About
jason's weblog, jason typing stuff

Jason Haslup
jason at haslup dot com

Subscribe
RSS: Subscribe

Links
These are a few of my favorite links.

Fri, 25 Feb 2005

I Gentoo, Do You?
blog :: linux

Well, I did it... and I'm sticking with it! On saturday morning I popped in my extra drive, fired up the bootable .iso of the latest Gentoo, and started installing.

I had printed out the Gentoo installation handbook which made things a little easier. I could have followed along on-screen and saved a few trees, but sometimes it's just handier having it on paper (I had read through it the previous day at lunch).

The first part of the installation went fairly well... I pretty much just typed in the things that the handbook said to type in. I did the basics: setup my parition, make sure networking was configured, and then un-tarred a "starter" environment. I went with the newbie-friendly stage 3 installation, which I think is fine since I'm sure those folks are better at optimization flags than I am.

I did manage to mess up my grub install, but all it took was re-reading that section, boot back into the LiveCD, run a step I missed, and after a reboot I was in my brand-spanking new gentoo install. Pretty cool.

Of course, it was a very basic install... no X, no emacs, not even a vi clone. So I started installing stuff which is pretty easy with the "emerge" tool. I think I tried a few small things to get started... distcc, ccache, vi, etc... Then I noticed that there was a new version of Gentoo's portage package, so I decided to emerge it.

And that's where I ran into my second problem... in doing that upgrade of portage, a new version of gcc was installed (3.3.5). That worked fine, but I later tried emerging libjpeg and it failed with libtool complaining about something.

I got stuck on that for a while... I tried re-emerging gcc (which is kind of a pain since it takes a while to compile), and even tried a shell scrip "fixlibtoolpaths" which you're supposed to run when you change compilers. No go. But then I searched on the gentoo forums and found a fix... re-emerge libtool (use emerge --oneshot libtool) and all will be fine. And it was!

It was getting late, so I thought I'd fire up a big install and let it run overnight. I decided on X, emacs, and sawfish, all in one shot. That turned out to be 74 total packages (after all the dependencies were said and done), and I let it go while I slept.

The next morning I woke up and found that it had failed at dependency

71 -- rep-gtk which is used by sawfish. I again searched on the

forums, found a pointer to a bugzilla report, and popped in a fix (another libtool issue, this time librep's fault). Re-started my emerge and it picked up right where it left off and soon after that I was ready to configure X.

Now here's the part where I cheated a bit... I ran xorgconfig to try and generate a config file for X, but that didn't work too well. Not wanting to waste any time, I mounted my fedora drive and copied over the config I was using there. I then had to emerge the Nvidia drivers, as well, since I definitely wanted to use accelerated video.

This was my first attempt at emerging a kernel module, and of course I initially had problems. The forums came to the rescue, though, as it seems Nvidia's latest driver has a problem with the 2.6.10 kernel. I added an entry into a config file that told emerge to actually pick the previous version of the driver, and I was up and running in a beautiful X.org 6.8 accelerated setup.

I ran into the same problem I had with archlinux, though, but I was determined to fix it this time. Again, the forums... all I had to do was disable eightBitInput in the XTerm app-defaults and I had my beloved alt- keystrokes back. Awesome.

Since then (I'm actually finishing writing this on the 25th) I've been emerging packages that I "need", but keeping the system light. I've still avoided the kde and gnome libraries, but I'd imagine I'll get those installed at some point. Just last night I setup alsa (another kernel module) and mpg321 which works just fine, so I can play mp3 files again. I'm also emerging bitbake right now which should let me compile apps for my Zaurus again.

At some point I need to migrate off this 20gb drive back on to my 80gb that currently has Fedora on it, although I'm only using 4gb of it so far. I might have another 80gb "data" drive" i suppose.

So, all-in-all, I'm very impressed by Gentoo... in fact, I'm a convert. Last night I was trying to decide when I'd put it on my laptop, although it's a wee pentium 3 with only 128mb of ram, so I'll definitely need to use distcc if I can. We'll see... I'm also always afraid of losing my WinXP partition whenever I upgrade it, so it might be a while.

That's it... you'll see more on gentoo in the future, I'm sure of it.

Fri, 18 Feb 2005

Tired of Fedora
blog :: linux

I'm tired of running Fedora and Red Hat. Sure, they're great distributions, but one big thing bothers me: it won't let me easily update packages to new major revisions.

For example, I want to get Python 2.4, or X.org 6.8. I can't do that via any of the RPM repositories because Fedora Core 2 is built on Python 2.2 and X.org 6.7. That's it. In order to upgrade those packages, I either need to download the source and install it myself or upgrade to Fedora Core 3. (And I'm not even sure that would give me Python 2.4, anyhow).

I've read that it's possible to upgrade from Core 2 to Core 3 just using yum, but I think I'm too scared to do that. I guess I should try, though, before dumping Fedora.

But let's pretend I tried and it didn't work... last saturday I spent a lot of the day installing Arch Linux on my desktop machine. I was fortunate enough to find an "extra" 20gb drive sitting around, so I still had my FC2 install.

I downloaded the .iso image via bittorrent and my blazing fast cablemodem, booted off the burned CD, and was quickly installing the base OS. That went well enough, and after a bit I had a nice console-based linux box with not much on it.

To install new stuff you use "pacman" which is sort of like emerge for gentoo and yum for Fedora. The .iso I had burned had a lot of the packages, which was nice as I didn't have to venture out on the 'net. But any packages that weren't on the CD (sawfish, for example), were easily retrieved from the main arch linux package repository.

I could go on for a while about the install, but there are articles out there already that do such a thing. So I'll skip ahead... by 8pm that night (it took that long not because of arch linux but because of the two new bundles of joy in my house) I had an ok base linux system, including emacs, sawfish, X.org 6.8, and a few other packages I grabbed. It was a pretty slim system, too... no Gnome, no KDE, just plain old X with my beloved sawfish.

And then I hit the wall with a problem I just couldn't figure out, and honestly, I'm ashamed of it. I think Fedora and all the previous Red Hat releases have made me soft.

The problem: when I was in X in an xterm, my alt key wouldn't work on the command line. That is, I'd type alt-b and instead of going back a word, it'd spit out a crazy international character. I went around and around with trying things to fix it... I pacman-installed rxvt and the alt key would work, but then something else would break. I tried all sorts of X.org configs because the alt key worked fine in th console vty's. Nothing I tried fixed it.

So I got mad, removed the hard drive, and rebooted into girly-man's Fedora. I'm such a wuss.

Now this weekend I'm gearing myself up for my third attempt at installing Gentoo. I think I'm nuts. I liked Arch because it had a nice set of up-to-date packages that could be easily installed. Gentoo has the same thing, but more packages and since they're going to be compiled from source, better tweaked for my system.

But the key part to that last paragraph was that this is my third attempt... just getting through the install has been painful, and I think one time when I did have a working system, subsequent package management was also painful. But I know I must be missing something... there are a ton of happy Gentoo users who swear by their install, so I'm going to try it.

The big .iso is in-hand and I'm all set. Saturday morning I'll pop open my dell box, re-attach my arch linux drive, and fire it up. I'm hoping by the evening (if gentoo and my girls cooperate), I'll be happily using my new gentoo workstation.

Wed, 16 Feb 2005

Napster To Go?
blog

So I'm still looking for my ultimate music solution... I've almost got it with Rhapsody which I use at work and home, but I don't have a mobile solution.

Actually, I'll chat about Rhapsody... I'm a big fan -- for about $8/month I get access to pretty much all the music that's out there. I can play an album directly, or I can listen to one of their many "radio stations" which is actually what I prefer since it lets me hear new music.

My one big gripe is that it is windows-only. I hate that. I don't know why it's windows only, it uses RealPlayer (I think) which is available on linux and mac. I've emailed them (of course), but I'm not expecting miracles.

Back to the topic... the one part that's missing from this solution is the mobile part... I can't listen to Rhapsody in the car or in the yard, I have to be near a windows box and an internet connection. The best part about the "radio stations" on Rhapsody is that I can fast-forward past a song I don't want to hear. I can't do that with XM Radio, which I thought about getting for the car.

Actually, speaking of XM Radio, I tried their online version for free for three days and was not impressed at all. Their stations seemed like they sucked... Rhapsody's "Alternative Hits" was much better than any station I found on XM even without the fast forward feature. So it's a no-go on XM. Sirius is tempting once Stern gets on there, but I doubt I'll go for that, either.

After all that, finally I'm getting to my point: Napster To Go. This service lets you download songs from their collection to your device without having to pay for them. It's a monthly fee, I think around $12-$14 or so, but you can have any song on your music player.

That sounds pretty cool... one thing I'm wondering about is how much of their library has been marked for this service. I think I read somewhere that it's not their entire collection but a subset. That might be annoying.

Of course, I'd need a new player that supported Napster To Go... I think the Dell devices will support it soon, which is probably the way I'd go.

Anyhow, just some thoughts. I always think that I want to get an iPod, but I really don't... it wouldn't solve any issues I have with music on-the-go -- I have a 20gb player but I don't use it very often anymore... I guess my library is too old. Oh well. Someday we'll get to Rhapsody in the car...

Tue, 15 Feb 2005

Some sawfish hacks
blog :: linux

So I'm still using sawfish both at home and at work and I couldn't be happier. I thought I'd share some of my hacks I've created so far:

Here's what I use in order to exec apps from the keyboard. It's bound to Ctrl-t !.

(defvar jh-exec-history (list)
  "History of exec commands.")


(defun jh-prompt-for-exec ()
  (let ( (e (prompt-from-list jh-exec-history "Execute: " nil t)))
    (delete e jh-exec-history)
    (when (and e (not (string= "" e)))
      (setq jh-exec-history (append (list e) jh-exec-history))
      (system (concat e "&")))))

When I press ctrl-t ctrl-t I pop back to the previous window from a differenct workspace. I use this to jump back and forth between my coding emacs and my mail emacs. For windows in the same workspace I just use alt-tab.

(defun jh-goto-last-window ()
  "Goto the previous window."
  (let ( (l (cdr (window-order)))
         (w (car (window-order))))
    (while (windows-share-workspace-p (car l) w) (progn (setq l (cdr
  l))))
    (display-window (car l))))

I'll add some more soon, and I'll probably just put up my entire .sawfishrc.

Go Novell
blog

Novell is really pushing themselves into the linux market and I think it's great. I guess it was around a year ago that they bought Ximian -- a company started by the Gnome folks who are now actively pushing Mono, an open-source version of Microsoft's .NET framework.

They also bought Suse, a linux distribution that's been around for quite a while. In addition, they've made some great hires in the kernel community, including Robert Love and Greg Kroah-Hartman. And those are only the folks that I know and remember, I know they've done more.

Just today, Nat from Novell announced the creation of the Hula Project which will be interesting to watch. They're trying to evolve the mail/calendar server from just a repository of data to something more. It'll be interesting to see how that goes... it's nice, though, having the corporate backing from Novell for an open source project. As soon as their lists are on gmane, I'll start reading them.

Wed, 09 Feb 2005

I Love Cablemodem
blog

So I recently switched from a wireless internet provider (at the time my only option here in bozeman) to a new cablemodem setup. Holy cow, what a difference.

My wireless provider was pretty good -- 512kb up and down, plus I had a static IP address which made remote access nice. But being wireless, I'd have a lot of latency issues which would drive me nuts just because of what I do. I ssh to work and I play games -- both of which cause me to have a low tolerance for 150-200ms ping times.

After a particulary long stretch of horrible connectivity (which has happened more than a few times), I finally got fed up and signed up for cablemodem service from our local cable company. It had been available for a few months, but since I was in a two-year contract with my wireless ISP I had resisted making the switch. But now since I only had three months left, plus I think I had a good case for getting released because of my continuing connectivity issues, I took the plunge.

And I'm glad I did it. Good parts: 3mb download instead of only 512kb; the latency is awesome -- I'm averaging 15ms to my work machine which is even more impressive since that's over an encrypted VPN tunnel, even. Bad parts: only 256kb upload and no static IP address. No big deal.

This morning I downloaded the latest version of the knoppix linux bootable cd using bittorrent. I was downloading at 350kbs... that's seven times as fast as before. Instead of 10 hours to download, I was done in just over an hour. Not bad for our little town of Bozeman!

2010 : February (2)
2009 : February (2)
2008 : January (2) February (2) March (5) April (1) June (1) July (2) October (1) November (3)
2007 : January (3) February (1) March (1) June (2) December (1)
2006 : February (4) March (4) April (11) May (5) July (7) August (5) September (4) October (3) November (6) December (2)
2005 : January (1) February (6) April (2) May (4) June (3) July (8) August (5) September (3) October (3) November (1) December (1)
2004 : January (9) February (5) March (6) April (3) May (2) June (1) July (6) August (10) September (1) October (4) November (3)
2003 : March (6) April (3) May (1) June (18) July (9) August (4) September (5) October (2) November (7) December (2)