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Last Week Next Week Insights Index Daynotes.com Email: tom@syroidmanor.com
Sometime it's fun to simply sit and watch a computer do what you bought it to do -- work hard. I'm currently compiling XFree on Kronk, and the lines are racing by faster than I can read them. No ccache either (not that a first run of ccache will garner you anything). 'Course all you GUI-enamoured folk wouldn't know anything about watching a program build from source ;-) Hold the flames -- just a joke...
I set Kronk to emerge system just prior to calling it quits last night. Unfortunately, the things didn't get too far. The process failed building automake, because a dependency on m4 wasn't satisfied. A minor course correction this morning fixed that: emerge m4 (which in turn brought a whole bunch of system stuff on its coattails), followed by another emerge system. Other than the one aforementioned minor fly in the ointment, Gentoo "base" built flawlessly. Not one error or hiccup. I got a clean kernel compile first whack, and everything -- so far -- is working as advertised. OK, XFree just completed; next I plan to emerge Fluxbox and the latest NVidia drivers. I think I'll leave GNOME building overnight and see what comes of that. I should note that I'm running a "stable" build on this system -- no cutting edge stuff; I get to play with enough of that on my notebook. Compiler optimization are basic as well: just -march-athlon-mp -O3. No fun rolling loops on this box :=)
The weather's been grand. There's storm clouds forming all around us tonight, but that's OK. The grass could use a splash or two of water. I might even get Leah's lawn mower dusted off and fired up this weekend if all goes according to plan.
Happy Sabbath all.
Greetings, and welcome to May. My how time flies when you're having fun...
I'm been at it since 5am, and I'm beat, so this will be brief-ish. It's been a busy few days on the computer front. Last night I installed Windows 2003 Server on the front partition of Kronk. Tonight I diced up the remaining disk space, and I'm currently in the thoes of watching Gentoo bootstrap. Amazing. I can hardly read the text as it flies across the screen. And I don't even have SMP enabled. This is something I've wanted to do since I bought the box -- install Gentoo and see just how fast it runs on the system. So far, I'm very impressed. But it's early in the game ;-)
I did several things different this time around, my new partitioning layout aside. First, as a test, I'm using ReiserFS for my root and home partitions. I haven't used ReiserFS since toying with SuSE two years ago. Guess it's about time for another look-see. Second, I've got a ext2 partition for /backup so I can test the rlbackup application I've mention here on several occasions. Here's my current partition/filesystem layout:
hda1 Windows NTFS 15GB hda2 /boot ext3 100M hda3 swap swap 1GB hda4 extended hda5 / ReiserFS 20GB hda6 /home ReiserFS 20GB hda7 /backup ext2 22GB
An interesting mix, no? We'll see. It's easy enough for me to throw Red Hat on the back partitions if something goes amiss, but I don't anticipate problems with Gentoo. I'm also using the new RC-4 ISO and building from the most current stage1. Again, we'll see. So far, so good.
Yesterday we bought Danielle a new bike. Of course, that meant we had to do something for Landon, so earlier this evening I went to a local bike shop and picked up a couple new tires for Danielle's old bike (they had been run flat on more than one occasion and weren't safe), and added a set of training wheels. Landon's in his glory. Pictures to come.
And that's about it for me tonight -- things to do, places to go, and the evening's getting late.
Mmmm. Not a good day for computers here yesterday. My dev box, running Windows 2003 Server and Red Hat 8.0, had a melt down. Well, not really a melt down, but GRUB won't boot any listed entries. I can't even read the boot screen -- it's black and white and distorted. I've be staring at grub.conf for almost 24 hours now, and I'll be damned if I can see any errors. I reinstalled GRUB into the MBR. I'm at a loss. I'm stumped. Wow. There's not too many things that bring me to a complete halt these days, but this one has. Oh well. As noted, it's just my dev box so there's nothing critical on the hard drive. And even if there was, I can still get to everything easy enough.
On reflection, I just might redo my partition layout. I spent some time Monday night trying to get rlbackup working. The concepts behind the program are excellent -- chroot'd access to the backup server via ssh, rotating backups, etc.; don't get much more secure than that. Unfortunately, I couldn't get it to run. Whenever I'd try to access the backup server (Kronk), I'd get an "unexpected EOF" error. This really stumped me for about three hours until I started looking at the installation itself. One of the files installed on the server (responsible for the chroot functionality, I believe) is bin.ext2. I'm guessing from the file name that rlbackup will not run on an ext3 filesystem for whatever reason, and all my Linux filesystems, on all my Linux systems, are ext3. So what I might do is re-carve the partitions on Kronk and create a 10 or 20 GB ext2 /backup partition on the tail of the drive. If that doesn't solve the problem, I can always re-format it ext3. Probably a good idea to keep backups on a separate partition anyway...
And on relatively minor note, I was working at the command line (that is, out of X) on
Phaedrus
most of yesterday. Late last night I typedstartx and XFree pitched an error back at me about some fonts being missing, then died. Bother. Again, I scratched my head, looked over the config file, and double-checked the font files were where they should be and were intact. What I don't get is the fact everything was copacetic earlier in the day, and I didn't touch anything (configuration-wise). So what broke my X-server? Dunno. After an hour of hair-pulling, I rebooted the system, typed startx, and everything worked as advertised. Mmmm.
The sun has returned to our fair land. It's cool though, and the wind has bite to it.
I took a day away from computers yesterday -- didn't even check mail. I find when I don't take at least one day off a week, daily things don't roll off my back like they should and usually do. Which is Ungood.
So what about that list of noteable "discoveries" you promised Sunday Tom? Here goes...
Last week I discovered Gnome. And while that's hardly a huge insight for some, it was for me. The last time I played with Gnome was 'bout six months ago and at that time it was horribly inferior to KDE. The start menu was populated with bunch of orphaned links. Nautilus crashed frequently. Compared to KDE, simple configuration changes seemed overly complex. But, as they say, "that was then -- this is now". Gnome 2.2 is polished and a worthy competitor to KDE. I've been using it for four or five days now, and I quite like it. So far, I've not experienced one single crash or blimp (with the desktop software itself). Nautilus also has at least one "feature" over Konqueror -- insert a blank CD in your burner or type burn:/// in the Nautilus address bar. A windows opens that you can "drag-n-drop" files to. Click Burn CD when done. Slick.
Friday I discovered an article on IBM developerWorks entitled Burning CDs on Linux. It could easily be subtitled "Everything you need to know about burning CDs from the command line". The one piece of the puzzle I was missing was how to burn multi-session CDs using cdrecord which the author covers fully. Excellent little resource. Recommended reading for all you wannabe Linux Gurus ;-)
I also discovered a lightweight word processor called TextMaker. The product claims to "seamlessly" read/write Word documents. I can't verify their claims fully, as I've only experimented with some relatively simple Word XP documents, but any I've tried do indeed open seamlessly and without the loss of formatting. TextMaker is available for both Windows and Linux. What I love best about the product is the fact it opens in about three seconds on my P3-1GHz notebook under Gnome. Try that with Word XP! If anyone has any long-term experience with TextMaker, send me your comments -- good or bad.
And last but not least, I discovered a good article on SNFS or secure NFS using an SSH tunnel. While I'm not sure I'd personally have any need for SNFS, the tunneling principles are applicable to almost any service you'd care to name.
I'm currently re-compiling/updating several key applications on Hydras: OpenSSH (to 3.6.1p1), Samba (to 2.2.8a), and rsync (to 2.5.6). One interesting note about rsync 2.5.6 (from the release announcement):
New option --link-dest which is like --compare-dest except that
unchanged files are hard-linked in to the destination directory.
(J.W. Schultz)
I plan to combine this new feature with a program called rlbackup (Remote Linked Backup) and implement a new backup system here at Syroid Manor. More as I go.
Yes, the wrap is off my right hand -- I took it off Saturday in a violent moment of frustration ;-) Yes, it feels much better. And yes, I'm typing two-handed today. Joy and rapture. Be well and have a happy day.
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