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On 29/08/2017 18:47, Mick wrote: |
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> On Tuesday, 29 August 2017 12:08:12 BST Alan McKinnon wrote: |
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>> On 28/08/2017 22:20, mad.scientist.at.large@××××××××.com wrote: |
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>>> |it's not so hard yet, just hard to get by reading it in advance, doing |
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>>> |
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>>> it is fairly straight forward. |
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>> |
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>> It only seems like it might be tricky when reading it. |
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>> Running Gentoo involves steps that you do on almost no other distro, so |
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>> the words on the web page are unfamiliar. |
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>> |
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>> Almost everyone that's done it for the first time in the last 5 years |
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>> and reported up says "Gee, that wasn't so hard! A lot easier than I ever |
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>> thought it would be!" |
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>> |
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>> It's also very obvious what each step actually did, but you have to do |
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>> it yourself once - it's obvious in petrospec. |
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>> |
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>> Welcome to Gentoo-land. May your stay be long and happy and fruitful. |
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>> |
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>> Your next assigned task (to be done sometime in the next year) is to |
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>> repeat the whole process on a test rig and do it from a stage 1. Like we |
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>> all did 15 years ago. If serious street cred brownie points is what you |
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>> are after, that's how you get 'em! |
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> |
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> Nope. You need to do a stage 1 on nothing newer than a Pentium 3 or |
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> equivalent for it to count, run out of compile space on PORTAGE_TMPDIR, |
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> reformat and start again. |
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> |
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> For extra street cred you would of course install ~arch and have to work- |
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> around every darn bug you came across by the n'th time you had to start |
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> recompiling from scratch, because both gcc and the profile USE flags changed 3 |
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> times during the 2 weeks it would invariably take you to finish your install. |
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> |
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> In between all this pain, you may also discover your MoBo would hard lock |
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> every time your mismatched RAM modules started paging over to swap ... O_O |
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> |
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> but after a hard reboot it would be OK until the next big compile. |
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> |
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> I understand this to be an endeavour not dissimilar to climbing Everest during |
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> an avalanche. |
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> |
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> PS. Did I mention you would have to do all of the above using a dial-up modem, |
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> which would require off-tree modules, because your PC came with a Winmodem? |
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> |
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> PPS. In case you have never been cursed with using a winmodem, check the 2nd |
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> bullet point at the bottom of this page: |
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> |
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> http://www.columbia.edu/kermit/winmodem.html |
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> |
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|
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|
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Let's see, the most bottom line stage 1 I ever did was on an AMD athlon |
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cpu with 512M Ram and an 80G IDE Drive. Didn't have the mobo lockups |
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tho, but did have the devil's own time fiddling with overclocking and |
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other goodies in the BIOS. Eventually I just selected "Optimal" and let |
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them damn thing figure out what it thought was best... |
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|
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Sadly, I missed the whole winmodem saga and never had a need to use one. |
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I had a US Robotics 56k dialup modem and in those days almost all mobos |
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came with serial ports. So I probably got lucky. |
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|
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there's also the fun and games 20 years before that typing silly games |
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on a ZX Spectrum, saving to cassette tape and hoping the bloody thing |
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plays back OK. But that's a whole other story and I'm sure you are not |
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even vaguely interested :-) |
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|
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-- |
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Alan McKinnon |
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alan.mckinnon@×××××.com |