Tom at 16

Week of March 4th, 2002

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Wednesday March 6, 2002

Yeee-Hawwww. OK. I'm really, REALLY, impressed. -->www.gentoo.org<-- If you haven't yet, check it out. There's three documents to read: the Installation doc, the FAQ, and the Portage User Guide. I started about noon. There's about 3/4 of an hour of roll-up-your-sleeves-and-get-dirty work involved (well.... I mis-typed my gateway IP; maybe closer to 1/2). You can't be afraid of FDISK or prepping your EXT3 partitions. But beyond that, it's simply a matter of following the bouncing ball. It's all laid out. Follow the installation guide -- to the letter. It works. It's accurate. It's comprehensive.

After you have your partitions and filesystems in place, it's simply a matter of typing:

cd /usr/portage scripts/bootstrap.sh

And you're off. Bootstrap builds binutils, gcc, gettext, and glibc. From source. The latest, greatest source.

Next up: emerge --usepkg system. Which adds all your stand file, shell, find-type utilities.

Next you build a kernel, add a system logger, edit some config files, configure grub, and viola. Reboot. You're live. Worked for me first time. Flawlessly. No errors or ruffles. And the cool part is I have a system with all the latest. The 2.4.18 kernel, the latest bash shell update, the latest grub code -- the works.

So the next thing I did was type:

emerge --usepkg --pretend dev-lang/php

I wanted to see what emerge would do. The key of this very cool python program is that it resolves all the dependencies for you. And it did just that. It's currently working away on building XFree86 4.2 from source. And QT 2.3.1. Then it will add in PHP 4.2.1 and Apache 1.3.23. All from source, build to my spec. Why is this so important? Well, the compiler is building everything for an i686 platform. Which makes everything very optimized, and VERY fast. Can't believe the difference. Startling, actually.

Ahhh... is it secure you ask... Check out the following. I installed the base system, and then added the OpenSSH server package (the client is installed from the get-go; not the server though). I then went to Hydras and ran NMAP. Here's the results:

[tom@hydras]:/export/home/tom # nmap phoenix.syroidmanor.com

Starting nmap V. 2.53 by fyodor@insecure.org ( www.insecure.org/nmap/ )
Interesting ports on phoenix.syroidmanor.com (192.168.1.20):
(The 1522 ports scanned but not shown below are in state: closed)
Port       State       Service
22/tcp     open        ssh                     

Nmap run completed -- 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 1 second
[tom@hydras]:/export/home/tom #

Judge for yourself. I've yet to see a clean installation of any other distro draw the above results.

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Tuesday March 5, 2002

Many thanks to my friend Brian who pointed me to the GenToo Linux distribution. It's very similar in concept to the Sorcerer distro I checked on on Monday, but in many ways GenToo is much more sophisticated. The initial installer is a scant 16MB, and from there you use several unique tools to pull down and build the sources you need/want. Very slick. Spend a little poking around the site. Tomorrow I'm going to try and installation -- I'll let you know.

Two tips for anyone who might want to try out one of the above products:

Download and read ALL the documentation! And print it out so you can have it by your side as you progress.
Distros like GenToo TAKE TIME to install and setup. GCC and the libraries are built from scratch from source, and both of these programs are BIG, and take several hours to build even with lots of horsepower (you actually need to build GLIB twice to get it optimized properly.

So why would anyone want to spend 8 or 10 hours building a Linux installation when you can have RH 7.x up and running in 35 minutes? Optimization. When you're done, everything is tuned to your system. And that's something that's not possible to do with "canned" distros.

-oOo-

Thanks to Mike Strock who sent me the following URL a few days back. An excellent resource to bookmark. Anyone who's had to deal with Microsoft's knowledge base knows what a labyrinth it can be. kbAlerts is a mailing service. Go to their page, check the products you're interesting in keeping up with, and they'll email you a link any time something new is posted on the topic. Very handy.

I've actually been reading madly all day trying to get through some of the excellent articles I keep stumbling across; unfortunately, I keep finding more... Ain't hyperlinks a wonderful thing? There's a couple good write-ups over on O'ReillyNet. Check out Introduction to CSS Layout, and Jon Udell's article on Radio UserLand 8.0. Recommended reading.

-oOo-

Here's a giggle for reading pleasure (From the CBP list this morning):

Ode to Spell Checker
by Jerrold H Zar

Eye halve a spelling chequer
It came with my pea sea
It plainly marques four my revue
Miss steaks eye kin knot sea.
Eye strike a key and type a word
And weight four it two say
Weather eye am wrong oar write
It shows me strait a weigh.
As soon as a mist ache is maid
It nose bee fore two long
And eye can put the error rite
Its rare lea ever wrong.
Eye have run this poem threw it
I am shore your pleased two no
Its letter perfect awl the weigh
My chequer tolled me sew.

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Monday March 4, 2002

Heh-heh-heh...

Lookee what I found:

http://sorcerer.wox.org/

And here's the review... by Joe Barr.

Guess what I'm up to tonight?

</grin>

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