Day: April 4, 2003

I’ll admit it up front: I’m a moron.

Before leaving for work, I did an emerge system.  I SSH’d in this afternoon to configure and make the kernel and do the other random stuff that must be done before the install is final.  For the record, I chose metalog as my system logger and vcron as my cron package.  Metalog looked a little more robust and higher performance than my other options.  I chose vcron cause the docs told me to.

I chose GRUB, just because I have not had issues with GRUB and LILO and I have had issues in the past.  (I managed to trash the family Pentium 60 a few times thanks to my ignorance and LILO.  I was in middle school at the time, so cut me some slack.)

Everything is ready to rock, so I unmounted everything and rebooted.  The machine didn’t come back up on the network.  I spent about 30 minutes trying to figure out which part of the install went wrong, what I could have done wrong or set incorrectly.

Then it hit me: There’s a boot CD in the CD-ROM drive and the BIOS is set to boot from CD first.  *SMACK*  I (hopefully!) have a functional system on that hard drive, I just can’t get to it.

Someone really needs to come up with a remote remove CD from CD-ROM over SSH protocol.

Reverand Jim:

Having been married for almost a week now, I am officially an expert on the subject.

Congrats.

According to Slashdot, 4 days after Duke3D was released as GPL, you can play it on Linux.

Rock, guys.

Ed Cone has the story:

Congressman Howard Coble has withdrawn as commencement speaker at his alma mater, Guilford College. The N&R reports that “about a third of the graduating class of about 160 students presented him with a petition Wednesday asking him not to speak at graduation.” Students were dismayed by Coble’s rationalization of the internment of Japanese-Americans during WWII, and also by his support of the war in Iraq, which some complain is at odds with Guilford’s Quaker traditions.

Mark:

This assumption gives us the willies, and the dangers of said assumption have been brought up in numerous meetings and have been the subject of numerous CYA memos, but for now we are simply going to proceed without worrying about it.

Kerneltrap:

Murray Stokely announced today the availability of FreeBSD 4.8, following October’s 4.7 release [story] by 6 months. Included in 4.8 are “conservative updates” of a number of software programs from the base system, several known security fixes, initial Firewire support, HyperThreading support, and support of “other new hardware technologies“.

Murray notes, “This release does not include all of the new technologies that were introduced with FreeBSD 5.0 in January. FreeBSD 4.X releases offer a more conservative platform than FreeBSD 5.0 at this time.” In other words, 4.8 is currently considered to be the -stable production release, whereas 5.0 [story] remains the development or New Technology release, as reflected here. More information about 4.8 can be found in the release notes and known errata. Murray’s full announcement follows.

I booted up the 1U this evening.from the basic iso.  I followed the install docs and have been bootstrapping a system that is optimized to my hardware.

Oh, here’s the great thing: After I got a few things in order, I hit up /etc/init.d/sshd and have been doing the vast majority of the install over SSH.  No that I’ve been doing anything really.  I haven’t touched it since I edited make.conf.  It’s been humming in the background while I’ve been working on my Windows box.

I tried Gentoo shortly after it was announced an available for download, but I ended up getting frustrated at network configuration.  I was quite happy to find that the correct modules were loaded and after a menu-driven network config script, everything just worked.

Thanks for all the hard work to make mybootstrapping and installation painless so far.  I’m curious to see how zippy this system will end up.