Triple-Booting

For a short period of time I was triple-booting on my laptop with Gentoo Linux, Windows XP, and Windows Vista. I compiled Linux from scratch and got everything working and set up, even the WiFi card, but in the end, it wasn't worth it to have to keep rebooting to switch operating systems, especially since the applications I used most were exactly the same across each platform: Firefox and Gaim. I kept XP around because my printer isn't supported in Vista. After a week of rebooting just to print, and dealing with Windows file permissions hell, and keeping files synchronized across three operating systems, I decided to wipe the hard drive and just go with Vista. If I want to print, I can print from Athena in Linux. The main benefit from the end user perspective of Vista is its pretty interface. There's a lot that's changed under the covers, but chances are most users aren't going to notice that so much, especially in day-to-day use. Mostly I installed Linux to prove to myself that it could be done. My laptop is relatively new hardware, and I wanted to see how the process of getting off the ground worked. I don't think Linux is a good OS choice for a laptop. A desktop or server, yes, but not a laptop. Linux was not meant to be turned on and off all the time and adjust to its environment on the fly. Windows XP Windows Vista Gentoo Linux with GNOME desktop Gentoo Linux with KDE desktop, just for show: this is the default without any customizations, since I didn't really use KDE.

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.

Vista Pre-RC1

I downloaded and installed the latest and greatest Vista last night. It's supposedly beyond beta, but not quite release canidate material: Pre-RC1. It's a build from the RC1 branch, so it theoretically should be feature-complete, though there might be some more bug fixes that go into RC1. The first big difference I noticed was that my graphics card was recognized and it installed the driver and set up Glass automatically. Ah yes, and that means screen capture is no longer broken.

As you can see, it's trying to install my printer. I was actually able to run the installer for my HP PhotoSmart 1000 (which is no longer supported beyond XP). The install got to the point where it told me to plug in the printer, and I did, but nothing happened, and I ended up having to kill the process. It did leave me with the drivers extracted onto my hard drive, and so I was able to direct the hardware installation wizard to their location, but in the end, the printer still wouldn't install. If I can finally get that working, I might just make the leap to Vista as my primary laptop OS.


This is why you need a fancy graphics card in your computer: new eye-candy features. Alt+Tab still works like before, only now with little previews of the windows, but now there's also Win+Tab. This is the kind of thing graphics cards were made for, and it's nice to see that Windows is finally catching up in this area.


As usual, Firefox and Gaim are among my staple applications. My favorite Gaim plugin, Guifications (which shows little popup messages on certain events) seems to crash Gaim when it tries to display an notification, which is odd, because the same exact setup worked perfectly in Beta 2. I suppose that's what I get for installing a beta version of a plugin on a beta version of an application on a pre-release operating system that's been out in the wild less than 24 hours.

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.