Ubuntu

Finally, a Linux-related post! I just installed Ubutu Linux (9.04 "Jaunty Jackalope", if you must know) on one of my computers. I'd done it once before, but it was on a partition on my main server athena, so it didn't get much face time (since I would have had to reboot it, and it would be downtime for the main install). The install was really easy. I complicated things by customizing my partition table to leave room for another install, but novices don't need to do that, so it doesn't count. Trouble came when I tried to see what software was available: Add/Remove threw an error, and the commands that it recommended I enter didn't work. It was easy enough to search and find a solution that worked (which was here). Overall, I would say that it was a smashing success. I was a bit disappointed that I had to manually install the ssh server, but I guess it comes with the territory. I couldn't find openssh-server with the GUI, so I did it from the command line. I'm still not sure if it's going to load on startup, and I suppose I need to figure out how to access non-standard software repositories, but I'll leave that for a later time.

That's What She sed

Lately, I've been uploading pictures to Twitter from my phone using TwitPic. Basically, you send them to a TwitPic e-mail address via multimedia messaging, and they are automatically posted to your Twitter account, along with the text from the subject. This all works quite well, and they even supply an RSS feed of your pictures, which you can take and (among other thing) put on your blog's sidebar. The problem was, when I put it in my blog sidebar, there was no thumbnail image. Other feeds that had images in them would have thumbnails, but not this one. This one just had a text link to the picture page. I found that disappointing. So I examined feeds that showed thumbnails and the TwitPic feed to see what the difference was. Feeds that contained images within the feed content showed up in the Blogger widget with a thumbnail. But the TwitPic feed showed images. What was the difference? The difference turned out to be CDATA. CDATA is a way to tell a feed reader, "Don't try to decipher my contents, just pass them along and leave the rendering to the end user application." It so happens that TwitPic's thumbnail images are within a CDATA block, and Blogger obediently ignores the CDATA contents when looking for images to display as a thumbnail. So, how do I fix that? I need to read the feed, and for each item, locate the line that contains the thumbnail URL, and create a new attribute containing the thumbnail in a format that is decipherable to Blogger's widget. Using my digg feed as a model, I figured out what the end result should look like, but how to achieve it? First, I tried Yahoo Pipes. Yahoo has a tool for processing feeds with a number of tools, controlled by a graphical pipe-looking interface. The problem is, none of the tools that I could find would add an attribute based on the transformed contents of another attribute. There were widgets that came close, but I couldn't get it to work, so I decided to host the feed myself and modify it using sed. I had never used sed before, except when the exact command was given, so I didn't know how to use it, but I knew that it was a powerful enough tool to get the job done. So I created a shell script on my Linux box, and a cron job to run it. The script basically downloaded the RSS feed from TwitPic to a local file, and then called sed on it with a particular set of parameters designed to extract the necessary information, and add the appropriate information in a format that is decipherable to Blogger. In order to understand sed, I searched the Internet for a tutorial, and found this page from the Gentoo Linux Documentation to be the most helpful. My sed command does two things, which are piped together:

1. It adds an xmlns:media declaration, which allows me to use the media tag later on.
2. It examines each CDATA line with the thumbnail URL, and below it, it adds a line with the media:thumbnail tag and the URL extracted from above.

sed -e 's/<rss version="[^"]*"/& xmlns:media="http:\/\/search.yahoo.com\/mrss\/"/g' $TMP_FILE | sed -e 's/\(http:\/\/twitpic.com\/show\/thumb\/[^"]*\).*/&\n <media:thumbnail url="\1" height="150" width="150" \/>/g' > $FEED_FILE

I know it's possible to consilidate the two sed commands into one and do it in one pass, but this works. I may tweak it in further revisions. It is not necessary to use a yahoo-defined media tag, so I might modify the script later on to simply transform the CDATA portion into parseable encoded HTML. I might also add that I'm using Feedburner to host the feed. Basically, I change the file on my server, and Feedburner goes there to get it, and offers it to the rest of the world. That way if my server is offline, the feed is still active and available, and I don't have to deal with the traffic, just the Feedburner hits. If anyone else wants their TwitPic feed to have thumbnails available, let me know, and I can set one up for you on my server through Feedburner. (It's pretty easy, since the TwitPic username is passed in to the script as a parameter). I can't guarantee anything, but since it's in my interest to keep the script working and up-to-date, you don't have much to worry about. All I need to know is your TwitPic (Twitter) username.

• Update (2009-04-16): I have modified the code to accept all image formats, and be shorter.

Baidu MP3

Lately, it seems that Baidu MP3 has indexed my server, and is pointing Chinese searchers to various Bible talks and sermons which I have hosted there. I recently (well, it was probably late last year) relaxed restrictions on my robots.txt file to allow most of the content (not the pictures) to be indexed by search engines. Since then, I've been hit from all over the world, but this is pretty recent. What's different is the volume and frequency of the hits. Of course, they're welcome to the content (as long as my server isn't getting hammered). I'm a bit curious as to what's being done with them: do people listen to them in order to learn English? Are they really trying to find music and stumbled on my files by mistake? Are they interested in biblical teaching? Maybe someday I'll find out.

Elrond: Blu-ray, Windows Media Center, Etc.

So I bought another computer: Elrond. Elrond will be the living room media PC.

I believe that makes a total of 6 computers. Obviously not all of them are this nice. Some of them are scratch boxes. I'm thinking of installing Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) on one of them in the near future. When I have time (HA!)

Elrond is a Dell Inspiron 530 with Blu-ray and an HDTV tuner. It has Windows Vista Home Premium, which comes with Windows Media Center. Media Center This is the first time I've messed with Media Center, and I'm mostly impressed. It was very easy to set up. The only really annoying thing is that if you have two tuners, they can't be hooked up to two different sources: I wanted to have the HD tuner record over-the-air broadcasts (which it can do in HD) and have a second USB tuner (that I had bought with my laptop) handle the SD signal from cable. No dice. It only supports managing one guide, and assumes that all tuners have access to it that guide and nothing else. Lame. Currently, I have it set up with just the HDTV tuner hooked up to cable. It can't record any of the cable HDTV channels, unfortunately, because it doesn't have a QAM tuner (HDTV signals are in a different format on cable than over the air). I think Athena's tuner supports QAM (and it ignores the broadcast flag too), but I haven't set up MythTV yet (which is ironic, since MythTV was one of my primary reasons behind putting Athena together in the first place). The reason I decided to go with SD cable is because it has the most content by far. If I want to record some over-the-air HDTV, I can switch it over to that temporarily. If I get MythTV running on Athena, I should be able to record anything I want. [Edit: According to the manufacturer's page, my tuner can indeed receive QAM HDTV signals, but they apparently have to be clear QAM (i.e., not encrypted or "scrambled"). My TV is able to tune to the HD stations without the cable box, which means it might be simply a matter of configuration: downloading the right listings that tell my computer it can tune to HDTV channels. Whether Comcast provides listings including HD channels is another matter.] [Edit: Apparently, it's not Comcast, it's Microsoft. Windows Media Center doesn't support QAM, unless you buy a special computer designed specifically for it. This seems stupid to me, because these channels are being sent over the wire in the clear. Back to square one. Time to get MythTV up and running.] [Edit: There appear to be ways around WMC's artificial restriction (by getting tuner hardware and drivers that lie about where the video comes from). Interesting. I'm still going to explore my MythTV solution. Currently, I have MythTV up and running, but nothing shows up on a channel scan.] Blu-ray So, I've finally bought myself a Blu-ray drive. I was hoping to wait until full-featured stand-alone players went down in price to the $200 mark. It doesn't look like this is going to happen anytime soon. Blu-ray players actually went up in price after the end of the format war with HD DVD (surprise, surprise), and they don't show any signs of going down any time soon. The best "value" on a Blu-ray player was still the PS3, and I'm not that interested in the PS3 for gaming (and I already have as many Linux boxes than I need) so that wasn't looking like a good deal either. I was looking at the Dell website for a PC for the living room, and I saw that they had a special deal on a Blu-ray player, in addition to a big chunk of money off the computer, and my employee discount program percentage off, so I bit. I was hoping that I could have the option of hooking up my HD DVD drive (Xbox 360 attachment) to the PC and have it play both, but it only came with PowerDVD DX version 7, which supports Blu-ray and not HD DVD. Not a big deal, of course, since I have a stand-alone player (HD-A3). The only problem I ran into as far as Blu-ray playback is concerned is that I wanted to output Surround Sound to my receiver digitally. For this, I had to buy a sound card, and since the two digital optical input ports were already occupied (by the HD DVD player and the TV), I needed a coaxial digital S/PDIF out. I found one at Fry's (Diamond XtremeSound 7.1 for $30 with a $10 rebate), hooked it up, and told Windows to use that card's digital out. In order to get it to output Dolby Digital 5.1 during movie playback, I had to configure the settings of the PowerDVD program to output to "SPDIF"; before that, it was still sending stereo.

More DNS Woes

So what happens when your DNS changes more often than your IP address? The whole point of DNS is so that your IP address can change, and you don't have to update your links (also, there's something about being human-friendly, but who needs that?). Sadly in my case, athena has had a string of DNS subdomains that haven't lasted quite so long as I had hoped. My problem is that I link to pages from my blog (mostly containing pictures, audio, and PDF documents) that I would like to be accessible on a permanent basis. Recently, I lost athena.sexypenguins.com, and so I've moved to athena.goddns.net. At some point, I'm just going to have to purchase my own domain. Thus far I've resisted out of (mostly) momentum, but now that I've registered my first domain and found that it's not so bad to be parked, I'm more inclined to plunk down the money. The question is, what should I choose? In the meantime, I've decided to create an "athena-link" label on my blogs, that will at least keep track of which posts have links to athena, so that I can update them whenever I have to change the DNS, which it appears will happen at least one more time. For now (and for the first time in a while), all of my links are up-to-date. Another problem with my current setup is that FreeDNS's policies dictate that I need to have Google's ability to access my server manually enabled every time that I switch to a new domain. This wouldn't be that big of a deal, except that I've started hosting feeds on my site, and Google Reader uses Google's DNS. Also, Google just bought out FeedBurner, and one of my feeds uses that as a proxy.

I've Moved from Israel to Poland!

Well, technically speaking, my server, athena has moved its DNS listing from athena.gentoo.org.il (Israel) to athena.gentoo.ltd.pl (Poland). This occured because apparently the "Israili society for Free Open Source Software," which had registered gentoo.org.il, originally as a site to host a discussion board and support for users of the Gentoo Linux distribution, had apparently not gotten off the ground, and had donated their DNS listing to the FreeDNS pool at freedns.afraid.org, but that domain was now expiring or changing hands, so it was leaving the pool I've had to move before. Over the past year-and-a-half, I've been at:

• athena.homelinux.net
• athena.gentoofreaks.org
• athena.gentoolinux.be
• athena.gentoo-server.be
• athena.gentoo.org.il

As you can see, my method of chosing names has typically been to search for something with "gentoo" in it, and then add the hostname "athena" to the beginning of it. Changing domains for me involves the following:

• Setting up a new DNS entry with the domain server
• Changing the update URL in the cron script that updates the listing whenever my IP address changes
• Updating the PuTTY saved sessions on Windows boxes that I use to access Athena via SSH from outside the home network.
• Updating the links in my blog templates that point to Athena
• Updating all the links in all of my blog posts that point to content hosted on Athana (mostly pictures)--this one is time-consuming, and has the unfortunate side-effect of re-shuffling my blogs' RSS and Atom feeds.

It's those last two that are the problem. So, why do I put myself through this? It's getting to be pretty inconvenient to have to change all of this every few months in order to keep my links to hosted pictures unbroken. I know one thing I could do would be to pick a more stable domain to subdomain off of. Free DNS entries with "gentoo" in them tend to be unreliable for piggy-backing off of because they tend to belong to failed websites that are simply waiting for their registrations to expire. If I were to choose something more stable, it would last longer, and I wouldn't have to change all of the time. But I like having "gentoo" prominently in the name. It's part of Athena's identity: Gentoo is what makes her tick. I could register my own domain name, of course. It's something I've considered, and something I will probably end up doing eventually. Part of my reluctance is the fact that hacked-up, free DNS is very much in the spirit of Linux, especially Gentoo, which is geared toward customization and tweaking. Yep, I'm just another one of those free software hippies.

Downtime

Athena was down all day while I was at work. Everything was working fine last night. The upgrade had gone as planned. Just to be sure there wouldn't be any surprises along the road, and to make sure I was using the latest compiles of everything, I decided to reboot before I went to work. I logged in, su'd, typed "shutdown -r now" and then went off and brushed my teeth and got dressed. When I came back, the login screen had come up. I switched over to tty1 to see if any of the services had screamed at me: none had, so I switched back, logged in, opened up firefox, and typed "http://localhost/" into the address bar. My (boring) directory listing page came up, indicating that Apache was running a-okay, and so I turned off the projector and headed to work. When I got there and tried to log in, however, I got no response from athena.

I tried accessing it through a web browser: nothing. Both ssh and apache weren't responding, so I figured either the whole box had gone down (i.e., kernel panic) or there was some sort of connection issue: perhaps the router wasn't port forwarding, but there was no way I could tell until after work, so I logged on to blogger and saved the post I'd put up directing people to download some files off of athena as a draft (so it would disappear), and went on with my work. When I got home, athena was running just fine, but when I tried to pull up external web sites, I got nothing: so it was a connection issue.

It wasn't the router: my laptop was doing fine, and the port forwarding was still set up. I looked at my init scripts and their accompanying config files: nothing seemed amiss. I restarted the ethernet interfaces and, viola, my network connections were restored: everything worked perfectly. That still didn't satisfy me: I didn't want athena to always start up without a net connection, so I rebooted her again, and the same thing happened. Then I remembered something I had read somewhere (probably the weekly newsletter) about the init scripts changing with the 2006.1 profiles. There was probably a dependency issue somewhere that was messing me up because my ethernet connections were loading too soon, but I had to have parallel startup because of my local DNS cache software.

I decided to look deeper into the issue, and so I pulled up the wiki page for dnscache, and searched the text for "parallel." Nothing. That was odd. I'm absolutely positive that this was the page that told me that I needed to set RC_PARALLEL_STARTUP="yes" in /etc/conf.d/rc. Could it be that the requirements (and the page) had changed? "Parallel" was one of my search terms to find the wiki page, so I went back to my Google tab and opened the cached version of the page: lo and behold, there it was, so someone had very recently changed the page to delete that instruction. I fired up vi, and changed the value to "no" and rebooted. Worked like a charm, only charms don't actually work, whereas this did. So, it wasn't gcc, and it wasn't my config files getting overwritten, it was some change they had incorporated into the new 2006.1 profile.

From the newsletter:

Some highlights from the release include the AMD64, HPPA, x86, PowerPC, and 64-bit PowerPC with a 32-bit userland releases being built with version 4.1 of the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC). AMD64, PowerPC, and x86 also feature version 2.4 of the GNU C library (glibc), while all architectures use baselayout 1.12.1, which features many improved startup scripts.

Improved. Indeed. Well, at least they warned me.

Athena: emerge -eav world

First I updated gcc to 4.1.1 (from 3.4.6), then I rebuilt the system software (emerge -eav system), and now I'm rebuilding all of the software on the box using the new compiler and rebuilt tools. I started the big emerge last night, and currently, Athena is chugging away at 429 of 1223 total packages.

I don't expect that this will cause down-time to any of the services running. In fact, I'm counting on Apache (the webserver software) to be up and running without interruption throughout the whole process, and afterward. I finished typing up the notes to a talk I gave, and I'm planning on hosting the PDF, as well as linking to an mp3 of a related talk that my dad gave earlier that I'm already hosting.

Also, this weekend I'm going to a Bible conference (Hicks Lake) and I suspect that I'll have some photos to put up on the web when I get back. I don't imagine I'll have too much trouble, because all of my software was up to date before I started, so I'm not getting any new versions of anything that might cause compatibility or upgrade configuration issues.

Athena's New Last Name

Okay, well it looks like gentoo-linux.be is no longer an option with freedns.afraid.org, so I've had to pick a new domain for my Gentoo box to be under. So, without further ado, the new DNS entry will be: athena.gentoo.org.il

I've had a long and sordid history with DNS on athena. First, it was athena.homelinux.net, then athena.gentoofreaks.org, then athena.gentoolinux.be, then athena.gentoo-server.be, and now this. Each time the domain owner has let their domain expire or withdrawn it from the available pool. You get what you pay for. Let's hope Israel is a better TLD than Belgium.

Free DNS

It's worth every penny.

Until today, I was using the subdomain athena.gentoolinux.be through freedns.agraid.org for athena's DNS. I have a neat little script that keeps track of what my IP address is, and then if it changes, it automatically updates the DNS listing for my box, and the world can keep on accessing all the wonderful pictures and such that I host there. This is all fine and dandy, but it so happens that the owner of gentoolinux.be is a bit temperamental, and so this morning athena was nowhere to be found. Oh, the IP address hadn't changed, ports 22 and 80 are still forwarded there from the router, and apache and sshd were chugging along just fine, but the DNS listing had disappeared.

I had no idea what was wrong. And I was counting on tar-ing up and transferring a Harry Potter sound track MP3 folder today. Bummer. My first thought was to interrogate RFH: he was doing something with athena after 12:30 last night, but it turns out all he did was watch an episode of "Jack and Bobby," so that was a dead end.

I didn't think to try just using the IP address until I got home and discovered everything was working just fine.

So anyway, I switched the domain from gentoolinux.be to gentoo-server.be, so now athena can be accessed via athena.gentoo-server.be. This domain is "public" at freedns.afraid.org, so hopefully there won't be another similar incident. I sent off a message to the owner of gentoolinux.be to ask him to restore my ability to use it. There are a grand total of 3 domains available for use with "gentoo" in them. It's not essential to have that in the name, but I like it there.

I updated the links on my blog template (actually, I changed it so that it only needs to be updated in one place at the top in a JavaScript variable that gets referenced several times throughout the page).

I didn't go through and update all the links in my blog entries, although I did do the Rattlesnake Ledge photos one. I discovered that you can't put JavaScript inside the blog entries themselves. If I get athena.gentoolinux.be back, then I'll leave things as they are, but if I don't then I'll have to go back through and update each link.

If someone wants to look at photos that have a dead link, all they need to do is click on the "athena" link on the top or bottom of the page and browse to ~tim/photos/.

<creative title>

Been up and running for a while now. I had a minor hiccup when the root partition failed fsck, but I was able to copy the files off to a backup parition, reformat, and copy them back. The failure happened at the same time as I had to manually turm off the computer (because it froze). I'm not sure if the filesystem error was the cause of the crash, or vice-versa. That's the second time it's happened. I'm thinking it might be ReiserFS, but I'm not overly worried. I pulled a backup script off the web and configured it to keep 4 weekly backups and 6 monthly backups at all times (once it builds up to that number, that is). There's a short list of locations you need to back up on a Gentoo system in order to be able to regenerate the exact same system in a straightforward and quick (ignoring compile time) manner.

I started using RAM/swap filesystems for /tmp and /var/tmp, and also for a writable /mnt/inbox folder shared via Samba. The inbox folder is capped at 100MB, while /tmp and /var/tmp are capped at 1GB and 3GB respectively. I have 1GB of RAM and 4GB of swap space. One nice benefit of this is that my compiles happen in /var/tmp, and the downloaded files are stored in RAM, so there's no time lost to reading and writing the hard drive.

The next step in my quest for the ultimate MythTV box is to become an expert (okay, well, maybe a knowledgeable novice) at configuring MySQL. I think that's the last step before I actually dive in to MythTV. We'll see.

In preparation for MythTV, I cleared out my 250GB Hard Drive (I moved the backup data from a partition on this drive to the one I had previousely been using on the 320GB drive for a 32-bit chroot--for which it turns out I don't have much use) and repartitioned it into one huge drive. I might break it up more later. That depends on the demands of Myth's storage scheme(s).

Athena has (has had now for a while) two internet hostnames: athena.homelinux.net, and athena.gentoofreaks.org

The first is updated through DynDns.org, which has limited selection of domains, the second is through afraid.org, which has literally thousands to chose from. RFH's router (a Linksys) can do DynDNS, so I moved that to there, and set up a cron script to update the afraid.org name.

I have Apache set up to route the two paths to different virtual hosts, but right now both of them are pointed at the same place, since I don't have much to put up. I also set it up so that each user can crate a public_html directory in his home folder accessable to the web, which is slightly more convenient than having to go to /var/www/localhost/htdocs/ and doesn't require that I give RFH write access if I want offer him hosting space.

Xorg

It was surprisingly easy.

I'm posting this from Firefox inside Gnome on Athena.

I just had to wait for KDE to finish compiling. I decided to install all of kde (using the kde-meta ebuild that pulls all the components as dependencies) thinking that that was what I had done last time. Well, perhaps it was, but I don't remember it taking 24 hours to compile last time around. Anyway, the reason I had to wait until it was done compiling because I tried starting X using an auto=generated config file and it froze the computer. I tried it with my old one, and it did the same thing. Crashing is not good when you're compiling, because the hard disk is engaged, so I just did other things and installed other software (which is partly why it took that long).

Anway, the easy part was reading the logs from the failed loads, changing the display driver from nvidia (a proprietary driver that I haven't yet installed) to nv (the open source version). I had to make a symlink from /dev/mouse to /dev/input/mice, and I disabled some things that the log had flagged warnings about, logged in as a user, typed 'startx' and, to my amazement, was greeted with the Gnome Desktop environment.

I think just it seemed easy because I knew where to look and what to do this time around.

w00t!

Hey! I can see!

After hours of reconfiguring the kernel, recompiling and rebooting, I finally solved the problem that was causing athena to boot without framebuffer support.

It turns out that I was compiling in framebuffer modules that conflict with vesafb, which is *the* module that works on x86_64, apparently. Mostly this was due to my confusion because I have an nvidia graphics card and there were two modules that said "nvidia."

So, now when I boot up with my custom kernel, I see all the wonderful status information fly by and then finally when it's all booted a login screen.

Yay.

Next up: installing X, Gnome, and KDE, and then...

On to MythTV! (I compiled in the pchdtv3000 driver, so this should be a cakewalk. Unless it isn't.)

Blind, But Alive

Athena is not dead. She's just blind. Or rather, I'm blind while using her. Turns out it's just the display that's not properly configured. First I reconfigured from scratch and recompiled the kernel using the liveCD, then I rebooted, and waited a bit.

I observed that the Ethernet jacks in the back both became active. I tried "ssh root@athena", but there was no address associated with that name. Makes sense, you can't resolve the IP address of a hostname if there are two of them (I had been using eth1 exclisively, but this last install, I switched to eth0 and eth1). So, I logged on to the router and checked the DHCP clients table. There were two entries for athena, so I opened two cygwin consoles and ssh'd to each of the addresses.

I had to clear the entries for the IP addresses on in my known_hosts file first, ssh doesn't let you log in to a host that doesn't have the same key that it remembers it having. So, I made it forget.

With that, I was in. I confirmed that nothing else was amiss, I logged in blind with athena's keyboard and checked who was logged in with "who", then I logged out, and checked again.

So, now I know that my custom kernel works. It just needs a working graphics driver. Or something.

It's a quest, not a commute

Try telling a hiker "you could just drive there" or NASA, "there isn't anything useful on Mars; it's just a big rock with little rocks on it, and a tiny bit of ice. We can make ice in a freezer and we have plenty of rocks here, and even if Mars were made of platinum or gold, the cost of mining it and transporting any of it here would outweigh the benefit by orders of magnitude."

Go ahead, try it. They won't listen. They will ignore you or tell you to shut up and go away. If they're feeling particularly benevolent and your inquiry seems to spring entirely from ignorance, they might just explain to you that the simplistic end result is not what they're after at all.

Needless to say, RFH, while largely ignorant, seemed to be motivated more by a desire to annoy me when he suggested (for like the fifth time) that I use a Windows install CD on Athena. (And yet each time he says it, I'm more and more impressed with the quick wit required to come up with this stuff time and time again. How does he do it?)

You see, I am in the process of installing a 64-bit Linux Kernel and I haven't got the configuration right just yet. It works fine using genkernel, which basically compiles everything as a loadable module and auto-loads what it needs at bootup based on hardware detection. The trouble is I don't want it that way. I want a lean mean kernel with compiled-in support for my hardware.

So, I have two kernels currently, and I can select the one I want to boot from GRUB. If I select my custom-configured one, it immediately blanks the screen (after setting the resolution) and I don't hear from it again. No logging. Nothing.

Well, there's a possibility that it's just taking a while to boot and if I wait a bit I can try and ssh in, but I haven't gotten to that yet. Most likely, though, it's a missing driver. I thought I included the proper modules for my hardware components, but I guess not.

I'm not doing this because it's easy.

fsck

Athena is fscked.

For those of you who don't know what I'm talking about, fsck (which stands for File System Check) is a utility used to check a file system for problems and fix them if they're not too serious. Athena started freezing up, which is highly unusual for a Linux system. I checked the logs, and it appeared to be having trouble with /dev/sda3, which is my /usr partition. That's a bad thing. Basically, /usr is the repository of software, so there's no way to run normally without accessing it all the time. I disabled the cron jobs that automatically update my software (which is what I think was triggering the crashes) but it still doesn't stop it from happening, just delays it a little.

So, my Hard Drive is toast. It came with a 5-year warranty from Seagate, so I'll have to see about the details of that. The other partitions are still good (at least for now, and as far as I can tell), so I didn't lose any data. I still have the other drive from Western Digital, but so far it doesn't have anything on it. I think what I'm going to do is start over with a 64-bit installation. It's what I've been intending to do all along, and now I think I have enough expertise that I can handle any problems that come up instead of just reverting to 32-bit like I did last time.

Another advantage of this tack is that if I go with the latest vanilla kernel I can easily include drivers for my HDTV tuner card. Yay!

Athena is on the web!

Well, sometimes.

I have apache server running on Athena, and I set up an account with DynDNS.org, so if you head on over to athena.homelinux.net, and she happens to be on, you'll get the generic apache default page. I haven't set much up yet. I don't really have anything right now that I want to put on the web that this blog doesn't take care of. I did put up a 1x1 transparent image that I reference from my blogs so I can get some sort of usage statistics to play with. I'll probably host some images and other stuff, but the problem is that she's not always on, so any website I put up would have a lot of downtime. The main benefit for me of doing the whole DNS thing is that I can ssh in from anywhere as long as I leave her on. Eventually I would like to have an always-on box, but that may have to wait.

There was a problem with the port forwarding. I was gone this last weekend, so my computers weren't being turned on, and the client table entry in the router for athena expired and was replaced by one of RFH's computers. All the ports that were being forwarded to athena were being sent to one of his Windows boxes. I need to figure out how to reserve an IP address.

emerge --sync -avuDN world

Well, it's been a while since my last post ans a lot has happened. I figured out how to change the kernel using menuconfig, so I updated it without losing my automatic hardware detection. I had to re-install the nVidia drivers with the new kernel, and there was some initial instability, although I attribute that entirely to my roommate turning off poor athena in the middle of a huge emerge. He just decided that he would switch it off while I was gone and hit the power switch in the back. What a jerk. Anyway, the hard drive took a few boot cycles and some tweaking to recover, and I think something was in the middle of being copied over somewhere, because athena actually froze a couple of times! I thought it was the new kernel, especially since the OpenGL screensavers weren't working under KDE, but after a (non-roommate-interrupted) "emerge --sync -avuDN world" (which updates all the software on my computer to the latest available stable version), there was no more instability.

The OpenGL thing it turns out is a problem with KDE 3.4, which I discovered on this forum thread and posted my solution.

I had a movie night at my apartment last friday, and athena performed admirably. She served as the jukebox before and after the flick. We also watched some video files that I have on the hard drive, and used Gaim to mess with poor stephanie's head. Basically, she had no idea who was talking to her using my screenname. We were passing the keyboard around. Poor Caleb got blamed for it at first (he wasn't even there). Towards the end, she finally figured out she was talking to TJ, who had been doing the majority of the typing.

Anyway, I still haven't messed with the TV tuner, or gone 64-bit. One option I'm considering is doing both at once. I'm feeling adventurous.

Kernel Panic

Note to self: do not overwrite the kernel without first saving a backup of one that is known to work.

Saturday we got the cable installed, so it was the first time in almost a month that Athena had an Internet connection. I installed quite a few programs, including Firefox, Thunderbird, and OpenOffice, Azureus and a bunch of small utilities and minor apps.

Then I decided to try to make the sound work, and for this, I had to add the driver to the kernel. The kernel is the core of the operating system and one of its jobs is to get everything else up and running, including hardware. Consequentially, the kernel must be able to read the boot disk, and initialize hardware. I thought I had done everything right: I found a Howto on the subject, which told me to look up which driver I needed to on a table, which I located and enabled in the kernel configuration program. Then I recompiled the kernel and copied it to my boot partition. No big deal, right? I didn't remove anything, just added a module. Well, you already know what the result was. I had kernel panic a few seconds after the bootloader tried to launch the operating system. I had to go get my LiveCD, mount all the paritions, chroot over to the new environment, configure and compile a new kernel (this time I used genkernel), which I then copied over to the boot partition and rebooted. This all occured after midnight, so it wasn't until almost 2:00 that I had Athena back up to her old self. No sound support, but everything else humming along nicely.

I think the problem might be that I used genkernel to begin with, so when I added the sound driver I wasn't adding it to my current configuration, I was adding it to some other configuration that was the default starting point for a custom kernel. That, and/or I think I missed a step somewhere where the initrd (initial root disk) gets generated. I think maybe I should have been making a new one, but the Gentoo Handbook section on manual kernel configuration doesn't have that part (or I didn't notice it for some reason). It might have gotten generated and I forgot to copy it over.

Anyway, I might have another go at it sometime this week, but I'm definitely going to do it this time as a separate kernel and initrd, with a separate bootloader entry in Grub (that way I can boot either one from a menu on startup).

Speaking of bootloaders, the thought has occured to me that it would be relatively easy given this tool to (and I would probably do this on one or more separate drives) boot a true 64-bit version and possibly have the option of Windows. Samba server pretty much makes having Windows on the box unnecessary, but I definitely want to get 64-bit Gentoo going, and possibly even a handful of other distros as well. I'll probably keep my x86 installation around and use it primarily, because there are some programs that don't port well to 64-bit (Firefox being one--although Mozilla is pretty good in a pinch) that I would like to have around.

KDE & GNOME

And we have graphics!

I was able to run both Gnome and KDE on Athena yesterday. I didn't have an internet connection, so I couldn't install anything else. I put her in the living room and hooked her up to the projector, so I'm all set for when I have Internet... which should be sometime in July. I have Comcast scheduled to come in on the 9th, but I'm gone to Illinois and Iowa from the 8th until the 17th. So, it might be a while before I make any more progress (unless I can configure my wireless router to act as a bridge from some neighbor's WiFi). Hmm...

I went ahead and ordered this HDTV tuner, although the other one is more likely to support (unencrypted) HD cable signals (or so I think I read once on some forum somewhere).