the corner office

Been studying, mostly, but I've made a bit of progress setting up the new PC. Xorg and Gnome installed without a hitch earlier this week, and getting the ATI drivers for my new graphics card working was a breeze, too. The ATI-specific X config tool (fglrxconfig) isn't the most user-friendly of configurers, but it did the job. I had my monitor up and running without any hassles. The Gnome installation is also a lot nicer. In addition to the +kitchen_sink standard Gnome install, there's now a gnome-light package which installs a bare-minimum Gnome desktop, leaving you free to pick what bits and bobs you want to add. The main saving this brings is not being dependent on some of the bigger Gnome packages, like Evolution and Mozilla. I noticed though, that Mozilla still gets installed to satisfy some odd dependency, but you can apparently sidestep this by setting 'firefox' USE flags which tells Gnome to rely on firefox wherever it needs a browser engine.

(The only trick is that if you install Firefox natively on x86_64, you can't use old-fashioned 32-bit plugins like Flash. The only way around this is using 32-bit Firefox binaries, meaning you have to have a source version of either Mozilla or Firefox, and the binary version. But I'm getting ahead of myself).

Setting up a Gentoo box from scratch takes you through a couple of milestones. The first one is getting the kernel built and bootable. Once you can actually boot up the machine, you can start mucking around with drivers and whatnot, knowing that you can always roll back to an earlier kernel if things go wrong. Usually at this stage you get ssh going, so that you can connect to the box and do all the set-up remotely.

The second big milestone is getting X (and your desktop environement - in my case, Gnome) up and running. This gives you a GUI to work with. A GUI is nice, but for me, the third milestone is getting sound going. When you can listen to mp3s, the machine is 'inhabitable' :-)

So this evening I got the sound drivers set up, which was also a straightforward case of following the documentation. I love Linux, because it lets you do cool things that you just can't do (or conceive of doing) with Windows. For example, to test whether sound is working, the Gentoo ALSA docs suggest that you just redirect random noise to your sound device with

cat /dev/urandom > /dev/dsp

Lots of static for free!

Anyway. Next step was installing VNC on my old PC. That's allowed me to 'move' across to the new PC, but still I get back into my old PC's Gnome desktop to do stuff like type this blog entry into my Notes client.

Next step is to start installing apps on this machine, and start moving my data and junk across. This is all still going incredibly smoothly...

Links (for future reference)

• Gentoo ATI driver HOWTO
• Unofficial ATI drivers FAQ - for installing the proprietary ATI drivers
• Gentoo Linux ALSA guide - sound configuration guide

That was a lot of fun... work year-end do at Carnivore restaurant, just down the road from us. I haven't been since about '99, and I realised that I couldn't remember what wild animals I'd eaten the last time. So this list is for posterity... apart from the usual critters, we ate kudu, warthog, crocodile and zebra. I, like most people, I think, was most apprehensive about eating croc, but it was actually quite decent. Zebra, on the other hand, is just dreadful. Now I know why 'horse meat' is such a pejorative term. Bleh.

The new machine, which shall be known as 'mirkwood' (since the old 200MMX mirkwood is an ex-PC), is an AMD 64 3200+. I got m'self an MSI nForce4 motherboard, which with new 939 pin design, PCIE and SLI support will hopefully be upgrade-friendly down the line... especially if, when this Honours degree is over, I regain a semblance of a normal life and dip my toes into the gaming world again. I got a gig of memory which isn't much by today's standards, but the proof will be in the swap file, so to speak, and can be upgraded later. I guess the main thing one gets from a new machine like this is unspeakably insane memory and IO throughput, compared to the machines from a few years ago.

Things have certainly changed since my last foray into hardware. Old ATA is out the window, in with SATA. AGP is on the way out, in with PCI Express. Gigabit on-board LAN, by default. On-board sound cards with more output ports than I know what to do with. The machine itself wasn't a problem to put together - which has improved my mood immensely. First of all, I really don't enjoy hardware. Fiddling with jumpers and getting tangled up in cables just isn't my scene. On top of that, I usually just accept that whenever I buy electronic stuff, there'll be at least one component that's a dud. Kind of like people who don't like horses always getting to ride the psychotic devil-horse. So anyway, having everything pop into place, and the machine just boot up without a whimper, was probably a first for me.

On the software side, things are also a bit different. This AMD64 thing is a little daunting. I've made the machine a dual-boot, and installed XP up-front, since common wisdom, which I'm fully prepared to listen to, is that letting the Windows XP installer loose on a hard drive with other operating systems is just asking for trouble. I also know there's an XP 64 bit edition, but my copy(s) of XP are 32-bit, and since I hardly ever use Windows right now, it'll do.

A quick run-through with the various driver disks gave me a pristine, juiced up XP installation waiting to be ignored for a few months. On to Linux...

Gentoo seems to have been a pioneer on the AMD 64 bit front, which I think just means they got to discover and document the problems sooner than most distributions. I could have gone with a safe 32 bit install, but where would the fun be in that? So armed with heaps of documentation, and the as-usual decent install guides, I got started last night.

The main change is that the old Stage 1 and Stage 2 installation methods have been deprecated. These two install methods basically involved compiling the whole damned system from scratch. There wasn't much point in doing it really, but it was an ubergeek thing to do, so that if you were ever chatting to other geeks you could casually toss in a 'oh yes, I've done a Stage 1 Gentoo install', and they'd phear you. I've done a few Stage 1 installs on home machines, so I have my cred and can happily move on. By the looks of things, this old way of installing has now been marginalised and is called a 'jackass' install, which says it all, I guess. About 15 minutes of research had me sold on going with the (recommended) Stage 3, which involves downloading a tar file of all the system tools, pre-compiled and packaged, and basically plopping a near-complete directory structure, and set of system utilities, compilers and libraries onto your hard drive with a single tar -xvf.

With that done, it was a quick job of going through the kernel configuration and compilation, getting the system set-up and installing a few system tools, and then getting GRUB going. Then it was time to reboot, and... I got a kernel panic. A quick Google later, and I realised that I'd forgotten to compile the nVidia SATA drivers into my kernel. So I recompiled, and retried, and ... pff, the same thing. A bit more digging around and I realised that when I copied across the recompiled kernel to the boot partition, I'd gotten the boot image's name wrong, so GRUB kept rebooting with the first, driver-less kernel. Got that fixed, and I booted up OK.

All in all, rather painless (apart from my own stupidity). I've got the machine doing a quick emerge world to get everything updated in preparation for the next step, which will be installing X, Gnome and all the other goodies I need. That'll probably be tomorrow's job. That's where things will get tricky, and the 64-bit issues start cropping up, so the install isn't over yet.

I have to say though, looking at the machine compiling its way through the various updates to system packages, this machine is suhmoking. I am thus far a very happy camper.

Haven't blogged in a bit, hereisthenews:

I hit the big 33 last week. I've decided that 33 is the age at which you can no longer pretend that you're a thirty-something who doesn't belong there. It seems to mark the transition from 'early 30s' to 'mid 30s'. And, it doesn't really have a nice ring to it. Come to think of it, 34, 35 etc etc don't have nice rings to them either.

Ronwen's finished her exam stretch, and all seems to have gone quite well. We're looking forward to returning to a more sane culinary regimen again. I, on the other hand, have about 2 months before I start exams, and the weeks are whizzing by a little too fast for comfort. Two months sounds like a long time, but dividing that by the number of subjects I have to cover doesn't leave much wiggle room. Still, it's doable, with a bit of discipline.

Which brings to my next topic. As if I didn't need more distractions, I finally bought myself a new PC. My current machine had gotten decidedly long in the tooth, and I'd put off getting a new machine for long enough. I decided to leap into the world of AMD 64 with a respectable, if not completely beastly machine. While I went for an old fashioned 32-bit Windows XP Pro install (it's going to be a dual-boot), my intention is to get Gentoo's AMD 64 distribution running on it, because I'm a silly bastard who loves a challenge and making life difficult for myself. I'm in the set-up stages of doing the install at the moment, so I'll leave the geek waffle for another post once I've made a bit more progress.

Via The Register via LinuxToday, SGI has been delisted from the NYSE. Reading a related article, they still cranked out over $700 million in turnover last year, which is nothing to snort at, but the days when uberpowerful, almost mythical SGI boxes were worth the premium are over. The story isn't new, but it is sad, I guess.

On a related note, Sun 'only' lost $133 million this past quarter.

A bit of a blog world huffy is surfacing over the announcement of plans to rename Johannesburg International Airport to Oliver Tambo International Airport. (Mzansi Afrika, Fodder, Commentary, Fodder again, all with lots of interesting comments and discussion).

My opinion, simply, is that in the greater scheme of things, naming an airport after a recognised and esteemed anti-apartheid icon isn't really that incendiary, although you'd think that our politicians had more important things to worry about than renaming bloody airports.

I had to deal with a hard drive going clackety-clack bzzzz this week. Unlike the Great Hard Drive Crash of 2004, this event shall be known as the Lesser Spotted Hard Drive Fizzle of 2005. I learned my lesson last year, and it paid off now.

The drive in question was a 5 year old 20 gig hard drive, so it was hardly unexpected. I used this old drive for my Gentoo and Windows installations, and kept all my 'real' data on a 200GB data drive. I regularly rsynced my entire Gentoo operating system onto the 200 gig drive as well, and then backed all of that up to another external USB 200 gig drive, which spends most of its time hidden away in the back of a cupboard, where burglars and lightning are less likely to get to it.

So thankfully, all I needed to do this time around was boot up with a Linux liveCD, convert an unused FAT32 partition into a boot, swap and root partition on the 200 gig drive, copy across my entire Gentoo system, set up the bootloader on the new drive, and I was back up and running.

What I didn't even try to restore, because I hadn't had much joy with it in the past, was my Windows system. I've now moved from dual-boot-but-never-touch-Windows, to being 100% Windows-free. When I finally get around to investing in a new PC I'll probably set it up as a dual-boot, but right now, being Linux-only will do me just fine.

Ohgoshlookatthetime. I haven't made much progress with that last assignment this weekend, I must admit. Friday night was spent tinkering on the PC, before crashing early. I'm not sure why, but Friday nights seem to be the one night of the week where I run out of steam ridiculously early. I think I'm getting old, and 8 hours of sleep just doesn't happen for me during the weeks. Nor 7, and sometimes not 6, for that matter. So I think I'm just buggered by Fridays.

Yesterday would have been my mom's 56th birthday. Being the first birthday after she passed away, I knew it was approaching, and wasn't looking forward to it, but I guess it's one of those things you have to go through. It wasn't too bad in the end, but still a bit of a gloomy day.

For the first time in months, we went to Cresta for breakfast yesterday morning. I spent the rest of the day doodling around with my blog app, and watching tons of Jeeves & Wooster. Today's followed pretty much the same pattern. As I mentioned, I should've spent the weekend doing my final assignment for the year, but considering that a fairly earnest and draconian study programme needs to be embarked upon pronto if I don't want a miserable January exam stretch, it's been a real treat having a totally lazy and self-indulgent weekend. I might not have another of these in a while.

I was given the credits I needed, so freedom reigned supreme this week. (I was asked to do the final assignment anyway, so that'll be this weekend's job).

I started fiddling with my new blog app again. First step was to convert everything from PostgreSQL to MySQL. That was supposed to be a quick 'tweak-some-SQL-here-n-there' sort of affair. Yeerrrrssss.

To be honest, SQL-wise, it wasn't too bad. I learned that PostgreSQL is a touch more forgiving of sloppy SQL than MySQL is (oddly enough). The real schlep came with upgrading from MySQL 4.0 to 4.1. It sparked all sorts of fix-reverse-dependency rebuilding and whatnot, coinciding with the monthly emerge world. Bugzilla broke, all sorts of apps rely on mysql object files, and a Perl module or two needed prodding to the ways of virtue.

Thankfully though, it seems (mostly) done, and I can now import from Notes into MySQL and click through just about everything. I felt a bit guilty leaving PostgreSQL, which is something of the underdog compared to MySQL, but since I have quite a few things relying on MySQL already, it makes sense to stick with one DB server. Also, it's completely unscientific, but I could swear that the new blog feels just a wee bit zippier with MySQL. That doesn't really make sense and there shouldn't be any difference with a single user, but I'll take it as a good omen anyway.

Feeewoooow. The assignment Death March is over, or close-as-dammit to over. This weekend was the final deadline for the year's assignments, and I just handed in my last AI assignment.

I say close-as-dammit, because there's the small matter of the Formal Program Verification assignment I might need to do over the next few nights. Some delicate negotiations are needed between myself and the lecturer who wants to chat to me about it but whom I can't get hold of; technically I've met the credit requirements with the first two assignments I did, but I suspect I'm going to be asked to do the final assignment anyway, just-because. My policy in these things is to just shut the hell up and do the assignment if I have to, in the hope that these gestures of goodwill will be meet with suitable reciprocity in the goodwill department when exams loom closer.

The downside is that the sheer, unholy jubilation I should be feeling at having completed this year's assignment run just isn't there. I had high hopes for doing, y'know, sweet bugger all this week, so here's hoping.