Did my Gentoo install on my Laptop last week. It's sweet. Upgraded the the 2.6 kernel with no issues. I am having some issues with Kate. I think it's because I compilied everything with "march=pentium4", which I was warned against. Started recompiling kde-libs and kde-net with "pentium3" before I left for the weekend, so we'll see if everything works right when I get back.

Actually, as I was writing this, I realized I was having the same issue on my other box, which leads me to believe that it's a imap issue, not a kate issue. Bummer, back to the drawing board.

--BiggJ

Gentoo --

Well, I have Gentoo installed on two different desktop machines and running well. The next step is to get it setup on my laptop. Which I am not sure when I am going to be able to do. As it's my main box, I really can't go without it for several days. That being said, I could do a Stage 3 install, which is the base system from binary, but that kind of defeats the purpose. Oh, well, whatever I do, I am going to have to do it soon.

TiVo --

I finally got shell access on my tivo, however, it broke the recording mechanism and caused the box to randomly crash. So, I decided to revert to a backup and leave the hacking for normal computers.

--Josh

Worked on installing Gentoo (all weekend), which meant a lot of hunching in front of monitors, very little sleep and way too much coke (the drink) and cig's.

However, it was well worth it. It's wicked fast!

My Gentoo Forum profile:

http://forums.gentoo.org/profile.php?mode=viewprofile&u=34571

--J

The good:

I set up fetchmail with dropmail and IMAP to do all my email. It's pretty cool. Fetchmail grabs my mail, dropmail filters it in to the correct folders and then I connect to the IMAP server running on my local box to check mail. It's great. This way, it's really easy to backup my mail filters and emails. The worst part about having to start over with a new install or mail client is having to redo the filters.

The bad:

My main box is a pretty rock'en laptop (P4 2.4GHz w/ 1G RAM). So I have been trying to get APM working so that I can suspend it and have it drop into power saving mode while transporting it. By default, it kills the display when shutting, which isn't bad, but it would be nice if it acted like a laptop is suppose to. I'd like to be able to close it, drop it in the case, take it home, and bang, all works as it should. Without having to go through the 5 minute shutdown and boot up.

So in the process of trying to get APM working, I found that I was going to need to recompile my kernel, which is a new thing to me. I downloaded 2.4.22 (was running 2.4.20-something which comes with RH9). With a lot of help of a co-worker of mine, I recompile it, APM support on and Unsynced TSC support on. Which is apparently what is needed for APM to work correctly. I then modified my grub boot line with "notsc" and rebooted.

On start-up it hung. I found out that I needed to install an i386 version of glibc to boot with notsc because the i686 version requires it.

The Ugly:

So I went and downloaded a i386 glibc rpm, and installed it (had to use the --force flag because it barfed saying that version was already installed). Right after installing it, I started getting seg fault errors. Reboot, hang, reboot single user mode, hang ... ummmm ... reinstall. :(

The Next Day:

I am pretty much back up now, not having to format my home partition was a huge help. But after all that, I am still in the same position, APM don't work.

The Quandary:

Now I am starting to think about maybe switching to a Mac ti-Book. You can pretty much do everything with OS X that you can do in Linux, including the fetchmail->maildrop->IMAP thing I am doing. You can run X and more open source apps. But I know that I would miss being able to hack my GUI, and as much as it can drive me nuts, I love the learning that goes into using Linux. Either way, it isn't like I can snap my fingers and a $2500 ti-Book will drop in my lap. So for now, it's Linux, but come time for a new laptop, it will be a hard choice. As for desktops, my Linux box at home works great, although I am thinking about switching from Redhat to Gentoo, but I am not sure if I am quite ready for that.

More to come...

I ran across this and found this quote that was too cool (to me) not to pass on.

"Contrary to popular myth, you don't have to be a nerd to be a hacker. It does help, however, and many hackers are in fact nerds. Being a social outcast helps you stay concentrated on the really important things, like thinking and hacking."

I found this in a white paper that was written about how to be a "hacker". He defines "hacker" as:

"... a community, a shared culture, of expert programmers and networking wizards that traces its history back through decades to the first time-sharing minicomputers ... if you have contributed to it and other people in it know who you are and call you a hacker, you're a hacker.

There is another group of people who loudly call themselves hackers, but aren't. These are people (mainly adolescent males) who get a kick out of breaking into computers and phreaking the phone system. Unfortunately, many journalists and writers have been fooled into using the word `hacker' to describe [them]; this irritates real hackers no end."

Found at: http://catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html

Okay, It's been a while since I have written in here, but this is what's new ...

- I gave up on my search for ASP on Linux (for now). Mostly because the need for it went away and I don't really like ASP all that much.

- I spent 15 minutes trying to explain to my 14 year-old brother why he couldn't install GAIM on Windows 98, which lead to me having to explain "source code", "compiling", "Linux" and "Unix" too him. What are they teaching these kids? ;) His mother is an MCST (trainer), so it isn't really his fault.

- My work laptop died. The display went out. I sent it back to the factory for repair (30 - 45 days). Coolest thing though, I pulled the hard drive out and slapped it into an older one that I had laying around, and Linux handled the rest (drivers and all). I must admit, I was a bit surprised it worked.

- I set up a new Linux box at home. RH9, Ximian, etc. It's getting so easy to use that my girlfriend figured out how to get on a launch a browser to check her webmail (which without "the little blue 'e' thingy" kind of surprised me).

- I moved (new apartment) and switched from Charter to Comcast. Hmmm ... Comcast is usable, but sucks compared to Charter (which isn't that good). With Comcast you have to register you MAC Addy thought Windows only software that they have. Also, if you want to use a router, you had better have that hooked up when you register. Lucky, I had just bought a new machine (home Linux box mentioned above) so I could use the default Windows install on that to register and then wipe it and reinstall Linux. Still, the Comcast software pack comes with all this connection optimization software (which I am guessing will keep you online for longer then 24 hours). So I am going to to have to get a Windows box set up for my girlfriend and install the software on that (I guess).

Anyway ... back to work ... laters.

If you haven't read this ... you should, it's great!

Dear Outlook users ...

There was a link to it on the /. main page in one of the linux widgets (can't remember which one).

Anyway ... happy reading.

I installed Mono and mod_mono (for Apache) today. The installation instruction were kind of confusing and there were weird difference between Mono (mod_mono) Apache config instructions and the config instructions on the mod_mono site. As I installed the rpm from the mod_mono site, I followed those. I believe that I got everything setup per the instructions, but I am getting a weird error when hitting a .aspx page (I would paste it in, but it's on my computer at work), but it wasn't covered in the FAQ. Everything I have seen on group.google.com show that the error has something to do with a missing object on the page being loaded. That being said, the page I was loading was one of the examples that came with the mono install, so it makes me wonder.

I think tomorrow I will try uninstalling the standalone mod_mono rpm and follow the instruction on the main Mono site. My guess is, the error I am getting has something to do with conflicting version (or something).

I was looking at Ximian's Developer site today, for one thing or another, and I came across two Presentations which I thought were interesting.

The first was on GTK# (written in C#) and the second was on Mono (www.go-mono.org).

My first thought was; "What's with the trend of porting crapy Window's dev technologies to Linux?"

But then I thought, it's kind of cool... I can run linux and still develop in .NET (... not to sound like a whore, but there's a lot of money in ASP and ADO development...) without having to run IIS inside of VMWare, or someting equally as nasty.

I had some trouble with X today. "Kate" caused it to crash and I had to do a force quit which caused X to get a little tweaked. For some reason xfs didn't start. I restarted it and it everything was fine.

This is weird because everything was running great until I installed kde-libs, kde-base, et al. I installed them to run "k3b" which was recommended to me as one of the best burners on linux. I must admit, it is great. But I don't know if it's worth the extra weight of KDE.

It seems to me, and don't hate me if you love KDE, but KDE is the Windoze of the Linux desktops. It's bloated and tries to do too much for you.