the corner office : Lazy Monday

Lazy Monday

Not the most productive day yesterday workwise. We went through to Jhb International yesterday morning to meet Ronwen's cousins who had a stopover en route from Ireland to Durban. Quick brunch, and sent them on their way again.

We got home and I should've buckled down to more Formal Logic, which is to say I ended up spending the most of the day playing with my Gentoo installation. We're down to a single 1Ghz Athlon these days, pending a few repairs to my other PCs and me finding the time to accumulate all the components for a new Beast Box. So, I'm trying to get this puppy going as a dual-boot. I haven't yet gotten X-windows running, which does limit the machine's functionality as a Linux box, apart from browsing the web using Lynx. But, we persevere...

Two major hassles - the first, getting X windows configured. (Backing up, budget a few hours to get X windows recompiled, before configging). I finally got it working late last night. I'm using a grotty old ATI card which is going to give me more grief, I know it. The other PITA was getting my USB mouse working. It turned out I'd compiled USB support into the kernel but no support for HID (human interface devices) drivers, for things like, oh, the bloody mouse, say. So Linux could see the USB device, but didn't know what to do with it. A bit of pain getting the various kernel configs sorted - if you break a kernel compilation then you know you've cocked up somewhere. All fixed now, though.

I also hauled Gnome and KDE down the wires. I've always preferred KDE but it's been a while since I've played with Gnome, so I figured I'd broaden my horizons. I left Gnome compiling overnight. I woke up this morning and it was still chugging away... had to stop it halfway through to reboot into Windows to check my mail and whatnot. I also know that on my considerably more beastly previous machine, it took over 6 hours to compile KDE, so I have a looooong way to go. It's crazy, but ultimately very rewarding in a sad, geekly kind of way.

I watched Scent of a Woman was on SABC2 last night. It was surprising, watching it again, to pick up the number of expressions and lines that Al Pacino made famous in that movie. Hooha! (hmm, come to think of it, that's the only one I can remember this morning ;-)

Really grotty weather in Jhb today - there's snow in the Berg apparently, so the whole country's freezing. Tomorrow's forecast high is 10C. Brrr.

{2004.07.26 23:03}

Comments:

1. Neil Blakey-Milner (2004.07.27 - 14:10) #

You really like to do things the hard way, eh? Although, I suppose it's useful to learn that way.

These days I'm reduced to 99.95% binary packages on my primary desktop, and a few custom-built-the-Debian-way kernel modules (ALSA and nVidia). I just don't have the time to do things the other way.

Watching apt-zip-list and apt-zip-inst upgrade all my binary packages in a few minutes was just priceless. ;)

2. Colin (2004.07.27 - 22:38) #

Yeah, Gentoo is firmly in the 'crazy-ass hobbyists' category, and I'm still battling to grok stuff you folks were playing with in 90s :)

But I'm finding it incredibly rewarding as I start clawing my way up the near-vertical learning curve, and some of the tinkering starts paying off.

Of course, some could argue that the time could be spent learning other things, but that's another story ;)

3. Vaz Lube (2004.08.04 - 09:13) #

Well, Gentoo is derived from LFS project IIRC. Took a look at install procedures for Gentoo. I gave it a miss.

I do recall the fun trying to install Slackware .97 or something like that off millions stiffies on a 386. At end of the milliena, it eventually managed to fly.

Personally, I'm FreeBSD guy, and the ports collection rocks compared to portage, pkg, rpm etc. All I can do is issue portupgrade command and it does the job. (dependances gets taken care of).