Another Opinion Among Many

If you remember, I  mentioned a hard drive replacement a while ago.  I haven’t tried to revive it yet with a tool like Spinright yet, but I may still be able to get something out of it.  That was a hard drive failure.  It doesn’t boot or recognize at all at the moment.

I thought that I was going through that with another one as well.  The hard drive in Frankenputer seemed to have gone on me after another update of Hardy Heron.  I had split the drive up into three partitions, one as the root partition “/”, swap, and a third one as “/home”.  The root partition was formatted as EXT3 and the /home was partitioned as ReiserFS.  After yet another update (development software after all), I rebooted into a corrupted first partition and E2FSCK didn’t help, dropping me to a single user recovery shell.  I ran FSCK manually and was able to get the partition reorganized.  I carried on but this was not the end of my troubles.

One more update killed it for good, I thought.  My drive was not even recognized on boot.  Its the second hard drive and I actually have GRUB, my bootloader on the first drive.  I’ve been letting whichever operating system that does the latest update handle GRUB, which meant that the config file with the instructions for GRUB “/boot/grub/menu.list”, was on the second drive on the corrupted partition.  no problem, I just popped in a Linux install CD (Ubuntu of some version, I recall), and chose the option to boot from the first hard drive to get into Arch Linux o that I could do some online digging about this problem.

Somehow, the corruption of the first partition seemed to have affected the boot sector of the second drive as well, which was causing the problem with the BIOS picking up the drive.  I was able to “see” and mount the “/home” partition, so I figured that the drive just couldn’t be dead, as I had thought.  I immediately attempted to back up as much data as I could access onto DVD, which was quite successful, albeit a tad slow, as the OS and the DVD burner were on the same IDE cable.  On a lark, I reformatted the first partition with ReiserFS, which in my opinion, has a far superior recovery on unexpected shutdown.  Suddenly, the whole drive was once again visible to the BIOS.

I reinstalled Gutsy Gibbon and used my existing “/home” and restored my user and each of the kids.  The only difference was that a few programs were missing, which  can be recovered, and some theme-related files which were in “/usr/share” were not available.

So, the take away from this story is that your hard drive may not actually be bad.  It might just be that your hardware is not perfectly suited to go together and a file system corruption may be the cause of your troubles.

In July, I wrote about reading a Wired article on Hans Reiser and the sensation around his arrest for murdering his estranged wife (who is quite possibly alive).  The trial is going on now.  It appears that only the San Francisco Chronicle seems to be interested at this point.  I wonder whether it will again become world news if Nina Reiser is found to be alive.

After I saw that my “Archivist” plugin pulled a post from Dec 25, 2005, I remembered an article that I just read on Hans Reiser at Wired.  Interviewer Joshua Davis interviewed Hans Reiser from Prison and wrote the interview.  The interview got Slashdotted.

If I hadn’t tried Reiserfs (at version 2.9 or 3.0) and saw how much faster my desktop worked with this “unstable” filesystem keeping the pidgeons in their holes, I may not have paid much attention to the whole sensational drama surrounding this true Linux geek.  So, where is Nina Reiser? Hubby’s in jail, arraigned on murder for a body that can’t be found.  I think that she’s in Russia and he’s going to rot for nothing.

So, what does this mean for Reiser4? Is there going to be a Reiser4? Are the traditional supporters going to return? Suse? Hello? Of all the filesystems I have tried on the same kernel of Linux, Reiser had the best speed (especially v4), followed by EXT3 and then XFS/JFS.  Microsoft’s filesystems didn’t keep up at all, running at the same speed as EXT2.

Surely, something good will come of this whole mess.

This list often changes:

I have two hard drives.  One is an 80 Gig Maxtor Diamond Max 9.  Hopefully, it will last for a long time.  The other us a 16 Gig Seagate U-series drive that I bought for $5.

The large drive houses my main distro, Ubuntu (currently Hardy Heron, somewhere around Alpha 4-5) and the smaller one houses whatever I want to play with.  Right now, its got Arch, running e17.

This page is where you’re going to be dazzled by how awesome it can be to have Gentoo with Reiser4 and Nitro-sources from the beginning, instead of that messy “after” stuff.

Stay tuned. I’m still figuring out how to say what I want to. I’m going to leave this part up top until I get enough written that it actually looks like a helpful page.

Starting Point and Preparation

There are some things that one needs to know to do this:

• you can browse the web and your cd with links2
• establishing networking up front is good
• lxnay’s RR4 Live-CD is needed
• RTFM - I can’t stress this enough (you will fail if you don’t)
• Reiser4 is still not considered stable so you have to get it yourself
• You’ll need the Reiser4 patch in your kernel (so get one with it in unless you think that’s too sissy)
• You will encounter roadblocks (normal Gentoo install x2 difficulty)
• You need a weekend
• Beer helps (at least the first part of the box)

I started my install by getting the right system/CD to install from. I headed over to the Gentoo Wiki to get the cd image because lxnay only makes DVDs now and I have no DVD burner. I downloaded the ISO for the 2.30 Live CD, which is the latest version on cd. It does have a fairly recent 2.6 kernel (from around last March) with Reiser4 patches, so you can create the Reiser4 filesystem with it. Otherwise, there’s no point to this whole exercise, right?

For those who have a DVD burner, you can get a more recent incarnation of this neat idea by downloading the Live DVD, which can be had through links from lxnay’s website and the Gentoo Wiki. You’ll have the advantage of being able to install a lot from the DVD itself. I’m never really interested in that, so I won’t be discussing it.

I got the file from within a Microsoft Windows environment, so I grabbed the md5sum and compared it to the one generated from the output of winmd5sum, a free graphical md5sum checker for Windows from Nullriver. Always do an md5sum check on images that you wish to boot from. If they don’t match, download the file again - its been corrupted some way.

I then burned the cd image using Burnatonce, I think. Its been two weeks, and, frankly, I had too many beers at that point to remember which software I used for the job. It may have been Nero (a little hint - with Burnatonce, you’re getting a free cdrdao front end with no bloat. You can burn a CD image with a double-click and two clicks - no coasters) but not likely. I then booted the computer with the CD in the drive and the installer started loading. If you don’t do this much, be sure that you BIOS is set to boot from CD before your hard drive.

Once the installer was finished loading, I had a full Live-CD environment within which to do with whatever I want. No, folks, this is not a pretty graphical installer like Anaconda. With this Live-CD, you’re greeted with a command prompt (which is not a bad thing). If I knew how to make a screenshot from that point, I would, as its got more info there than anyone seems to have reported. There is a short blurb (kind of like the MOTD) explaining that you can use links2 to browse the install instructions from the CD and/or from the internet at http://www.gentoo.org. The instruction to set up networking is stated as well. You’ll be prompted to type “net-setup” at the prompt. I did this, as I got my install fresh off the internet. There’s a dialogue box that pops up showing the device representing your network interface (I only have one, so there is no choice - although I did install a dialup modem afterwords to interface with faxing software later). You would then either choose to get on the net via PPP (if you’re insane enough to install over dialup), DHCP, or manually. I chose manually, as my piece of crap Linksys BEFSR41 router doesn’t broadcast and assign addresses via DHCP, although the server is on.

The rules for the IP setup are generally the same. You’re going to set it up with a private IP range, either 192.168.x.x, 10.x.x.x, or 172.x.x.x. I always choose what the router’s default range is. The Linksys uses 192.168.1.x. I understand that dLinks use 192.168.0.x. Whichever. The subnet is 255.255.255.0 (if you have a complex network, then it’ll be something different, but you’ll also be ignoring this part of the instructions if so, right? Don’t forget to add the router’s IP address as the gateway address. Then, if nameservers are asked for, I use my router, as it finds the nameservers from my ISP and uses them. This keeps the setup simple, effective, and easy to troubleshoot.

At this point, I must disclaim that much of what is to follow is a combination of knowledge from the Gentoo Handbook, the Wiki article, and stuff that I’ve picked up along the way.

The next step is to test the success of your network configuration. Typing ifconfig eth0 gives you the status of the first ethernet card (the only one for me). You should see an IP address and some stats for rx and tx transfers. If all’s well, you should, then, be able to go to the internet with links. I do, at this point, and go straight to the Gentoo Handbook to get the most up to date instructions. At this point, using the Handbook is the simplest way to get going. All instructions really remain the same, except for the Reiser4 specific instructions. I’ll concentrate on that part next.

Got successfully installed a Reiser4 Gentoo Linux with X.org 6.8.2 (3d working but in need of tweaking), Windowmaker, and Firefox. I’ll be writing a page with my install story and its steps, so that others can replicate my experience. I’m running on 2.6.14-nitro2. If you want a responsive desktop system, I’d recommed nitro or cko sources. The scheduler is the thang. Next is to tackle mplayer and perhaps Xine (as I’ve never really got into using it with all formats). Then, onto browser plugins! Woohoo!

Merry Christmas, everyone!

I’ll be less than chatty online for the next day, likely, as I celebrate the holliday known as Christmas. We have a Christmas tree, not a “holiday tree” like on the kid shows today. Tell me what other holiday uses a decorated tree as a symbol! Anyhow, the kids are gonna have fun on the morning opening presents and we are going to visit with family and enjoy a nice meal together in an environment of giving. I hope that everyone can share some time with another person or twenty as well.

And, my computer will enjoy Christmas compiling a new Gentoo install on Reiser4, if all goes well (yes, I’m running from a Live CD right now! Woo!)