war journal 004

so i took a break. a long one in building gentoo on my centrino-based notebook.

it just wasn't viable enough to do on only 256mb ram--- and 64 mb of it shared video.

ram matters. more of it the better.

anyway, i got a dsl connection for the house and started setting up an operation here. cleaned up the old library and turned it into my little home-office with some interesting plans for it.

now, with the adsl connection, i plugged in my gentoo linux.

sometimes, not compiling everything in the kernel is a good thing. the kernel isn't bloated with stuff i'll never use, hence, i normally never turn them on. and i avoid modules. in this case that backfired. you see, i never did emerge adsl, pppoe packages. not even compiled them in the kernel. hence, having the new adsl connection, i had no way of connecting to the internet to emerge packages.

i was forced to rebuild the gentoo system.

no problem. its not production. more experimental in nature. i quickly plugged in an old ide 40gb drive and uploaded data to it. and set about to rebuild gentoo. i booted into the new system and less than 8 hours later ( i couldn't give you the exact number because i slept through most of it and when i awoke, portage had stopped on an error when it reached 30 packages out of 189, that was 4 am). by 10am the following morning, xorg-x11+gnome was built and working.

a quick edit of the xorg.conf gave me 1024x768 resolution and my scroll mouse working properly.

it was time to get some stuff in. sure this would be used for application/web development but i still wanted officeorg installed and i did.

because sun-sdk (java 5) is masked--- i did a minor hack. i went and downloaded sun java 5 from sun and extracted it to a local directory and copied the entire thing as root to my /usr dir. java 5 is working on my machine.

as this was happening i was building firefox. ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~amd64" emerge =mozilla-firefox-1.5.0.1-r1

it of course worked. sort of. because after reading the amd64 how to, i should have built from binary to take advantage of flash. may be i'll find some other way around it.

as i'm writing this, i'm compiling mplayer to play some videos and dvds. (off topic: though i don't mind playing with mplayer, it does peeve that for me to watch my legitimately owned dvds in linux, in any distro, i have to go through hell, talk about a consumer right)

i love my amd64 and i love gentoo on it. i'll be doing some stuff with this machine. the fun part of gentoo is building things from scratch and learning about interesting hacks. its fun.

gentoo linux on amd64 is the ultimate experimental car. sometimes you get to play with it in productive ways. when this is done, i'm sure it will be one powerful system. and worth the trouble building.