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Last Week Next Week Insights Index Daynotes.com Email: tom@syroidmanor.com
Sorry about that. I B0rked my Gentoo installation Saturday morning and I simply did not feel like fixing things. Anything. I was in one of those moods where I just wanted to do a few odd tasks and surf a bit without a whole bunch of effort. I was also in a frame of mind that if things were not going to go my way, I was going to take my toys and go home. I did actually boot into XP for a spell, but that lasted all of about twenty minutes. Guess you can say that I'm a true convert. Having worked almost exclusively in Gentoo/KDE for the last six months I've developed a full and complete appreciation for "the ways of Linux". I don't like Winblows. I don't like the bloat, I don't like feeling constrained by the environment, and most of all, I don't like staring at that blasted hour-glass cursor waiting for an application to do something. Heh. Amazing how much my world's changed in just one year...
Whadda-ya-all-break-this-time-Tom? My PCMCIA card manager. System would boot up and lock solid at "... watching two sockets". The Gentoo team released a long laundry list of package updates Friday, and rather than follow my own sage advice (emerge -up world, then emerge any desired packages individually testing the system for stability between important/key updates) I went ahead and did emerge -u world then scurried off to do something. The updates compiled without error, but I didn't notice pcmcia-cs listing, and I really really really didn't want to emerge pcmcia-cs. It overwrote my "working just swell" installation, and in do so, broke pcmcia fully and completely. Bad Tom. Forty strokes with a wet noodle.
The fix was easy enough, but as noted, I did NOT feel like doing administrative-type stuff yesterday. Boot into the Red Hat install on the back of my drive, mount the Gentoo '/' partition, and replace the contents of /etc/pcmcia with the backup I carefully tucked away under /home/admin a month or so ago. Ta and Da. I'm happily pecking this out using JEdit (4.1 pre5) under Gentoo.
A big thanks to everyone who took the time to write me with comments and/or suggestions for the problems we're having with Danielle. It's nice to know we're not alone For anyone interested, here's what we've done so far:
My sense of smell on Friday as spot on. It started to snow later in the day and hasn't quit since. No accumulation to speak of, and what fell yesterday blew over into Manitoba this morning, but it would appear that winter is here to stay. Bleh.
We have some friends coming over for dinner, so I'd best get my butt in gear and get started on the roast I'm cooking. Cheers.
Good Morning. Well, actually, I'm just trying to be polite -- so far, it's anything but for me. Good grief. Welcome to Friday, Tom...
Oh Bother #1: I updated KDE-BASE from CVS last night. The process completed without error, but I've lost my cool "auto-magic" NFS icons from the desktop. Up until the update last night, whenever KDE started it placed two icons on my desktop pointing to the NFS mounts referenced in /etc/fstab. The icons depicted whether the drive was mounted or not (via an arrow overlay); if it wasn't, I could simply click on the icon to mount it. They're gone, and nothing I do will reproduce them. Trivial in the big picture I know, and eye-candy for sure, but I miss them. Hopefully it's just a code malfunction and the devs at KDE haven't removed them.
Oh Bother #2: The LCD on my notebook is going again. Having had 4 or 6 of them replaced, I more than a little familiar with the early warning signs. The little "phosphers" that paint the graphics on the screen start to "dance", colors morph (blue turns to purple), and slowly over time the effects become more pronounced until the screen is unreadable. Guess it's time to call Dell. AGAIN. Would I buy another Dell notebook? On reflection, I'd have to say "yes". With one important qualification. Dell's price to value to feature ratio is one of the best around. But they obvious have issues with some of their components (namely, keyboards and LCDs). I'd buy another Dell, but I'd never, never, never buy a Dell without extended onsite warranty (which I have, thank goodness).
Oh Bother #3: We learned yesterday that Danielle's having issues with her schoolwork. In short, it's not getting done adequately, or on time. She's always been pokey about getting her homework done -- sometimes it takes her three hours to complete something that should only take 15 minutes, primarily because she doesn't concentrate/focus on the task at hand. Our approach so far has been to encourage her, and do everything in our power to help her concentrate. She is 8, however, and as I understand it, 8 year-olds are not the most focused people on the planet. Unfortunately, it's come to our attention that Danielle's been lying to us about what she needs to do for homework; I assume, to shorten the amount of time she needs to sit at the table and "get the job done". Needless to say, this is Very Ungood. Leah and I need to nip this one in the bud quickly. We just haven't decided how to accomplish that yet.
It "smells" like snow today. Bleh. Just when the last dump had almost melted. Guess I'ma gonna have to invest it a new snow shovel this weekend...
Sorry, no link-fest today. Yesterday was a bit chaotic, and I'm still trying to find the top of my desk. Organizing, tracking down, and consolidating my multitude of bookmark files feel through the cracks.
Cheerio, and have a safe day.
A spectacular sunrise this morning. The whole eastern sky appeared to be on fire with colors ranging from "fire engine" red to deep magenta. Truly nature in all its glory. No, we don't have to worry about any of that "Red sky in the morning, sailor take warning" stuff here -- no sailors in Saskatchewan (WAG).
Let's see now... what's up around Syroid Manor... My "unstable" Gentoo installation remains as stable as a rock. I've been pounding hard on it for two plus days now, and I've yet to break anything (which in itself speaks volumes, considering my track record). It seems that I'm not the only one that experienced "library breakages" when switching to the unstable tree. The Gentoo mailing list and IRC channel were unusually busy with people asking for help, and explanations of possible fixes; I see this morning the devs have masked the glibc-2.3.1 ebuild "until the problems are sorted out". Fixing things -- as they currently stand -- is not terribly difficult, but it does call for an understanding of static linking and libraries. Given that no two Gentoo installations are exactly alike, what you have to do is figure out which programs and libraries are statically compiled against glibc, then re-emerge anything that is. I accomplished this by watching and interpreting any error messages encountered at build-time. There's also some fancy find/sed/grep/piped-to-a-file commands floating around the Gentoo forums that provide you with a list of packages that will need to be updated so you can have everything you need in hand before beginning the update.
My memory problem with Phoenix turned out to be Bad News. Either the guy who sold me the board shipped it with 4 64M DIMMS (instead of the as advertised 4 256M DIMMS), or I have a whole bunch of B0rked DIMMS. Only one of the DIMMS will actually allow me to boot the system (testing each one individually), and it only comes up as 64M. If I put all 4 DIMMS in in just the right order (get the order wrong, and the system will not boot), I get 256M. Mmmm. I solved the problem temporarily by pulling two 256M DIMMS out of another machine. Having Phoenix work without incident is important given m.y current TODO list; I'll pick up some more memory next month.
I've got a bunch of good links to share, but they're spread all over hell's half-acre. I'll trying to get my bookmark collection sorted out later today; I'll have a "link-fest" tomorrow.
Nothing of interest to say today -- happens sometime ;-)
Our weather remains "frosty". Temp climbed all the way up to about 10F yesterday. I am NOT looking forward to this. It's going to be a long winter. Ah well. The forecast is for some warmer weather by the weekend.
My Gentoo install on Phaedrus is now built against the "unstable" tree. It wasn't exactly what I'd call a seamless transition, and the errors I got compiling PAM-0.75-r8 didn't immediate suggest where the problem lay, but in the end I triumphed through sheer force and determination ;-). The problem was one of the first packages updated was glibc (to 2.3.1), which broke some other libs compiled against an earlier version. Updating libraries is almost always a tricky process under Linux. Solution: re-emerge glib 1.2.somethingoranother. The only other package I could get to build was OpenSSH 3.5 -- the configuration phase wants to find something called libwrap which is obviously not anywhere to be found. No idea where to find it either, but I'm not terribly concerned. The good news is "unstable" Gentoo is -- for all intents and purposes -- just as stable as what I started with yesterday morning. No doubt I'll run across some broken bits as I explore further, but whatever I find will likely be relatively minor. Between Portage, the growing selection of stable refined packages, KDE 3.1, and the new stable/unstable tree branch, Gentoo has quickly matured into one kick-ass distribution. I'm thoroughly impressed. Gentoo is a bit like a sharp knife, though -- you have to be very careful where you point it. BTW, I have OpenSSH installed on all three of my Red Hat distributions now, and it's working without error or incident.
[UPDATE: Just resolved the problem with OpenSSH -- another library issue. OpenSSH is dependent on tcp-wrappers, which "owns" libwrap.a. The file was present on my system, but library got B0rked by -- in all probability -- the glibc update. The fix is to simply re-emerge tcp-wrappers. OpenSSH will now build without errors.]
I installed Quanta 3.0 as promised. Short story, Quanta is still horribly broken -- I managed to get it to segfault in four easy mouse clicks. As Robin Williams would say, "...piece of fecal matter". First and foremost, Quanta does not word wrap by default, which IMHO is assinine. Who in their right mind wants to constantly scroll right to see the code they're writing? Second, Quanta does not do "soft wrapping" (meaning the program doesn't actually put line breaks into the document; it just looks that way when you view the document). Instead, Quanta forces you to set a wrap length, then inserts hard breaks into the document. Third, setting a wrap length cause the program to segfault. Beauty. Guess I don't need to tell you Quanta is no longer resident on my system.
WHOA! Lots of new developments this weekend as I napped my life away... The devs at Gentoo have added a much-requested feature to Portage. Users can now choose between a "stable" and "unstable" package tree. Stable is the default, so if you want to use the stable tree, do nothing. If you want to experiment with the bleeding edge, simply add ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~arch" to /etc/make.conf, where arch is your system architechure (x86, ppc, sparc, sparc64, or alpha). Details at the top of the Gentoo Home Page. I added the unstable option, did an emerge rsync, and Portage is now busy building me a brand new system including GCC 3.2-r2, glibc 2.3.1, a whole slew of updated system utilities/tools, blackdown JDK 1.4.1-beta, Portage 2.0.41 (you'll have to unmask this one), xfree 4.2.1, new versions of gnupg and ncftp, etc, etc. The list is long and noble. I'm pretty sure there's a partridge in a pear tree somewhere in there -- I just haven't seen it flash across my screen yet. Am I trying to break my favorite working environment? Nope. I just have a lot of confidence in the Gentoo folks and the distribution's ability to handle errors gracefully. As noted in previous posts, I've been working with KDE's CVS tree for almost two months now, and while I don't always get clean compiles when I update, my Desktop has yet to break in a way that makes it unuseable. This is also my way of giving something back to the Gentoo development process. I excercise new releases in a real working environment and file bug reports as appropriate. Besides, someone has to "do these silly things so you don't have to" ;-)
And it would seem that Quanta 3.0 has gone "gold". Frankly, I have no idea when this occured (could be old news to some of you). I haven't been monitoring the product for a while, as I'm perfectly content with JEdit; I've come to find I don't need all the baggage that comes with most "industrial strength" HTML development environments. The last time I looked at Quanta it was still in beta, and IMHO, horrendously buggy. I do plan to suck it down later today, though, and have a look-see. Quanta has tremendous potential as an Open Source alternative to products like FrontPage... providing the developers got their code-base cleaned up.
Does the name Mitch Kapor ring a bell? For those unfamiliar, Kapor was the founder of Lotus Development and a pioneer in the world of PIMs. He was also the brains behind Lotus' Agenda product. Well, Mitch is back in the news after a long hiatus. He and a small group of cohorts are developing an Open Source "Interpersonal Information Manager". It will do email, track your contacts and TODOs, and have calendaring functionality. And it will do all this without any server-side dependencies. "Chandler" will initially run on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X (I assume this means Kapor has plans to support other platforms down the road). Timeline for a 1.0 release is late 2003, early 2004. Kapor is not only back pushing the software envelope, he's also busy working out the details of a new Open Source business model. According to the article, Kapor wants to make his new project "self-sustaining by 2005 through a variety of funding sources". The key ingredient is to make Chandler highly extensible, then sell a commercial license of sorts to developers and/or businesses that want to use Chandler as a base to create highly customized applications from. The legal vehicle for all this will be the Open Source Application Foundation. All in all, very cool stuff. I was Kapor and his team all the best in their new venture. If there's anyone who can add a spark of vitality to the software industry, and perhaps create a new sustainable Open Source business model, it's Kapor. This is a project that bears watching.
Then there's the mundane world of Sabre Rattling and politics. It would seem that US Secretary of State Colin Powell is once again speaking out in direct opposition to the Bush administration's much-repeated policy toward Hussein. Bush, under no uncertain terms, wants a "regime change". Powell says the focus is on disarmament; that the potential exists for Hussein to stay as long as the nukes go. It's fun being a Canadian. We get to sit back and chuckle at the inconsistencies of the world, all the while steering clear of direct involvement in anything that might be even remotely contentious.
I've got some debugging to do on my chroot/CVS/SSH box today, plus a memory problem to resolve. The system has 1G of RAM in it, but the BIOS check and OS itself is only showing 254MB. Mmmm. I don't like differing opinions, especially when they involve memory. Time for some Sherlock Holmes-type investigation. Have a good Monday.
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