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Week of September 24th, 2001
Last Updated: October 02, 2001 12:05
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Daynotes.com
Email: tom@syroidmanor.com
It's official. I'm so far behind, I really and truly think I'm first.
I've just come upstairs from bathing the kids. I ate my dinner sitting on the toilet, watching to ensure no one drowned. I have 100 emails in my Inbox (that's not counting my mailing lists which get sorted directly by server-side rules); at least 50 of them need responses sometime soon. Yup. On my "to-do" list. We have a big push happening next month at work -- of late, I've been preparing/editing/revising 6 or 7 tutorials a month. Next month we're ramping up to double that number. Ohmygosh.
I've spent four of the last six days editing, pruning, and shearing.
I've spent two of the last six days chasing down delinquent authors and making preparation for "Plan B".
I've spent five of the last six days trying to get Slackware to run on Phaedrus.
I've spent [at least] three of the last six days trying to keep my wife from killing my son [and, at times, my daughter].
Yep. Interesting times indeed. No, the numbers do not add up -- not in theory, and certainly not in reality. Adding up chandeliers is art, not science.
Sigh.
I foolishly decided last Friday to remove RH from my laptop and have another stab at Slackware 8.0. I triumphed above evil, but I certainly do not kid myself over the experience -- I have my share of battle scars. Learned scars, but scars nonetheless.
Fact: RH "Roswell" (7.2?) has a major bug. I alluded to it briefly last week. The routing table gets hosed when the system is initialized. The script that configures the routing table clearly shows that it sets the route metric to "1", but when the network interface(s) come up, it's set to "0". Which is where all my grief came from. The solution? Add the following two lines to the end of /etc/rc.d/rc.local:
route del default dev eth0
route add default gw 192.168.X.X metric 1 dev eth0
The above clears the existing "bad" route and adds the correct one with the correct metric.
About the time I figured all the aforementioned out, I promptly ripped RH 7.2 out by the roots and re-installed Slackware 8.0. Why? Because Slack is just a distribution and my failure to get 'X' running under Slack was haunting me. Everything was there, either in behavior or the scripts, but I wasn't "seeing" the problem. So I hunkered down and pounded (No, no, not literally...) on my keyboard for four long days until I got things working as I knew they eventually would. If you want to know anything about compiling a kernel under Slack, just ask -- I can probably answer your question. After all, I only built about 35 kernels in four days...
I'm going to call the problem I had getting 'X' to run under Slack a "kernel problem", but that might be a somewhat simplified description. Suffice to say, like everything in my life of late, that there was nothing cut and dried in any of my exploits. I could not make wireless work under the SCSI 2.4.5 kernel; worked like a charm under the IDE 2.4.5 kernel (with SCSI compiled in). The NVIDIA drivers would not compile under either of the 2.4.5 kernels (compiles like a charm under several Slack installations running on friend's desktop machines, though). So I installed the latest "stable" kernel - - 2.4.10. Took me two very long days to get it to compile cleanly (my .config file is available for anyone interested). I should say it took me two long days to get the 2.4.10 kernel compiled with wireless capabilities. Getting a clean kernel compile is simply a matter of elimination (and patience); getting wireless working with the 2.4.10 kernel is a tad on the tricky side (HINT: Get a clean kernel built WITHOUT pcmcia, then compile the latest PCMCIA-CS source (1.3.29, I believe); and don't forget, every time you recompile your kernel, you should also recompile your PCMCIA-CS tree; pcmcia and the kernel are tightly bound).
Once I got a clean 2.4.10 kernel built, and wireless working, the rest was child's play. I copied my "stock" working XF86Config file to /etc/X11, installed the NVIDIA drivers (no fuss, no muss with the 2.4.10 kernel), and typed startx. Ta and Da, as they say... instant high resolution, anti-aliased desktop. And Slack is fast as compared to RH 7.2. Too bad it took me a month to get it to run as advertised. Again, please note: the problems I experienced were most certainly at least partially related to my Inspiron. As I've said before, getting a Linux distro up and running on a relatively stock desktop system is not rocket science these days. Problems with installation and configuration are minimal and generally occur only with "odd" hardware configurations. Getting Linux up and happening on a laptop is another thing altogether. With some distros the process is relatively seamless -- like RH's new "Roswell" package. But you pay for that relative seamlessness when you need to troubleshoot a problem. Good luck finding which script initializes a network interface. It's there all right, but finding it is far from intuitive. Slackware on the other hand is like an ornery cow. Getting it to move your way is a challenge, but all the tires are there and can be kicked whenever you feel the notion.
On a positive note, our weather here in Saskabush is nothing short of glorious. Warm days, coolish nights, crystal clear blue skies... It's almost surreal. Several times I've wandered out onto the back porch and been struck by the beauty of the trees -- everything is gold and red, or in the process of changing that way. Then I'm struck by the temperature -- some days, it's been downright hot, which somehow doesn't quite fit with the season or the color of the trees. Yesterday we broke a record: 32 degrees C. (mid nineties). Today was warm but windy. And the weather is supposed to continue through to the end of the month. Very, very nice.
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Last modified:
October 02,
2001