imprisonment all wrapped in one.

I’m not going to uninstall the Gnome parts, but its definitely going on the back burner for a while. KDE is compiling in the background, a la CCACHE, and I’ve fallen back to Window Maker to get to the GUI. From there, I installed the light and fast IceWM and am now using that. Strangely, Window Maker was developed as an enhanced branch of Afterstep, which was stagnating. Now, it seems that Window Maker is in that position and Afterstep is plowing all ahead full. **STOP GEEKY PART**

That picture above was taken shortly ago. We’ve got a bit of snow coming down. Its not a blizzard, but as dangerous as one here in town, as the plows have not been out at all since it started. This weather makes me think of good, warm, home cooked food, like sheppard’s pie. I had made one of those a few nights ago and it was browned to perfection, so I snapped a pic of it with Caleb’s little cheapo keychain camera (the pic of the snow was done with that one too). I usually don’t mess with the basic ingredients much when it comes to Sheppard’s Pie as its grea in its own simplicity. I’ve found the key to a good meal with this dish is to put enough potato in it. If its all meat, you’re not going to enjoy it nearly as much as you would otherwise. The key to getting it to brown well is to ensure that the top has some form of fat on it, be it margarine, butter, oil, or cooking spray. A lot of diet-consious people will forgo this step to avoid all fat in their diet, according to some Heart Association lobby inspired “Food Guide”, which makes us unnaturally pick food to eat that are similar to what livestock would (notice that they GAIN weight on this diet). If you leave out the butter on the top, you might as well leave out the dish, as you’re not going to enjoy it nearly as much. Live a little. If you like to have your portions to come out of the pan in nice “chunks”, then stir an egg into your ground beef (or pork) bottom. It’ll keep it all together. You can used creamed corn in your pie but make sure that your potato mixture is not too wet in this case, or your dish will be a bit sloppy (which is okay if you just want the good taste). If anyone really wants, I can write down how I make mine. I’ll try to quantify my “pinch of this” and “dash of that” cooking into real measurements. I may have more to meander about later, but I’ll devote a new post to it, as this one’s getting a bit long.

My brother is a saint, whether he owns up to it or not. This Christmas has been a thin one and I did not expect to receive much. I didn’t. That’s all in good stride. Thank you to all my family members that did not embarrass the poor guy by giving gifts when he could not give any to you. You got it. Right on.

My brother (and my sister, in a different way) is different. Without talking constantly or keeping up all the time, our family, especially me and my siblings, are close. We can go a long time without any contact and resume as if there was no break. I don’t know what contributes to this intimacy with distance, but I can only attribute our parents for it.

Back to the geeky stuff. My Frankenputer will be getting a bit of a boost (OK, a large one). I stuffed the first video card I could get into the AGP slot, which was an ATI Rage Pro Turbo with 8 MB of memory. This card is really getting long in the tooth and doesn’t really seem to have proper 3D support and won’t run glxgears with any more than 4 or 5 FPS. Enter Ian’s Radeon 9500 Pro. Gidddeyup! The 128MB of memory and the arm’s length list of features will be fun to explore. This is a card that will allow cool games to be played on my poor little Franken-puter. I may even start to like them. Getting the flgrx driver installed is my next fun task, I guess. Who wants to stick with 60FPS, when you can get more, etc? Thanks, bro, for the Christmas gift that you didn’t likely realize that you gave me.

update: I’ve installed Linux on this machine, so I’ve been working with Kubuntu, Gentoo, Kororaa, and Freespire. I’ve not had a chance to check out the performance of this card with Kororaa or Kubuntu yet, but with Gentoo (a fresh GRP install yesterday from the 2006.1 Live C), I tried to get 3D Accelleration working with the x.org/DRI drivers. I get it, but glxgears locks up the computer hard after about 7 seconds running. I don’t install ssh by default, so I can’t access the machine remotely to see if I can kill the offending process or debug it. Freespire installed with the proprietary ATI fglrx driver and this problem doesn’t seem to have presented itself, and the FPS are insane!

corey@frankenfreespire:~$ glxgears
16261 frames in 5.0 seconds = 3252.183 FPS
16295 frames in 5.0 seconds = 3258.937 FPS
16427 frames in 5.0 seconds = 3285.261 FPS
16463 frames in 5.0 seconds = 3292.429 FPS

corey@frankenfreespire:~$ fgl_glxgears
Using GLX_SGIX_pbuffer
1942 frames in 5.0 seconds = 388.400 FPS
1663 frames in 5.0 seconds = 332.600 FPS
2159 frames in 5.0 seconds = 431.800 FPS
2156 frames in 5.0 seconds = 431.200 FPS
2157 frames in 5.0 seconds = 431.400 FPS

What an insane difference between this setup and the old one @ around 1100FPS

Anyone who has installed Konqueror on Gentoo lately may notice that there isn’t a way to use Netscape plugins for viewing web content. So, how do you view Adobe Flash or PDF documents online? Or, for that matter, what about embedded videos, etc?

The plugins do work on this browser, and they have worked on previous incarnations without a hitch, but now, with the componentized KDE and other factors in play, you have to emerge another package to ensure that you can use these plugins. Its hard to find this info on the net without a bit of searching, and cruising the Gentoo forums will be the only way to get the answer. So, I thought that I’d put this little post together as another online resource for this little annoyance.

For those who would actually like to use Konqueror and view web content like Flash and embedded movies from, perhaps, Apple or other sources, the package is kde-base/nsplugins. Install this and you’ll be able to access the plugins designed for Netscape browsers, such as Netscape, Firefox, Mozilla, K-Meleon, Galeon, etc.

This seems to be an error that crops up for those who are merging an upgrade of x.org to version xorg-server-1.1.1-r1. It stuck me on an

emerge -u world

for a bit until I found this thread at the Gentoo forums. I thought it important enough to make reference to, as it points out that sometimes the simplest solutions can be the best. The solution to the problem:

!!! cannot write to ‘/usr/share/X11/xkb/compiled.’
!!! please check permissions and directores for broken symlinks.

is to simply delete the shortcut/usr/share/X11/xkb/compiled with rm -R /usr/share/X11/xkb/compiled
Too easy. Why didn’t they say that?