From 'tuxmobl' to asparagus

Greetings fellow penguins and good day. I've edited the ticker above to add interesting articles about linux and embedded news. Breadboarding has come so far these last 30 years ;-) For today's mental exercise you are instructed to build a 4 bit binary counter from NOR gates.

I came by some older hardware in trade for labor. A Dell Inspiron 8000 with a fair battery, 1GHz Coppermine CPU and 256 MB of ram. It also had a 10GB hard drive and Windows XP installed. A 'hwoarang' version that seemed quite nice and incorporated some of the look of Windows 7.

I upgraded the memory to 512 MB and changed the hard drive out for a 40GB drive and booted a Knoppix 6 cd and used the 'alternate-install' method to chroot and install Gentoo. Along the way I found the onboard NIC seems to be bad but I have a Xircom PCMCIA card that provides 10/100 MB ethernet, a modem and 1394 and used that. The system came with an internal CDRW and the 2 bays can use 2 batteries or a DVD player and a floppy drive in some combination all of which came with it. So I thought all this worth salvage since it has a nice keyboard and screen as well even if the hardware is rather dated and everything worked in Windows.

The install went well till ready to boot the new kernel. Then issues with the graphics driver and the aty128fb driver it should have worked with yielded a blank screen. I chrooted back into the system and took all reference to any framebuffer except the default kernel framebuffer out and rebooted and have since rebuilt the system with -march=native Choosing a GUI of LXDE for a lightweight graphical display yields

tuxmobl runlevels # emerge -vp lxde-meta

These are the packages that would be merged, in order:

Calculating dependencies... done!

emerge: there are no ebuilds built with USE flags to satisfy ">=x11-libs/cairo-1.6[X,svg]".
!!! One of the following packages is required to complete your request:
- x11-libs/cairo-1.8.10 (Change USE: +X)
(dependency required by "x11-libs/gtk+-2.20.1-r1" [ebuild])
(dependency required by "lxde-base/lxsession-edit-0.1.1" [ebuild])
(dependency required by "lxde-base/lxde-meta-0.5.0-r1" [ebuild])
(dependency required by "lxde-meta" [argument])

Seems like this USE flag should have been provided and I'll need to look into how the ebuild sets it and maybe others won't see the issue as soon as I get the system doing something useful and get something to eat.

Thinking mushroom and cheese omelets and some asparagus with toast sounds good Even a bit of a splurge since asparagus is something I don't treat myself to much. I had some under a dripping air conditioner once that sprouted some nice ones years ago. On that note as soon as I can change the layout here there will be some other topics including food. Hmmm hope blogger has the features I want. ;-) since I want to be able to have this be kind of a meta-blog with the subs having their own RSS