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!

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Is Gentoo Coming Back to Life?

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.

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An Alternative Gentoo Install Method

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

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What Do I Look Like?

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.

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Thoughts on a Lazy Saturday