gentoo

Put the simple file in "/usr/share/bash-completion" with the ones I use most.

For about a year now I have had a very annoying problem with my file server. One of the two Seagate drives simply disappeared from time to time. It was never the same one and I couldn't tell what pattern the disappearances followed. The system log looked something like:

Jul 11 18:55:02 hostname ata5.00: exception Emask 0x10 SAct 0x1 SErr 0x190002 action 0xe frozen

Sometime when I was updating drupal from 6.10 to 6.11 I thought I was going to be clever and
update as soon at the core module was available upstream. Not to wait until it reached portage. I

The editor emacs continues to amaze me. For some time now I have been using emacs as a day-planner in the excellent org-mode. Once you get used to the commands it's a breeze to create documents with structured headlines, internal and external links, etc. It's also very versatile in that it can export the same document to different formats like html or ascii.

So I decided to spice up my Gentoo work station a little. I was having a little too much crud lying
around like ldap and mysql support anyways. To get a more complete control over what was installed,
I started moving away from using a list of use flags in make.conf by doing a

 emerge -evp --columns world >> tmpfile

with that format it was easy to use an openoffice spreadsheet and insert from file with fixed width
delimiters cut and then go through the file with emacs and do some search and replace to end up with

As I am nowadays using the keyworded gentoo-sources, I am already using the 2.6.29 kernel with promised updated ext4 stuff and some more goodies. However, after doing my normal upgrading routine with make oldconfig and sifting through all the new options, running my 'build kernel and drivers'-script, my system wouldn't boot =|. Unable to remount read-write dmesg said. A wee bit stumped, I went back to 2.6.28 for a few days but now I had a go again and took a look at my fstab. In the mount options, I had put "extents, barriers=0".

Finally I made the leap.
Used the stopwatch to get the boot time from BIOS POST to login screen: 1:02.4
Added

sys-apps/openrc ~amd64
sys-apps/baselayout ~amd64

to /etc/portage/package.keywords
Emerged them and followed the guide:
http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/openrc-migration.xml

No problemo. New boot time:
00:48.4
Sweet. Thx Roy!

When the computer geek in me grew up, I was excusively using Gentoo for all my needs. When I first started out learning about free software operating systems, I had used windows 98 for little more than playing Fallout and some other fun games.

In my early days (in like 2002, which is not very long ago I admit) as a GNU/Linux zealot I was installing from a minimal CD and going from stage-1 tarballs and working my way up. Wasn't very exciting watching glibc compile on a PII 400hz.

I finally gave up trying to keep my hordeinstallation alive. It's been alot of work installing and upgrading the package and every time I've failed to retain my data. I was recommended Zimbra by a friend. It turns out it's a complete suite with mta, imap, spam- and virusscanner. This meant that I'd have to give up my carefully configured mail services. After bracing myself for a number of days, I got to it.

For a very long while now, several years actually, I've been a bit annoyed by the behaviour of terminals under X when you doubleclick links. What the UI considers a word is selected. Selection 'starts' at the point that is doubleclicked and 'spreads' in each direction, stopping at a char it considers to be a word delimiter. A space is probably always considered a delimiter. Sometimes a '?' too, and often ',' as well.

I just read tsunam's blogpost and it sparked a thought. He's calling for more ideas for improving user relationships and quite neatly describes the Gentoo community through parallels to George Orwell's 1984. Now, as the topic says, I've always regarded it as a Gentoopia.

Time goes by and sometimes gentoo hands you a new update to kde-base as happened today and it's compile-time again. When I first began using gentoo I sometimes watched the scrolling lines and kind of get stuck much like watching a burning fire. It would give a cosy feeling and time flew by. Nowadays I never do that for some reason, I just want to be done with it. Having invested in a Reserator, I thought I'd make good use of it and hence overclocked my CPU.

I have to say my impression is that the gentoo devs maintaining the kernel sources does a damn fine job. New versions appears in the three at a very nice rate and keeping up with the relentless pace of vanilla. At the time of this writing the latest stable kernel is 2.6.23.14 and portage just gave me 2.6.23-gentoo-r6. Good stuff. I've been compiling gentoo-sources for a few years now and it has never been smoother. A simple

emerge -Nqa world

* copy the old .config to the new source dir
* swap the symlink

make oldconfig