Current build (Sabrent Rocket Q onboard)

  I first wondered in chat in #gentoo irc back years ago when would pcie be looked at as a vehicle to store and retrieve from hard drives and bypass the bottlenecks built into SATA. Well it is wonderful I can report to have it working. I mean M.2 NVMe with PCIE 3.0 Sure there is a faster version. You can go ahead and pay for it if you like. Not likely I could see the real difference in any of my current usage at least. Perhaps if I were compiling Gentoo. But I would like to say thank you any way to those who made it happen and compliment them on a job well done.

  The new system I built uses the following components;

BaseBoard Manufacturer    Gigabyte Technology Co., Ltd.
BaseBoard Product    B450 AORUS M
Processor    AMD Ryzen 3 3200G with Radeon Vega Graphics, 3600 Mhz, 4 Core(s), 4 Logical Processor(s)

Model    Sabrent Rocket Q
Size    931.51 GB (1,000,202,273,280 bytes)

  That's as stated above a PCI-E 3.0 disk and for the board, disk and ram for a system like this. Each is selling for less than $100 US at the moment. A friend had several video cards and (perhaps because 4 years later the AC still hums without leaking) he had upgraded and sent me his 'old' RX 580 8 GB. I was more than happy to put it to use. 

  I opted for a Fractal Meshify C case and installed the Corsair 700 Gold I have been using for about 6 years now. It isn't modular but has been great. The case can accommodate water cooling if I decide to go that way and I never did give a damn about turning it into a strobe globe from a Friday night dance floor. Wire routing is nicely done in this particular case and it makes for a clean install and good air flow and heat exchange. The heavy power supply at the bottom of the case makes it more stable and less likely to tip. Of course having now eliminated spinning drives in the case. (no dvd) there is little chance of breaking anything if it did tip over. 

  'Pics or it didn't happen'? That little sliver of black under the video card....it's the heat spreader for the disk drive.

Works like a champ!

 

Parents and mis-information

 You have to trust the source. Take for instance my daughter. She doesn't trust me to teach her math. Now she asserts and is backed by others that teaching is something not everyone can do. I have to agree with some qualification.

While organizational skills, lesson planning and a working syllabus are necessary to teach a course; it is unnecessary to explain a single concept or problem. From years as a math tutor I can say that in order to explain a concept one must thoroughly understand it.

What is often missed on the (her) part of the student is that work is required. I asserted to her that you would not expect a carpenter, mason or any other tradesman to work without a tape measure. So why then say to me "I do not like graphing." Graph 2 points and define the line. The solution to where two lines meet is often as easy to solve graphically as any other method. (Yes, I did assume they were in the same plane.) Parabolas, ellipses, circles... it matters not we can represent them and solve most questions (probably enough of them to at least pass) just graphing these things.

And it is so easy when you get to set the parameters. If I let x=0 and solve for y; then reverse that usually that yields at least 3 graph points. A couple more easy ones and usually done. 

Trust me the work will pay off. It pays to dig a bit and verify especially these days. Years ago in a #Gentoo-chat channel someone commented that we were gaining so much information we would have trouble storing it at the current rate of expansion. My response was that we should be more worried about what we 'know' that is just flat ass wrong.

Recent events point this out to me very well as my own Mom who watches all the religious broadcasts faithfully swears to me 6 weeks before the presidential election that Biden will end Social Security. This while Trump makes the moves toward destabilizing the SSA. *SMDH*

 Stay safe out there. 

Is Calculus a waste of time?

To be fair about this let us give it a bit of context first. Since it was a conversation now several months old this perhaps could tell you how much it disturbed me.

The statement was "If you are an English major and literature your intended field; Calculus is a waste of time better spent on other subjects. If you never will use it no point in taking it."

From Which college-majors-need-calculus? via (theclassroom.com) 
you can add psychology and economics to the list that require it. It helps you to differentiate between science and bullshit.  If you want an MBA you need it too.

I don't recall using it on the job; but can say it helped learning to take larger problems and break them down in to smaller ones that can then be dealt with. It has helped me to impose order on the chaos (well some order). It gave me confidence and I get where if you could not do it ...it would deprive you of yours.

Hard to ignore the future when you have studied time as a variable. Chess anyone? How many moves ahead can you see? If we were just going to do the easy things, would we learn to solve a Rubiks cube?

If we avoid the difficult does that lead us to a better life? Or perhaps ignorance truly is bliss.

8+ years later

Opened this today and it has been almost a decade now since I last wrote. Life exerts its many pressures and things like a blog become incidental and unimportant.


 I moved on from Gentoo in the end I don't trust myself enough to know all the ins and outs of system setup and configuration and have moved to Debian.

What is more with Windows 10 support of the Linux command prompt I have been waiting for a tighter bash integration :) A lot could be won with a default bashrc that made use of the windows $PATH but then it is never really that simple and as usual the makers of the OS don't trust us not to screw it up. With good reason!

 Many things have changed thru the years. As my daughter grew I came to see some of my own responses to stimuli and modified them because of it. Feedback loop!

 I have been in cardiac rehabilitation twice now. Lost 40 pounds and when the weather permits a walk at least everyday. No more service trucks and 14-16 hour days in the heat of the summer on rooftops. No more dragging a torch and tanks to the roof. If you do this work guys make damn sure the exhaust fans work before you begin in an enclosed space. You don't want to have to change that fan motor with the racks leaking and it will scar your lungs o burn that torch and breathe that gas.

 We moved 1100 miles to Michigan to be closer to my wife's family due to health mostly. A friend I helped build a system for back in 2000 sent me a used rx580 and I bought a game and have been in it a lot since the pandemic thing.

 In 1993 I solved a problem and the company I worked for was bought out by Pilgrims Pride and is now the largest poultry processor in the US. And yes it is in some part due to the change in process I initiated back then. It eliminated almost entirely the loss of giblets during processing. There were of course several people involved and USDA approval was required so there is a record of the change for sure since the change added two more people to the eviscerating line. That is not all of it of course. Obviously I had already won my supervisor over and he took the idea to USDA after consulting with the brass.

 Now thing is I signed an NDA back when I first started with that company in 1990. I am sure that expired. I was actually let go a year or so later for being late one minute. (technically true) The change not only eliminates the loss of product it lowers the energy cost of processing and the load on the compressors and chillers saving money on energy and equipment replacement. The chillers were flooded type and the system required re-balancing at the hand valves (R-717)

Edit: Company- Gold Kist Poultry Live Oak, Florida Maintenance- Super Ray Mygrant(sp?) The change was to use chilled water(32 to 40 degrees F- the lower the better) when sending the product on to the diaphragm pumps and to the giblet chillers instead of tap water and separators; then adding chilled water at the red water chillers. Separators clogged and sent hot water to the chillers too often and the product had already passed inspection. An FOIA from the USDA should get the rest.

It would be nice if I got to profit a little from all that. It has yet to happen but then no other poultry processor has implemented this change as far as I can tell. In any case there is too much energy savings and waste to continue as that was done before.

What happened to the Gnome desktop?

G'day to ya! Hope the New Year has brought good things to you and yours.

The Gnome software project has brought dramatic change to the Gnome 3 desktop over previous versions. The layout and feel are more akin to mobile devices than the older desktops. For someone like me the upgrade was almost painful enough to make me give Gnome up altogether. I briefly considered KDE since there is a new version available. The new look has however grown on me.

The first thing I hated was the desktop switcher was just gone. Wrong. It's as simple as CTRL-ALT and the up/down arrow or just clicking on "Activities" in the top left corner and making a selection. In the end I find this an improvement.

 Click on "Activities" or hit the "Windows" key and you select "Applications" you see a screen similar to that above. The search box in the top right hand corner allows searching by name. As you enter a text string the icons change, narrowing against probable(random?) matches. YMMV

Default key bindings have been fine for me once I learned them. The "Windows" key gives the same action as clicking on "Activities"  My hands don't have to leave the keyboard to grab the mouse. Very useful when you want to switch between windows or applications in full screen.

A post on RedHat's forum (comment #3) had the following instructions in it in reference to changing the key bindings.

"Open System Settings.
Click Keyboard and navigate to the 'Shortcuts' tab.
Choose 'System' on the left column, and you can change the 'Show the activities overview' shortcut by highlighting it and pressing Backspace."

Also found this nice You Tube video showing how to customize the login, background and other settings.

There is also a newly forked desktop environment meant to give a traditional  (Gnome 2ish) feel called Cinnamon now at version 1.1.3 It seems to be available and hosted by Linux Mint. An ebuild is available in Gentoo. After all choices are a good thing.

Rewrite: How to use USE and Gentoo dependencies support

Good morning ladies and Gentoo-men. For today's mental exercise you are instructed to prove the Pythagorean Theorom

Editors Note: This is a rewrite to address some things in the previous version and make it more informative.

At one of the last LUG meetings I attended; a discussion with one user of Slackware turned up the topic of dependencies. In Slackware AFAIK since I have not used it in several years you get what Patrick Volkerding gives you.
I have not seen a way to do this with Debian or other distributions and it is one of the ways Gentoo is unique.

In Gentoo dependencies are pulled in by USE flags in several ways. In /etc/make.conf they are enabled on a global basis. This means when they are defined here every package on the box that can support that flag will be compiled with support in your application. Let's take some real world examples.

The pam USE flag adds support for pluggable authentication modules and I suspect that it is enabled on every Gentoo profile. ipv6 since it is all the rage and brings many new features to networking as well. However there have been some issues with ipv6 and my router (the communications point for the home network) does not support it. So making use of the global properties as in the following line removes support system wide without having to do it on a package by package basis which is currently done by hand. Instead just add this to /etc/make.conf

USE="-ipv6"

Initial system flags on Gentoo installations are determined by the system profile which is set through 'eselect' To view or set your profile is as easy as running the following command in your shell. Here I have selected the AMD64 Gnome desktop profile as is indicated with the *

localhost david # eselect profile list
Available profile symlink targets:
[1] default/linux/amd64/10.0
[2] default/linux/amd64/10.0/desktop
[3] default/linux/amd64/10.0/desktop/gnome *
[4] default/linux/amd64/10.0/desktop/kde
[5] default/linux/amd64/10.0/developer
[6] default/linux/amd64/10.0/no-multilib
[7] default/linux/amd64/10.0/server
[8] hardened/linux/amd64
[9] hardened/linux/amd64/selinux
[10] hardened/linux/amd64/no-multilib
[11] hardened/linux/amd64/no-multilib/selinux
[12] selinux/2007.0/amd64
[13] selinux/2007.0/amd64/hardened
[14] selinux/v2refpolicy/amd64
[15] selinux/v2refpolicy/amd64/desktop
[16] selinux/v2refpolicy/amd64/developer
[17] selinux/v2refpolicy/amd64/hardened
[18] selinux/v2refpolicy/amd64/server


Changing your profile greatly affects the packages installed on your system and should be done likely only once.

In order to tailor a system and only install the applications you want you can specify USE flags on a per package basis
Create the file /etc/portage/package.use if it is not there already and add your per-package Use flags there. Here is a short listing from mine on a new build adding gallium, llvm, gles support for mesa. As well as the ones I set for some mail programs, X etc.

##Global flags are set by the profile too
localhost david # cat /etc/portage/package.use
sys-devel/llvm llvm-gcc udis86
media-libs/mesa gles
sys-devel/gcc lto objc objc++ objc-gc
dev-cvs/git emacs cvs subversion gtk
dev-libs/udis86 pic
sys-libs/pam audit
app-portage/eix sqlite tools optimization
# For courier-imap support
net-mail/courier-imap -ipv6 gnutls
net-libs/courier-authlib vpopmail
# To satisfy lxde-meta
x11-libs/cairo X
x11-libs/pango X
sys-fs/udev extras
# add gnome-keyring support to gnome-base/gvfs
gnome-base/gvfs gnome-keyring
# X for freetype
media-libs/freetype X
#and I add what I want to satisfy dependencies
gnome-base/gconf policykit
sys-auth/consolekit policykit


At present I can ssh in from the random host so progress ;-) Installing via ethernet but plan to wireless the new build soon.

As to the topic by manipulating the file package.use and editing the USE line in /etc/make.conf you can tailor your Gentoo install. Running emerge -vp world or system will show you how dependencies are set on your system now and you can tailor your system and achieve a more stable host since by eliminating unneeded dependencies one can eliminate bugs that might be pulled in by them.

You may wish to run eselect profile set $ where $ is the value your system supports and see what emerge -vp world will show on different profiles but remember where you started so you can set it back if you don't wish to change anything. Proper building steps would include first choosing a profile then editing USE in /etc/make.conf and package.use to achieve fine grained control over dependencies on Gentoo linux.

Linux wireless

I've written about some of what works for my hardware. 2 boxes currently running Gentoo.Network manager has never worked for me on either of these. Gentoo bug #345143 I had no luck trying to setup Gentoo and wireless as it is currently documented.

For me what worked was using instead 'emerge -vp iw wireless-regdb crda' and configuring wpa thru wpa_cli wpa_passphrase and two files /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf and /etc/conf,d/net

As of version Connman 0.70 it does load the card properly but when it does it loses the routing table and I would have to add it each time I start up connman. ;-( Guess I could add it to local till they get it fixed or I find out what is the issue and then emerge gconnman and actually have a gui for networks. It also over writes /etc/resolv.conf without regard for using the nameservers provided by dhcp

I've a half completed application for arch tester. Got halfway and just not sure I want to dedicate the time. Also wondering what restrictions would come with actual association. Even generated a gpg key so I could sign email. I do like contributing but in actuality my profession and family life come first. Dedicating 20+ hours a week on a consistent basis is not likely. Could certainly host on a dedicated ip cheaply enough and give others access to the hardware on a speedy connection at times As is flameeyes power usage and my own high electric bills make me think twice about even running so much hardware.

In fact updating my pc's and a slight rate reduction last month dropped $80 from my utility bill this month. Modern hardware is providing more computing power at far less energy cost. One would think there would be new pc's flying off the shelf in the low and mid-range. This Coding Horror blog shows an energy reduction of 75% for hardware purchased today versus that purchased just 5 years ago.

Random progress

So now the hard drive has been moved to it's new home. A dual core pentium 4 and it lives further on sata2

I had run about 9 passes of memtest 86 and have done an emerge -e system since then. Everything is pretty stable.
Did have a bug report but this was an issue that occurred long before moving to this hardware but bug-buddy was
unable to report due to the keyboard failing to work when nautilus crashed. After moving from Nvidia/AMD 64 to radeon/dual core P4 I was able to type in my email address which was preventing the crash report.

The ATI TV 650 reports as

02:00.0 Multimedia controller: ATI Technologies Inc Device 4d51
Subsystem: ATI Technologies Inc Device b041
Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 11
Memory at ff400000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=1M]
Memory at dc000000 (64-bit, prefetchable) [size=32M]
Capabilities: [50] Power Management version 3
Capabilities: [58] Express Endpoint, MSI 00

I do not see the Xcieve module loading via lsmod. I do have I believe the proper firmware installed for the Xcieve 3028
I built much of v4l/tuner in kernel as modules Likely will try installing a tv app (after re-check MSI in kernel support)

Rescued a docking station for tuxmobl It was a timely event as it was on it's way to the great electronics graveyard in the sky

I am quite satisfied with the new Windows laptop it is snappy and capable. I have yet to try to boot a linux on that machine yet. May try a liveusb image at some point. The biggest drawback was the lack of hdmi Although the vga out is compatible with about any conference room in the US and a ton of image projectors.

At a time when labor is taking a beating sellable skills are still at a premium and so things may change for me soon.

For anyone using Gentoo please avail yourself of the 'eclean' command I have suggested some enhancements but it is already very useful.

Getting better.

Been down with a nasty flu for about a month. It lines your lungs with a thick phlegm and saps your energy. Rough stuff. Getting enough sleep to get better was the thing to do.

Congratulations to Flameeyes on his elevation to Gentoo QA lead. An excellent 'technical' choice by Gentoo and due recognition for what he has accomplished in the community. I am very pleased in having contributed in some small way to his fine book Autotools Mythbuster which he has recently expanded and edited considering some more minor changes I proposed. What is discussed is quite concise and a valuable resource worthy of a hard copy but available online. Please consider Flattr'ing it if you find it useful. I hope for him patience enough to work with us all ;-) (users and devs alike)

I decided to just build in support for the 'random' box's new hardware and just move the drive. Mostly done but the drive swap isn't. Several questions arise from this. I may need to run an 'emerge -e world' before/after the swap which will rebuild all packages. The compiler flag was set 'native' and the old AMD 64 3200+ vs a dual core Pentium 4 It is speculated that the chipset of the ATI 650 tv tuner card may be supported by the Xcieve driver in kernel. If it is I will know soon but cannot say until I move to the new platform.

The first computer I ever bought off the shelf arrived. I'll perhaps review it soon.

Connman is a blur of work and I'm sure it is wonderful for those it works for ...but not for any setup I've built yet. I'm still using wpa_cli at startup (tuxmobl and random) with my configured wlan fine. I've a lot to do if I had the time. ;-( and 'iw list scan' works fine with both SMC 2802 (p54pci) and WNA1100(ath9k_ht) For now it's cli tools only for me. The p54pci support requires a custom kernel build something non-trivial on some linux distributions (Ubuntu I know of Debian no idea Red Hat don't remember it being an issue ) But all my linux is wireless.

Really ruminating of late about Gentoo but I don't make a living from it. My change process seems to be more along the lines of dripping water, than a flood; since for me it's just utilizing older hardware and I've only so many projects for the boxes. It's cheaper to just turn them off though they do run pretty much 24/7 they need work jobs.

A Noid by any other name

Warning: Some of the following material qualifies as a rant.

Is still annoying. It irritates me how hardware manufacturer's and retailers conspire to elevate ram prices at times. Take a recent purchase I made from Ascendtech. I have this NIB cpu sitting on my desk and wanted a board for it. Well I had a system go bad and needed an alternate power supply to continue troubleshooting. I had no POST card at the time. So for (RC410-M2 and a P4 520) $51 US I found this setup. Note it is now a $75 part. It was shipped for $24 bringing the total to $84 and change. I could have ordered memory from them at a premium (iirc 2 gb was circa $69) price but I had some I thought to re-use. Patriot DDR2-667 It seemed a good compromise. A case and power supply and board and cpu except the memory failed to boot the machine. I pulled the power supply and checked the other board. This traced to a bad agp card. Unplugged the fan on the card and it booted. That system is down.

There was no manual shipped via Asecndtech so I called them asking for some help. He replied after I pulled it and we got a beep that I had incompatible memory. I could return it. (loose money on shipping twice) or try something else. Their memory was still higher than I see listed on the Ascendtech site today. I asked for manual and was told there was none available. He was just silent when asked what the specifications were. Or non-informative. (ddr2 667)

In the end I spent about 8 man hours searching chipsets and manufacturers to order compatible memory for the board from Kingston. I guess persistence pays in the end. Though I am not likely to buy products from them in the future and recommend you buy a complete barebones if you do. Newegg and Tiger Direct are the two vendors I use most often. BTW this board is afrom the Acer e500 bios splash says.

So now I have a dual core system I can consider dumping the AMD64 3200+ as the LGA 775 setup will be faster if more power hungry. Even that should be a wash though the 3200+ is an agp board and the newer board is onboard pci-e Not trivial to re-install a complete Gentoo on a new board Likely the quickest way would be to build in support for the new system in a chroot on another partition then just swap the drive over and reboot ;) YMMV of course but isn't tech support just like dealing with the 'Noid?

Editors Note: Thought a bit about this and will add here that as of the time of my purchase of Kingston ram for that board A Kingston sales rep replied "We don't sell memory for that board. It takes a special 'gigabit' chip" When i pressed conversationally she confirmed she just was not allowed to supply me with the req'd part number saying "We don't make that type anymore"

tuxmobl gits wireless

tuxmobl is progressing well. I now have working wireless on linux via a Netgear WNA1100 I initially had a few issues but have since ironed them out. Mainly with connecting to the router it seems. The connection is actually on a usb 1.0 port but has been stable enough for over a week with my router that the tether is gone. ;-)

Retrieving the latest firmware and installing it was as easy as making a directory for kernel/firmware and cloning with git. You should not need to rebuild a kernel to take advantage of an update in firmware your distribution has not pushed through (busy guys) I didn't initially do this but the method does have benefits. Requires git.

Launch a terminal and create a directory for the kernel and change from that directory -

git clone git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/dwmw2/linux-firmware.git

If you need to install a wireless-testing kernel to get the latest wireless kernel and build your own in order to achieve some added functionality (this is also an alternative to gentoo-sources though it may contain bug fixes and patches you are missing out on) create another directory for your new kernel source and cd there

git clone git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/luca/wl12xx.git

Making a kernel is a subject in itself. Gentoo has genkernel if you need help. Or you could visit Pappy's kernel seeds for a jump start.

connman is the next project but currently you would add it to package.keywords
if you are using the 'stable' tree.

#echo 'net-misc/connman ~x86' >> /etc/portage/package.keywords

One of connman's dependencies is iptables so that should help firewalling the connection and wireless should be firewalled.

Just do it. emerge =sys-devel/bin-86-0.16.18

Good day everyone. Today is the weekend. No homework ;) Just play.

In Gentoo there is a new minor version bump of bin86. (Yes it still lives even on x86_64) This version includes some system headers that were missing in dumps.c, objchop.c and catimage.c Patch submitted by yours truly. It should have test and stable requests soon I've also submitted a patch to Gnome screensaver that fixes a missing system header and mplayer that fixes another. Hoping they will get added soon since they have been around a while.

Edit note: The mplayer bug was closed but it does seem fixed now. A peek at the patch upstream shows that bin86 recieved a good deal of fixes and my minor patch applies to the 0.16.17.ebuild that existed

Gnome 2.32.x is out and I have been submitting bug reports where they are supposed to go. Gentoo doesn't accept all bugs on all software installed via portage at present. QA will change this soon hopefully. It is clear that Gnome and Gentoo could work better in some way. There is a large upstream here and Gnome should be well supported. If perhaps upstream would work with our development team we have the capability to significantly improve Gnome through Gentoo QA.

Ahh yes I said 'play' didn't I? Well how about let's rescue a princess. In Gentoo this is almost as easy as 'emerge -vp supertux'. I set the following in /etc/portage/profiles/package.use to resolve dependencies for this game.

# below added for supertux
media-libs/sdl-mixer mikmod vorbis mad flac mp3
media-libs/sdl-image png gif tiff
games-arcade/supertux opengl

It does pull in a few more dpendencies than are actually required but since they are already in they should hopefully satisfy other games based on media-libs/sdl Happy gaming.

Making a better distribution of Gentoo

G'day mate! Today we advocate not only mental but physical stimulation and your homework assignment is to master the boomerang.

My Gentoo installation on the Dell Inspiron 8000 (nee tuxmobl) shows some progress now since I have managed to successfully start X and obtain an LXDE desktop. Network access is currently through the PCMCIA card and I have yet to try the laptops built in NIC jack that would not work under M$. I can ssh in and set it building while working from 'random' host; which I did yesterday. Once set to a task I checked on some of my open bugs and posted a new blog. Flameeyes has hardware issues and reported he is not able to do tinderbox runs at least where it concerns the packages I use I can try to pick up some small portion of the work.Since updating to gcc-4.5.1 I am currently running 'emerge -e world' on the the 'random' host At 12:00 pm EST there are 290 of 856 packages done.

As the laptop installation proceeds I am forced to make choices concerning hal and udev. Since hal is going away but the documentation still outlines hal and until Gentoo migrates to openrc and baselayout2 hal is still used on Gentoo stable AFAIK With laptops there is the whole battery runlevel and issues of power management as I progress through the problems I intend to post updates here. Further there was discussion I recall on using i2c versus lm_sensors.

The 'random' host has already been migrated to openrc and baselayout2 and seem to be fine running udev without hal. The only thing that at last check actually still required hal on that system was the gnome-gvfs IIRC I chose gnome for a desktop on it since it seemed the easiest way to manage a working install without hal.

I must also keep in mind some kind of solution where integrating the other boxes into the network better yields access to what the linux and windows boxes here can do. Like shared printing and a shared rsync solution between hosts random and tuxmobl Then there is a little router project I have in mind as well.

Good luck with your own tasks. And enjoy a sunset near you with a friend. I'm off the weekend and hope to make some progress then so keep checking back.

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

Promises promises

To share with the pen leaves the messages for others over a longer time and it is less easy to mis-quote that the spoken word. Does everything really deserve to be written? Not in the least. So the intent here is to one day have something helpful to others and perhaps to even profit by the spread of common ideas and interests in some way. Enough to make living easier anyway.To that end this document will be undergoing some changes over time.

Flameeyes wrote Autotools Mythbuster to assist those using the autotools suite of software building tools to configure build and install programs. Being a non-native speaker there were ways I could help to improve it and perhaps help those developers using them and thus improve the distribution Gentoo and software built with it's toolchain since I use Gentoo on several machines.

Recently I pushed some changes I had made in my tree using git. Git is a version control system that allows collaborating authors to work on documents or code and also limit who can make changes Using linux I have as of yet not managed to get any of the graphical interfaces for git to work the way I wish; so the terminal and git is where syncing is done.

In my installation there are 3 branches.
1) 'master'
2) 'to-be-published'
3) 'user99s-to-be-published'.

Recently I did 'git push' from the master branch after a merge and new things went in after the most recent merge request. But I wondered how it was that the merges I had commited were not posted. Still after a year and with the new content that Diego has added the Guide is very good and I am proud to have contributed.

Gentoo QA team has implemented FORTIFY_SOURCE as an option in gcc and on amd64 This tests static sources for problems as software is being built. And should in the end lead to a stable tree for Gentoo that is well checked by development for bugs. This does not address runtime bugs but should limit them in number I would venture. If the QA team has it's way it might be a 'Badge of Honor' that software is considered stable and part of the Portage tree. There is lots of open source code out there. Wouldn't it be a good thing if you knew your software had been checked to the limit of your compiler and the tests development could come up with?

so what could happen? A lot of software could be removed form Portage. There could be a smaller set of packages that had passed Quality Assurance at first anyway. As long as enough tools can pass to have the tools we need as users then upstream bugs should be reported to them and if needed the ebuild masked. Large/stable projects code should have plenty of upstream anyway.

But all bugs should be reported to and tracked by Gentoo if the software is part of the Portage tree.

Making Gentoo more stable

In the past Flameeyes has written of testing sources at compile time. Now the Gentoo QA team has taken the next step and is now testing sources with FORTIFY_SOURCE At the time when this was implemented my system was about where I wanted it and I decided to emerge -e world This turned up a number of bugs some now closed. Response was mixed by the development team. some just recognized the bug and fixed it. Some still sit with no movement. Some were closed WONTFIX.

This last upsets me. Portage installed the software in all cases. And if there are bugs then they should be tracked until resolved or marked trivial. There may be times when the software should be removed from the tree. If bugs are not filed in Gentoo bugzilla then there is no way to ensure the bugs are properly fixed. See for an example of how this works FORTIFY_SOURCE turns up real bugs.and the QA team should be commended for their work. But if users are discouraged from even filing a Gentoo bug how can Gentoo track the resolution?

In an irc discussion bonsaikitten disparaged this solution citing a need for fixes and patches and the limited resources of the database. These may well be real problems that need to be overcome. They do need to be overcome though. Patches I would write if I could Unfortunately I missed my chance decades ago and instead I have a full time job and family and not the time to learn all the languages required.

I submit to him though I stood in line with a stack of punchcards waiting for my turn on the cardreader so I could run code I wrote on a mainframe before he was out of diapers...Maybe when his parents were in diapers.circa(1980) and just becuase I can't fix it doesn't mean I cannot be trained to. If he has the time ;) With a bit of luck Gentoo will still be around when I retire within the next decade.....perhaps then I will have time to to learn

Until then I assert that all bugs found by QA should be tracked so that the software can be removed if the issues found cannot be resolved properly and/or makes the software a security risk..

Perfect Storms Happen

Well there was a movie like that. But in this real world example. The Gentoo development people had just pushed through FORTIFY_SOURCE which runs some extra checks against software about to be installed on the system. And my system reaching something close to what I want in the end I decided to do an emerge -e world. This last was largely due to host 'random' reaching something close to a set of applications I wanted to keep and to make sure I had installed everything with the flags I wanted.

For one I had recently set all the flags 'mmx sse 3dnow and 3dnowext' off for at least the emul-x86- packages (to avoid any TEXT RELOCATIONS

Along the way I discovered that I had improperly set my LDFLAGS and had to redo those. The 800+ packages took over 3 days to install.The speed that some bugs were solved was rather amazing. Big thanks to Spanky (nee vapier aka Mike Fyrsinger) and Flameeyes and the rest of the QA team as well as the package maintainers themselves.

Oh as a policy please don't close bugs WONTFIX and remove the 'do not file a Gentoo bug" from QA notices. All errors should be reported and inspected as they could lead to security issues Gentoo should track all installed software for errors. In a perfect world nothing would go stable with QA errors.

Good work guys keep it up.

Gentoo be more better now. ;-)

What I do

In the HVAC industry a newer and more generic term is Climate Control. Essentially achieving targeted conditons in an mostly enclosed environment. Client comfort is job-1.0 and saving money on the utility bill job-0.991

My title is Building Engineer and I operate 2 chillers(500 ton Yorks) and a large Hurst boiler as well as monitor and maintain 10 walk-in refrigerators, 2 walk-in freezers, 44 water fountains, 49 ice machines, several ventilation systems 2 energy management systems, circa 20 AHU's(air handling units) and 76 VAV's (variable air vents) And some other stuff I dismember like the cooling tower and pumps and ad infinitum.

Sometimes it's fun. Sometimes it's not. All in all though I enjoy fixing things and live where I always wanted to.

I've always enjoyed learning and though I never got a Bachelors. I have an AA and the education has helped me understand systems. Especially math and later algebra and calculus has helped me overcome problems. When you approach a broken machine you should be familliar with how it performs it's tasks before you can fix it. This can be applied anywhere. Whether the system is a group of players on a team, a simple mousetrap, or a Gentoo Desktop machine

Take a simple window air conditioning unit. It has at least 6 different sub-systems. Evaporator air flow, Condensor airflow, electric power, electric control, refrigeration system( this is further subdivided into a high and low side) and drain system. Now it could be much more complex.

Breaking what a machine down into sub-systems and defining the jobs these subs perform is part of diagnosing machines or problems. Checking off the most common problems first. Elimination saves time.

It comes to mind the cheapest part is usually at fault. Being least reliable. (I do not wish to think much along this line when it comes to linux software)

As this concerns Gentoo and desktops ...init system(sysinit,boot,default), build-tools( nee toolchain), logging
X system and many others. Time with linux would tend to lead one to use only say one desktop environment, and few apps. I currently have 800+ applications Time to streamline I think. As few apps as comfortable would mean less places for things to go wrong. This applies across the board though not just to Gentoo. Fedora, Debian if you are running a desktop of any linux Pick one KDE, Gnome, XFCE or any other that fills your needs and streamline the machine. If you haven't used it this month...odds are you don't need it.

It's kind of like cleaning out the car I guess...needs to be done once in a while. And it might even help my work flow. ;-)

A handle history

And perhaps a bit of the why of things follows.

The first linux I used was a zipslack install. It was fostered by wanting another alternative to Windows(something I own a string of licenses back to DOS 6 for... many of those licenses support expired of course). Slackware did not permit a great deal of freedom to me. On alt.os.linux.slackware I joined a discussion of BSD's ports and linux posting as yggsdrasil a username I chose while posting through our dialup account.

I moved and DSL became available to me for the first time using BellSouth soon after Gentoo 1.0 was released by drobbins and I installed it dual-boot on the only box I had. So I'm dual booting Gentoo and Win95 and when not playing games I try to help out new users as bus_drivr on irc.

I try to sync one day and cannot BellSouth had gotten wise and was blocking sync. Keeping up with current on Gentoo was bandwidth heavy and likely they weren't real happy about me sucking there bandwidth. (This is just my opinion btw derived from experience though another user complained on irc about it.) Starts me ranting about my perception of what Gentoo should be able to do and that includes sync the portage tree via http protocol This would I pointed out also allow people essentially with just web access to install Gentoo.

Well that was answered by emerge-webrsync which was released written quickly. I do not recall how qucikly but today I look in the script and publicly thank karltk@ gentoo for helping to make Gentoo what it is today.

And once again to thank flameeyes for all his hard work.

And as for olbrannon? Well he was a Lord of a great elven guild during the third age of Middle Earth In the Tolkien language Olbrannon translates as 'Dream-Lord'

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.