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Last Week Next Week Insights Index Daynotes.com Email: tom@syroidmanor.com
Slowly, bit by bit, I'm working through the minor remaining issues from my Gentoo install earlier this week. I found the problem with my environment not initializing correctly. It lay in /etc/rc-envupdate.sh (knew that; just took me a while to lay my eyes to it). Turn out one of the variables the script was testing for was surround by a pair "back ticks" (aka apostrophes); they should have been "forward ticks".
I also managed to get ALSA working -- er, from the console. During an earlier attempt I had it working from KDE but not the console :-) but the settings wouldn't stick, and every time I rebooted I started from scratch again. I finally figured out the correct [undocumented] procedure by back-tracing through a 20-odd thread on the Gentoo-Users mailing list. One of those things where everyone had it about 75% right; the last 25% was a mish-mash of wrong guesses. Turns out you can't start ALSA from rc-update. Nor can you load any sound modules until the init phase is complete. Loading any modules causes ALSA to think its already been started, when it hasn't. So it says, "Sorry, I'm already running" and quits.
I've got two remaining niggles to work through: One, my CDRW is not being recognized. This is no doubt a failure on my part to understand the devfs concept. Or perhaps I've got something misconfigured in the kernel. Here's the output from a cdrecord -scanbus command:
root@phaedrus root # cdrecord -scanbus
Cdrecord 1.11a19 (i686-pc-linux-gnu) Copyright (C) 1995-2002 Jörg Schilling
cdrecord: No such file or directory. Cannot open '/dev/pg*'. Cannot open SCSI driver.
cdrecord: For possible targets try 'cdrecord -scanbus'. Make sure you are root.
root@phaedrus root #
Mmm. No pg* entries whatsoever in /dev, but I also know that Gentoo relies on the devfsd.conf file to configure a CDRW. I'll figure it out eventually...
The second remaining problem is sound under KDE. That too I'll get to eventually. I'm not too worried about this one, though, as I don't really need my system squeaking and squacking at me to know I've got email or that I've made a boo-boo.
Other than the above, I'm damn pleased. Gentoo is fast, and solid. I've learned to be very selective about doing ANY library upgrades to a functioning system. As far as software goes, I'm running/using:
OpenOffice is very impressive in its finished form. Solid, fast, and seamless to everyone I send files to. Except for those who know I work exclusively in Linux now, everyone else thinks I'm sending them an Office document. My hat's off to the people at Sun for releasing the code, and for the thousands of souls who worked so hard to make OpenOffice the toolset it has become. Look out Microsoft -- in the blink of an eye you have some serious competition in Mozilla and OpenOffice.
I'm off to Indy shortly. I'll see you Tuesday.
Cheers, all...
Greets. I'm back... working from my notebook again, that is. It took a good two days to get everything installed and shoehorned back where I wanted it, and I'm still twiddling and tweaking here and there, but basically I'm satisfied. I threw a few extra compiler optimizations at the process this time and things are definitely "crisper". My Mosfet-liquid translucent menus aren't translucent, I haven't tackled sound yet, and I've got an error in one of my init scripts that's preventing Java from working without some o-manual intervention, but things are close enough to be functional. Actually, I've been pounding the keyboard since the wee hours of Thursday without a whole lot of interuptions (damn, where did that program go... Oh yeah... I haven't installed it yet). Better than my last install? Mmm. Cleaner. When I first installed Gentoo on Phaedrus I threw a lot of software on the drive to see what "X" did, or experiment with "Y". Over the course of two months, I pretty much figured out what worked, what didn't, and what I personally took a shining to. Just before I installation borked itself, my '/' partition was sitting at about 86%; now, with most of the big rocks installed, it's sitting at about 45%.
It's been a busy week, and I've put in some gawd-awful long days between work and rebuilding my notebook. I'm pretty for a big one day meeting in Indy on Monday. I fly out Sunday afternoon, meetings all day Monday, and I leave Tuesday AM to return home. I'll try to post Sunday before I leave, and Tuesday when I'm home, but don't expect to hear from me Monday.
And now I think I'm going surf my favorite haunts for 20 minutes, then hit the hay -- before 1am for a change.
Mmmm. Where to begin, where to begin...
Landon's three today. Happy Birthday Landon.
I had no connectivity from Friday afternoon to Monday morning. This time it was my DSL modem -- it just up and died, and given that SaskTel do not consider Internet access to be an essential service... Nope, I was NOT amused.We finally got some decent weather on the weekend, so name of the game was yardwork. We got a lot done, but we have a long way to go -- the previous tennents didn't do squat so we're starting from scratch. Oh well. Everyone got lots of sun and fresh air.
Leah got a new lawn mower for Mother's Day (grin).
I'm currently rebuilding the Gentoo installation on my notebook. Last night, after an emerge the installation imploded on itself. KDE would display any icon and started acting irrationally. The error had something to do with libpng and the fix was a painful one: un-emerge the lib, re-emerge it, then rebuild all programs that access said lib. Yuk and Bother. I decided it would be quicker to just re-install the whole works as I can start the process and walk away. Rebuilding every program affected by the error would mean I had to sit and monitor things, and continually feed the compiler new commands. Guess that's what happens when you play on the bleeding edge; sometime you get cut. After experiencing the power and flexibility of the Portage system, however, I have no desire to have any other distro on my main machine. Besides, after two months of experimentation my /usr directory was starting to grow pretty big.
For about a week now the small UPS (Back-UPS Pro 650) I have all my hubs and switches plugged into just up and turns itself off. Both red lights on the RH side come on. All I have to do is power it off and back on again, and off it goes for another day or so. The batter was new two years ago (I think), so it shouldn't be that. Cosmic. If anyone has any suggestions, I'd appreciate hearing them. I'm stumped.
Cheers... I've got to go find an ice-cream cake.
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