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Last Week Next Week Insights Index Daynotes.com Email: tom@syroidmanor.com
Enjoyed a very quiet day yesterday. Watched several DVDs (Armageddon twice! ;-), napped, snacked, and napped some more. For dinner we ordered in pizza, which in our house is a big treat as we order in often. When you're used to eating good food, made from quality ingredients, take-out -- as a rule -- sucks. But we found a great source of pizza last month, so we have a fallback for those days when nobody feels like cooking.
No computing action yesterday whatsoever, and I don't mind telling you it felt good to be a couch potatoe for a day. This morning (just because I could) I installed RH 8 on the back-end of my hard drive. The installation was smooth and without incident. When it came time to choose a bootloader, I simply selected "none". Once setup was complete, I booted into Gentoo and edited Grub's menu.lst to look like so:
default 0 timeout 20 splashimage=(hd0,1)/boot/grub/splash.xpm.gz title=Gentoo Linux (gentoo-sources-2.4.19-r10) root (hd0,1) kernel /boot/bzImage root=/dev/hda5 vga=791 hdc=ide-scsi title=Red Hat Linux 8.0 (kernel-2.4.18-10) root (hd0,7) kernel /vmlinuz ro root=/dev/hda9 vga=791 initrd /initrd-2.4.18-17.8.0.img title=Windows XP root (hd0,0) chainloader +1
Actually, what you see above is after I applied the latest 8.0 kernel security update. The base install, IIRC, uses initrd-2.4.18-14.img as an image file. I'm now running the 8.0 kernel update on two boxes, Janus and Phaedrus and it seems solid.
As noted, RH installed without fuss. It didn't correctly detect my wireless card, but I didn't expect it to. Wlan-ng support is not included in any kernels that I'm aware of. Other than that, I did my usual routine (server install, then select the package groups I want a few screens later): KDE, VIM, Lynx, a few admin tools, and a partridge in a pear tree. Presto-pocus, I now have a tri-boot system -- XP up front, Gentoo 1.4 in the middle, and RH 8.0 on the back.
When I first started KDE, I immediately thought "Ye gawd... what have I done???" It was sllloooowwwww. Initialization took almost a minute (a very long time when you're sitting watching a splash screen); opening my Home folder took about 30 seconds. Mmmm. Not good. Time to roll up my sleeves...
A little poking and proding turned up three things (all, no doubt, unique to my HW/SW/configuration):
JEdit pre5 is out. I'm typing in it right now. Looks good; loads a tad faster than pre4. Recommended. I'd be lost without JEdit. I use it every day, for almost all tasks text-related.
BLEHH. It snowed yesterday. Then it melted -- a bit. Then it froze, melted a bit more, and froze again. This morning the temp's sitting right on 20F, it's dreary, the wind's blowing, and all the mush that didn't fully melt yesterday is rock hard and as slippery as goose shit. Sounds like a fine day to stay home and toss a few logs on the fire. Which is exactly what I intend to do. The logs will have to wait until I'm done with the three conference calls I've scheduled to attend today. And my desk... well, I think I need to find it again. I always know when it's time to resuffle the paper stacked on my desk. I typically work with my notebook in my lap, and my feet up on the corner of my desk. This morning, this is a problem -- no room for my feet :=(
A couple quick notes:
I installed the new Red Hat kernels last night, one on my 7.3 dev box and the other on my 8.0 dev box. So far, all is well. No WTF's, no weirdness, no unruly behavior. So far. If I have a problem, you'll know about it.
As noted a couple days ago, Phoenix 0.3 is out. I struggled for hours to try to get it to run on my Gentoo partition. No joy. Nope, none whatsoever. The short story is that Phoenix has a library "issue" with some distributions (found this little titbit buried deep within a Mozilla/Phoenix bug report list). I tried juggling some files off a local RH box, but again I didn't meet with much success. Bottom line: Phoenix 0.3 installs without a hitch under RH 8, runs well, and is blazingly fast (compared to full-blown Mozilla 1.2). But it don't run under Gentoo, and I don't want to B0rk my system trying to achieve what might in the end be impossible.
I continue to ticker and toy with K3B, which is a GUI CDR/W front-end to cdrecord. While the Gentoo mailing list cites lots of user problems with the program (primarily, they can't get it to compile under Gentoo 1.4), methinks these are user configuration issues. K3B compiled first crack out of the box for me, and has run like a top every time I've used it. It's got a nice interface, and is intuitive to use. Overall, I like it a lot. Given it's still a beta, however, and in its current form designed for KDE 3.1 (at least the rev I'm using), I'm not going to go around recommending it to the average user. It's got a ton of potential, though, and it's given me one less reason to have to jump into Windoz.
Landon's awful quiet... I'd better go see what the little imp is up to... TGIF, and have a happy day.
Evening. Yes, I know... not much of an effort here yesterday. I did intend to return with a snippet or two, but I'm afraid the sands of time got the best of me. My day yesterday started at 4am when Landon came into the bedroom to throw up in my lap. The simple joys of having children. I shut the lid on my notebook just after midnight when I came to the sudden realization that it was late, I'd been up far too long to think clearly any more, and I really really didn't have anything else to say to anyone.
Last night I took all the notes and spurious information I've been gleening for the past month or so, carefully assembled them in order of execution, and rebuilt one of my development boxes from the ground up using Red Hat 7.3. It was a test to (a) see if I could intermesh several different procedures without breaking anything, (2) make notes and corrections to anything that did break, and (3) try to best discern where Murphy might potentially rear his ugly head. Why all the fuss? Because if everything goes according to plan, I'll be in Indianapolis sometime around the first week of November building a new project server. And I can't afford a lot of WTF'ing while I'm there. Put another way, I need to know the whereabouts of Murphy long before he strikes.
The result of my efforts last night was an unqualified success. Behind me is Phoenix running RH 7.3, fully updated with all current security/maintenance patches, and locked down tight. The only service running is SSH. System users are "jailed" in a chrooted /home tree. Further up the tree is a chrooted CVS tree accessible only by SSH. Everything works. Nothing trompted on anything else during installation. The CVS repository is not publically accessible yet, and the directory structure is incredibly complex and I want to go over the permission on each and every branch first, but it's all there, and everything works as advertised. Total time from start to finish: about fours hours, including about an hour of "script adjustment" for the CVS chroot. As they say in the movie business, "Ta and Da".
bAs most of you know, I've been running the KDE 3.1 beta on my notebook for almost three months now and I LOVE it. It gives me about 1/32 the grief Windows does, it's fast, it's functional, and it's pretty. Nice combo, if you ask me. I had to drop into XP today to grab a file and decided to surf around a bit while I was there. That lasted all of about an hour. I used to appreciate IE's speed over Moz, but after checking a few of my favorite sites I realized that really missed tabbed browsing, and that IE no longer held an edge over Mozilla (I've been using 1.2 alpha for over a month; I'm currently pulling down 1.2 beta which was released today). Back to KDE I went, and I've been smiling in appreciation ever since. BTW, there's a good article on the features contained in the upcoming 3.1 release [Top]
<grin>
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/27636.html
</grin>
Oh-Dark-Hundred... (Sometime waay before dawn): OK, I lied about routine posts again as of Monday ;-) But this time I have a good excuse. I'm delirious from excellent food. Sunday we cooked up a wonderful 12-or-so pound turkey with all the trimmings. Stuffing, mashed potatoes, cauliflower with cheese and carrots... Yuummy. Yesterday was -- of course -- soup day. Turkey soup with celery, carrots, and orzzo (kind of a cross between pasta and rice; highly recommended for your soup pot!). Yes, the triptophane [sp?] worked exactly as advertised thanks. Both days I was "lights out" on the couch about 15 minutes after the table was cleared.
On the computing front, I've been busy playing with (that's R & D for all us techno-geeks) with the ins-and-outs of chroot'ing. Generally speaking, the process is not all that difficult once you get the base concepts sorted out. But for the most part the documentation accompanying the majority of the chroot tools/utilities out there really does suck. Take Juan Casillas' Jail Chroot Project for example. If you follow his INSTALL instructions you will, in all probability, have the same success as I did 'chroot'ing a user. Zero. The trick is (implied, but never clearly stated) you have to assign [path-to-jail-chroot-scripts]/jail as the user's shell. There's a good tutorial on using Jail-Chroot over on Linux Orbit that spells all this out (with thanks to Roland and David T. for the link). Once you get the implementation "fingered" out, the Jail-Chroot Project is an excellent little tool. Recommended. As a side note: Jail does NOT currently work under Gentoo (although it can be found in the Portage tree). It installs and builds without error, but the addjailsw command does not execute correctly; for some reason, Jail can't find the correct libraries to link to. This is an OS-specific problem, however, as I've successfully installed and configured Jail on a RH 8 box. Not sure if this is a library version issue or what. To the best of my knowledge Gentoo doesn't put its libraries anywhere odd, so I don't think it's a location thing. Oh well. I don't really feel a need to chroot myself on my own notebook {smirk} so it's not a major problem for me.
Back later. I don't have enough coffee in me yet to speak [or type] for extended periods.
19:00 hrs... It started about 4pm. Yessiree. Snow. Major Yuk. It likely won't stay and we'll still get the odd warmish day, but the weather's turned here. I have a feeling it's going to be a long winter.
I finally have a choot'd /home tree working to my satisfaction. As usual, it took some twiddling of the dials though. Here's a short nuts and bolts summary:
It works; I'm pleased. Now if I can just get that troublesome file I was fighting with last week to compile. Then I'd have CVS-chroot-SSH functionality as well. Oh well. Another task for tomorrow's TODO list.
Under the category of "new software I'm hacking on", I finally found a decent GUI CD-R/W program. It's called K3B -- it's in the Portage tree. It's got a decent, intuitive interface, and so far, appears to do the job. It's a KDE app, but it should run under GNOME providing you have the requisite libraries installed.
I see Mozilla Phoenix 0.3 is out. I think I'll go fetch it and see what's new and/or different. See ya.
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