Re: [gentoo-dev] Fwd: [gentoo-user] Questions--help answer these and you might help Gentoo and Linux as a whole

[Quinn Harris]

On Thu, 2002-10-03 at 20:27, Mike Frysinger wrote:
> help him out :D
>
> ----------  Forwarded Message  ----------
>
> Subject: [gentoo-user] Questions--help answer these and you might help Gentoo
> and Linux as a whole
> Date: Thu, 03 Oct 2002 19:23:04 -0700
> From: "Charles N. Burns" <charles.burns@×××.net>
> To: gentoo-user@g.o
>
> I have a demo for a school tomorrow in which, if I can prove that Gentoo
> will work well as a server OS (to use a big server rather than a bunch
> of small workstations not running Gentoo) then the school will probably
> go with my recommendation, and I have a few questions whose answers will
> greatly help the demo's likelyhood of success. This server will be used
> by thousands of people per year and, if Gentoo, I will let each one of
> them know about it and how to get it. (These are good CS students, the
> type of people that Gentoo is best for, IMO)
>
> 1) Mozilla's cursor isn't blinking as I type this. This is irritating
> beyond belief and makes it impossible to see where anyone is typing. How
> to fix this? (I am in GNOME2, which is what I will use for the demo)

Why not use Galeon for the web and Evolution for email?
If you don't know, galeon uses the mozilla rendering engine gecko but
the gui is gtk+.  The same took kit used by GNOME.
Evolution is essentially a MS Outlook clone with better features for
large amounts of email.

>
> 2) Can Gentoo's kernel safely, stably address 12GB of memory? If not,
> will the stock kernel? (Clearly I have to enable high memory and
> recompile, but back with 1.1a my system would crash when I enabled
> highmem to support the full GB in my Linux server)
>
I doubt any of the patches to the gentoo kernel will prevent it from
accessing up to 64GB of memory as the help for "High Memory Support" in
the Linux Kernel Configuration states can be done.  Enabling "High
Memory Support" incurs a slight performance penalty.  If your system has
1GB or ram, you might change the "User address space size" to 2GB and
disable highmem (gentoo specific).  This will reduce the amount of
memory a single process can utilize though.


> 3) Does anyone know how to make HP X-terminals (specifically the Entria
> 2) display 16-bit or 24-bit color rather than nasty looking 8-bit? Does
> anyone know if it can't be done? Does anyone know these things even
> exist? HP doesn't seem to! The things have 2MB of video RAM, so I would
> think they can, but the screen gets scrunched into a small corner and
> gets mangled when we try.

>
> 4) What CFLAGS should I use for the FASTEST compilation. I figure -O0 is
> one (to not optimize). Any others to speed things up? I will be
> compiling like 20+ files at once, so every little bit helps.
>
> 5) Biggie---How do I make X start up with a higher priority every time,
> rather than manually renicing it each and every time it starts? I use
> KDM if that matters. I can use something else, like GDM, if needed.
>
> 6) What other cool stuff can I do for the demo? The server (not mine,
> mine is just the demo) will support 35 X-terminals (the Entria II's I
> told you about above). I plan to show it running GNOME2, Anjuta, and
> EMACS and perhaps a few shells for each user, and then simultaneously
> compiling 20 or so programs to show that the system won't freak out or
> get dog slow. I'd like to show that Linux is very useful for programmers
> learning ANSI C, Java, BASIC (is there a BASIC interpreter for Linux??),
> and general use--such as showing they can use Dia for making their
> flowcharts. My demo system is a dual AthlonXP 1400MHz W\ 1GB RAM and an
> 18GB 10KRPM SCSI drive. The server will be, if the demo works, a dual
> Xeon 2.8 W\12GB RAM and 5 10KRPM SCSI drives in RAID10 + hotspare. (Not
> bad for 35 X terminals!)
> Any ideas on how to show it as useful (if it is for these tasks) and as
> generally cool? I was thinking of showing off a few themes, but they
> will look like crap in 8-bit color...

I think BASIC is a terible language.  I would recommend to anyone to
stay away from BASIC at all costs.  If you want an easy langauge to
learn that is interpreted, look at Python.  BASIC was the first langauge
I learned and I still despise the time I wasted using it.  I wish
someone would have told me to learn something else.

When I first saw DDD I thought it was cool.  This debugger front end
will show you nice structed diagrams of the data for the program you are
debugging.

>
> 7) Hmm, Mozilla is just broken as hell. What browser should I demo?
> Mozilla's cursor doesn't work, cut/paste doesn't work even between
> Mozilla applications, and overall it is being a piece of junk. I see the
> system install emerged 1.0 for some reason. I'll have to try 1.1.
>
> Any other ideas, warnings, caveats, etc? I am doing the demo TOMORROW
> (Friday OCT 4 2002) so need answers ASAP, ***but answers after tommorow
> will still be useful*** because I will have a few days to show off to
> individual instructors.
> Any help appreciated. Thanks.

None of what has been mentioned so far is specific to Gentoo.  Any newer
linux distro should have all the mentioned applications.  Is your
audience familiar with linux?  Is gentoo in competition with another
linux distro?