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It looks like it's time to take Gentoo off of my main machine. I feel a |
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little sad about it, or I'd just quietly go away. |
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|
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A few months ago, an update made the machine headless -- well, it could no |
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longer bring up X but I could use the console-mode for admin, and log in via |
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SSH from my laptop and run GUI programs. I was busy at the time, first |
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deciding and then implementing my retirement, so I let it go. |
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|
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Now, a couple of months into my retirement, I'm trying to fix things up, and |
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the latest Gentoo live disk cannot talk to my monitor at all. Whatever it's |
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trying is unacceptable to the HD monitor I've had on there for a year, and I |
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can't even run the consoles. The video card is an ATI Rage XL on the |
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motherboard. Like the rest of the machine, it's vintage 2000, so maybe |
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support got dropped. But I'm not inclined to drop the machine -- it was the |
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ballyhooed thing in Linux Journal in 2002 when I finished my PHD, so I put |
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together these pieces: |
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* Two XEON chips. I didn't know it right away but that means 4 cores. They |
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are old Pentium IV-based 32-bit chips. I got the slowest still being made, |
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so the clock speed is 1.6 GHz. On 4 cores, it's not bad at all. |
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* 2GB of DDR ECC memory |
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* about a dozen hard drives (some old, but mostly 500GB - 2TB Sata drives), |
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I feel it's still worthy of respect. Some of these are in EZ-Dock docking |
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stations and are used for rotating backups (including off-site). The main |
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directories are on hardware RAID 1 so I have ongoing redundancy. |
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* a Smart UPS 1500 for everything except the laser printer. |
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|
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So, since I am familiar with Ubuntu from work, and have it on a couple of |
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laptops, I'm installing from the Ubuntu 11.04 live disk (video is just |
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fine). |
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|
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The real headache is all the stuff I'm going to have to port. |
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|
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1) Apache and dynamic (Python CGI) web site. |
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2) Postfix |
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3) About a dozen accounts that just do wget(1) data gathering triggered by |
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the cron daemon. |
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4) DNS (I run my own domain on a commercial DSL account) |
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5) NTP client and server |
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6) Whatever else I forgot I set up over the years. |
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|
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My original reason for using Gentoo is that this machine was pretty exotic |
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when I bought it, and I wanted to be able to tweak the compiler to get the |
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most out of it. I can still do that for specific applications I'm working |
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on, but otherwise it's really a non-issue now. I have gotten pretty tired |
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of updates that take over 48 hours to compile, and the occasional mess-up |
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that once or twice led me to rebuild with empty-tree and took a week or so. |
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|
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|
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So I guess I shouldn't complain (and I'm not). I'm just not in the target |
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market for Gentoo any more. It was fun, though. |
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-- |
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Kevin O'Gorman, PhD |