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On Thu, May 26, 2011 at 6:28 PM, Kevin O'Gorman <kogorman@×××××.com> wrote: |
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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, |
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> and the latest Gentoo live disk cannot talk to my monitor at all. Whatever |
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> it's trying is unacceptable to the HD monitor I've had on there for a year, |
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> and I 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. |
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> They are old Pentium IV-based 32-bit chips. I got the slowest still being |
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> made, 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 |
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> |
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> |
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|
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You let a small problem like the latest live cd not booting your system |
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scare you away? |
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|
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Have you tried using an older live cd? If it's a video issue, maybe |
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detecting your monitor wrong, how about turning on the framebuffer (there's |
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an option for that)? |
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|
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It's doable man, don't give up. |