Friday, August 20, 2010

Too much information?

If you think so; Prokhorov is a case for those who say we are in over our heads. Believe I read he doesn't partake of the net. Billionaire and no cell phone? Or does his assistant use an old Russian model that runs with a hand crank? But pushing on anyway.

 Ubuntu's latest kernel image update managed to install without me adding the 'nomce' and Wes now has a nice (I'm jealous) box. I mentioned the build earlier.  

Linux Wireless is changing. My SMC 2802v1 adaptor and the older firmware version(installed by prism54-firmware if you are ACCEPT_KEYWORD'd) is working and reported. Gentoo documentation still recommends 'wireless-tools' and 'iwconfig' last I viewed the handbook. Kernel team reports that wireless tools are outdated and are linking 'iw' 'regdb' 'crda' as well as 'wpa_supplicant' All of these packages were available in portage. They are installed and seem fine. Removed wireless-tools. I like their style ;-) The tabbed interface is nice and it's not difficult to get a login and set subscriptions for mailing lists. 

While it's not quite the coming of Twitter(or is it) it does bode well for linux wireless. One of these days got to try networkmanager now my driver and connection seem stable. Had a working Gnome-2.30.2 mostly and was using the firefox-bin that has flash support. It works but grabs the sound after which no other device can get it back. Always something to steal the joy. Still need oss support thru alsa for GCompris using the pulseaudio plugin and sound worked at least then updated glibc and it broke...of course. 

Time to reinstall the firefox-bin I suppose. elogv has saved me many times. Reading those postinstall instructions is critical. As is following the instructions in them. Still struggling with git and that may be a blog in itself soon...in my last merge request I mentioned editing the 'git imposed history' Hmph...what I meant was somehow wound up with all the commit numbers and double entries in the file trying to use emacs and git together and wound up having to remove the crap. By the time I finished making everything right I was aggravated and summed it up wrong. 

 There seems to be a difference in my system and flameeyes ...naturally... well as far as emacs is concerned. Some characters in the Autotools-Mythbuster repository display as question marks in my emacs. I believe they were meant to be quotation marks. My system was built with utf-8 and the LINGUAS="en_US" no idea about his. Not sure what to do about that. nxml is installed as well.

Saturday, August 7, 2010

Using Gentoo

Gentoo differs in many ways from a standard linux distribution. It's hardware requirements,
the skill level of the administrator/installer and the intended purpose of the machine are all
factors in deciding upon a distribution.

Gentoo keeping around the sources and running Gnome 2.30.2 is 21.2 GB This is a huge
number compared to most package managed distro's Much of this is the sources in
/usr/portage/distfiles/* (4.1 GB)
/usr/src/ (7.1 GB)
Compiling software on old slow hardware can be quite time-consuming as well.

However...it's quite easy to tailor make your own system with Gentoo's package management and
the judicious use of portage. How to make your own SystemRescueCD for instance.
Create your own custom ebuilds and even your own binpkg host if you
wish or a cross-platform toolchain for embedded development.

If your skillset is more limited but still you would like to try linux; Ubuntu is a good choice for first time users of linux systems that "just want it to work". Even so it is not bug free. A recent kernel update added a new grub boot option on a system I built and without copying the needed "nomce" at the end of the kernel line. Result Lucid Lynx unusable for the user. On a working new system built for linux. I don't know why grub chokes without
the "nomce" flag but I'll file a bug as soon as the user sets up his Ubuntu One Care account so
they can hopefully address it.

Got introduced recently to NerdVittles and PBX in a flash from some acquaintances at lugot.org (which seems to be down atm SMH)
I see Asterisk has an ebuild in portage as well.