|
|
|
Last Week Next Week Insights Index Daynotes.com Email: tom@syroidmanor.com
It's a beautiful day here in Saskatoon. As soon as I get this posted, I'll be heading out to tackle some yardwork, kill a few danelions, cut the grass, wash the car, and if time and conditions permit, shoot the damn partridge that keeps appearing in my pear tree. But first I need to procur some bug repellant. The mosquitoes that have taken up residence in the grass are of the tiny green variety whose bites itch like hell and swell to huge proportions -- viscous nasty littleu creatures. Part and parcel of living three blocks from a river.
Yes, it was indeed very irresponsible of Leah to leave three children alone and unsupervised, and fly off to Vancouver :=) I'd suggest, if you feel strongly about the matter, you email her and voice your concerns directly (heh-heh-heh... and she thinks she gets a lot of SPAM now...).
I've got a lot of ground to cover today, so I'd better cut the banter get down to it...
I'm currently in the process of implementing some major changes to the way I work every day. As noted in an earlier post, I installed Gentoo on a spare box with the intent of making the system a dedicated CVS server (Thumper, a P2-450 box with 256MB of RAM and a 10G IDE hard drive -- perfect for the task. No X, the stable Gentoo tree, and no extra fluff). That task is complete. Gentoo is installed and configured, and I have two initial 'chrooted' CVS repositories initialized, and working as advertised. I intend to -- over time -- move all my daily work into CVS.
Currently, all my Linux-based systems mount NFS exports from Hydras; Windows-based systems map to SMB shares on the same server. I backup all important data to alternate systems, and to my external USB hard drive Max. Tracking file revisions often gets problematical, however, because I don't consistently document changes (notebook can get unweildy over time and date-named directories don't reveal what changes were made or why) and because it's easy to lose track of which system contains the file I happen to be looking for. It dawned on earlier in the week, almost everything I do every day involves file revision of some form -- tweaking a config file on one of my systems, writing/revising a piece for IBM, documenting something new I've discovered in my travels, updating a bookmark file, etc, etc, etc. To avoid the aforementioned logistical nightware, why not keep everything in CVS and have each system pull key files from the CVS tree? I have a lot more reading and research to do on CVS (some of its key mechanisms are boroque and not well documented), but I think in the end the effort will be worth it. We'll see. I'll keep you abreast of my adventures.
I've almost got my recent new Gentoo installation on Phaedrus tweaked to my satisfaction. I'm not pleased with my browser options at the moment (Konq doesn't cut it for me, Phoenix/Firebird is still a little rough on the edges, and the Mozilla 1.4 beta I installed Wednesday is broken on several important fronts); I'm currently 'emerging' the latest stable Moz release: 1.3-r2, me thinks.
Time to shift my focus to the great outdoors. Be well, and enjoy the weekend.
The storm last night was pretty spectacular. There was lightening and thunder all around us, but it was almost like our house was at the eye of a hurricane -- the sky above remained calm and clear.
The more I work with, read, and write about CVS, the more I'm struck by its diversity and potential. So much so, I decided to set up one of my spare boxes as a dedicated CVS server. It will be Gentoo-based, very basic (no X; CLI only), and compiled against the stable tree. I'm contemplating using the system as an LDAP server as well, but I haven't refined my thinking on that one yet. First things first. The system is currently running through its inital bootstrap sequence. Hopefully this will finish before I retire so I can start the emerge system segment of the install; it can then run overnight.
I plan to use the box for two key things: Project management, and tracking changes to configuration files across all my systems.
I'm alone with the kids for the next four days -- Leah flew to Vancouver for the weekend to visit with family and friends. Hence, posts might me a bit short and disjointed until Monday. Bear with me please.
We've got some major electrial storms brewing all around us here tonight -- first of the summer. I think I'll play it safe and shut everything down for the evening. Hydras is the only system protected by a UPS, and I don't need anything jolted due to my own negligence. Wow... you can almost taste the electricity in the air even from the confines of my office. Have a good one.
I'm in Heaven. I started the emerge kde process about 10pm last night. I let it run throughout the day, as I had another machine to work on. It finished up about 5pm today (bear in mind, I add a ton of USE settings before the emerge, so it wasn't just KDE and X I emerged; it also brought in Samba, LDAP, etc.), sans one single error. Not too shabby, considering I was emerging from the Gentoo "unstable" tree. After dinner I copied over my previous XF86Config file and a few misc. 'dot' files from my home directory. I then emerged the latest nVIDIA drivers, Mosfet Liquid, GNUPG, and jEdit. Viola. A desktop fit for a king. I don't know what I missed with my last installation, as I kept it pretty much cutting edge through its duration, but this time around my desktop is discernably sharper and crisper. Every bit as sharp and crisp as XP with ClearType enabled.
If you haven't yet seen Nick Petreley's latest column on LinuxWorld, check it out -- Yet Another Gentoo Convert (YAGC) ;-)
Hope your week's going well. Mine's off to a decent start... Time to add some "goodies" to my Gentoo installation, then grab some well-earned Zzzz's.
I've been sitting in front of a keyboard for 14-16 hours a day, four days straight, so I intend to be brief tonight...
The day dawned clear and sunny. The temperature has warmed significantly, and while the wind is still a tad coolish, the forecast is for a steady warming trend through the week ahead. Joy and Rapture. I just might get my tomatoes planted this weekend ;-)
I've decided I don't like Red Hat 9 as much as I thought I did -- at least on my main working machine, Phaedrus. After using Gentoo for as long as I have, I've become accustomed to the flexibility and power of Portage. Saturday I decided I'd add the Mosfet Liquid theme to my Red Hat desktop. I couldn't find an RPM for the latest pre-release, so I pulled down the source and set to compiling it. Nope. No dice. Missing libraries. So I tried to install the KDE library-devel package from the installation CD, but RPM wouldn't let me. It wanted such-n-such a dependency. So I tried to install that, and it wanted yet another dependency. I swapped discs and flailed away for over an hour but the build configuration still failed. It was looking for a specific file that was clearly not on the machine, but I had no idea what package it belonged to. And even if I had managed to get it installed, chances are RPM would have complained about yet another dependency. Contrast this experience with Gentoo: One simple command, emerge mosfet-liquid-whatever would have brought in everything I needed in one simple operation.
That, and Red Hat is noticeably sloowww once you become accustomed to compiling optimized binaries.
Don't get me wrong. Red Hat is a good distribution and I use it on a lot of my machines. I can install it in under an hour, and for the most part, it simply works (wireless niggles aside). I've recommended Red Hat to a lot of my friends over the years, and I've yet to hear anything in the way of major complaints. But I wear a lot of hats around here (pardon the pun). I have an administrator's hat, a development hat, a I-don't-have-time-to-screw-around, let's-get-the-job-done hat, and, of course, a geek hat. I want my main working system to not only be cutting edge, but purr like a kitten. Sometimes that's a contradiction in terms, but not always -- not if you're working with an operating system you understand; a system you can pop the hood on and fix when things go awry.
So last night, I made an executive decision. I decided to put Gentoo back on my notebook. No, I don't really have three days to install it, but on the other hand, if I do things right... I installed the "base" last night which is the bootstrap process and the initial system emerge. Tonight, as soon as I'm done this, I'll boot into Gentoo and start X and KDE compiling. If it's not done in the morning when I'm ready to go to work, I'll kill it, boot into Windows, and let it finish tomorrow night. After all, a guy's gotta sleep -- why not use the downtime for something productive :=)
Night all. Things to do, news to watch.
Send questions or comments about this site to
webmaster@syroidmanor.com.
Copyright © 1998-2003 Tom Syroid. All Rights Reserved
