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Welcome to Orb Graffiti, a place for me to write daily about life and computers. Contrary to popular belief, the two are not interchangeable. EMAIL - I publish email sometimes. If you send me an email and you want privacy or anonymity, please say so clearly at the beginning of your message.. |
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June 03, 2001 - Updates at 0730
Good morning. The good news is that the last OpenOffice article is up on LinuxMuse. Other than that, it's just the beginning of another manic Monday. Oh, I know what... I'm looking to build an SMP machine, and I welcome your recommendations. Prices are pretty decent right now, and I've gotten a fair amount of feedback that decent computer gear outlets are far and few between out there in Maryland. No grand rush, later today will be fine... heh!
I owe you several garden pictures, as I've been notably lax in getting them up early in the week, this year. I'll snap some today for tomorrow's update.
Meantime, I'm also looking at assorted topics for write-up, either here or on the LinuxMuse site. At the latter, we still haven't got any News, Kernel, Hardware or Miscellaneous articles up at all. Most of what Greg and I have written is under the rubric of Userspace, which is to be expected, I suppose. There's so much to see and do and learn, every which way, neh?
I will find something to keep me busy and out of trouble. Enjoy your Monday, best as you can, and I'll see you around.
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June 04, 2002 - Updates at 0630
Good morning. Here's just a brief update for the moment. I didn't get any new hardware, yet... However, I had two issues to cope with on Garcia, my current main workstation. First was a variety of problems related to this machine having been on an upgrade conga-line since before Gentoo Linux was released. It had been updated many times. I was really ready for a clean-slate installation.
Secondly, I had a spare 40G Maxtor laying around, waiting for the day I decided to reconfigure my systems. To set things up as I needed them, I was going to be moving all of my partitions around anyway, so it becomes time to rebuild Garcia. Now I've got hda, hdb and hdc as 40, 20 and 40 gigabyte drives, respectively. hdd is a Teac IDE 24X burner. The reinstall of Gentoo on Garcia is proceeding apace. It should have actually been done by now, but the network went down overnight. That kills an installation that depends on downloading latest sources with each install. I could have worked around that, but didn't know I'd have to!
So right now I'm editing this file on the webserver directly, using Vim, via ssh, from Gryphon (the Acer Travelmate) while I wait for the rest of Garcia's brain to download, compile and install. Oh, there is one minor woo-hoo in all of this. If it works right (and it looks as though it will), I'll have a GCC3.1 workstation running, thanks to a new test image from Gentoo. I know, I know, but I just can't stay away from the bleeding edge. More later, when things are settled down a bit. TTFN.
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June 05, 2002 - Updates at 0830
Good morning... Oh, wait. Let me get a cup of coffee. It doesn't mean I'll be any more coherent, but at least I have a shot at waking up one of these hours. There's a bunch of new things and changes, but first things first: the vegetable garden. Once I install the netpbm package, I'll be able to do the graphics manipulations I need to present you with the snaps from yesterday...
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From left to right, above: The carrots are doing nicely for such a little plot. We'll be increasing that crop in future years. We've been noshing on fresh carrots each evening for a couple of weeks now. Yummy stuff. The beans are stunning. They've shot up to over 7 feet vertically, and I'm training them out on lines to both sides. We have a lot of baby beans (in the 1 to 2" size) there now. I'd guess another couple or three weeks before those start feeding us. The tomatoes are fecund this year. There is lots of fruit on all of the plants, and I'm just waiting for the first to start ripening - that will open the floodgates. Finally, the late-start squash and cucumber that we put in at the end of the yard is coming up nicely. The potted squash are about dead, something went wrong there. But thesenew plants will be producing in another couple of weeks, so that'll be fun, too!
Next up, I rebuilt Gentoo Linux on Garcia, my current main workstation. There are at least two reasons for this. First, I haven't really done a housekeeping on this box since I first installed Gentoo, and that was well before they went 1.0. The net result was lots of cruft, stranded and broken bits of programs and configurations laying about, probably mostly from my learning process with the Gentoo Way. So it was time to clean house anyway. Secondly, there's the beginnings of a migration into the GCC 3 series of compilers. The current latest iteration is gcc3.1, and more eyeballs are needed to spot and report bugs. In my official role as Guinea Pig to the Stars, I decided I'd travel with the lemmings at the front of the pack again.
I've tried doing stand-alone gcc3.1 upgrades in the last couple of weeks on Gryphon, the Acer Travelmate, with very little success. But a couple of days ago, a 1.3 test release for Gentoo, theoretically supporting gcc3.1, appeared on the ibibilo server. So I went for it. Here's a rough set of instructions that I followed. Some of the compiler flags might be different for you - I've got a PIII coppermine in Garcia. Note, I needed to have networking running to follow this process.
Boot and start install with Gentoo 1.1a Install CDR
Follow directions on http://www.gentoo.org/doc/build.html
through the partitioning and mount steps (but don't mount the cdrom)
$ cd /mnt/gentoo
$ wget http://www.ibiblio.org/gentoo/releases/build/1.3_gcc3.1_test/stage1-ix86-1.3-gcc3.1.tbz2
$ tar -xvjpf stage1-ix86-1.3-gcc3.1.tbz2
Then continue with the chroot process. After the 'emerge rsync'
edit /etc/make.conf, but don't use any fancy flags or optimizations
at this time. I used the following stanza:
# Pentium Pro/Pentium II/Pentium III+/Pentium 4/Athlon exclusive (binaries
# will use the P6 instruction set and only run on P6+ systems)
CHOST="i686-pc-linux-gnu"
CFLAGS="-march=i686 -O2 -pipe"
CXXFLAGS="-march=i686 -O2 -pipe"
My first try, I used -O3, and -fomit-frame-pointer, and didn't get
all the way through a first stage install. So I restarted, rebuilt, and used
the above flags. Got through the bootstrap just fine.
Then I edited make.conf again, like this:
CFLAGS="-march=i686 -O3 -pipe -fomit-frame-pointer"
CXXFLAGS="-march=i686 -O3 -pipe -fomit-frame-pointer"
Then I did the emerge system step. It completed satifactorily, with
just 7 errors in the emerge process, all info files. Then I finished out
the install, including the 2.4.19-gentoo-r5 kernel, and all the other bits.
First boot went smoothly. Then I continued on with the desktop install
documented at http://www.gentoo.org/doc/desktop.html
While installing KDE, the emerge died twice, on xanim and kdemultimedia.
Following a hint from http://forums.gentoo.org/viewforum.php?f=29
I changed the CFLAGS and CXXFLAGS from -O3 back to -O2, and
installed just the package that failed, like this:
$ nano -w /etc/make.conf
...
$ emerge xanim
The build for that package went fine. Then I changed back to -O3
and restarted the emerge kde process. Rince and repeat with
kdemultimedia, and everything installed very, very nicely. I'd note
that actual compilation of the software went more slowly with gcc3.1,
but the compiled programs run noticably faster. Whether this is
just a product of binutils 2.12xxx or a combination... who cares!
So far the only program I haven't been able to build under gcc3.1 is
Vim 6.1. It uses it's own configuration routine, and sets up defines that
conflict with library routine prototypes. I'm working on this.
But overall, great success with the 1.3 GCC3.1 build so far!!!
Next in line is the new main workstation. Now I'm looking for a name, a name for a machine that's going to be a real barn-burner. Here's the core of the configuration:
Some of the parts I purchased locally, others I ordered from Outpost and Crucial. Everything should be here by tomorrow sometime. Here's hoping that they're all the right parts, same as I ordered, eh? Thanks go to Bob Thompson for helping me out, both with the HardwareGuys site that he and Barbara run in support of their books (like PC Hardware in a Nutshell, Second Edition, coming soon to a bookstore near you!)
Now I'd best get busy. There are projects that await me. See you soon!
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June 06, 2002 - Updates at 0654
Howdy. Last night about three minutes past nine, I looked at the clock and said to myself, "S&*@#&(*@&!" Or words to that effect. The heat of the day (it peaked in our back yard just shy of the century mark) must have sucked the brains out of my head. Even though I posted a notice about last night's SVLUG meeting to the sbay.linux newsgroup, I still forgot about it.
Good news on the hardware-for-the-new-box front: The memory arrived yesterday, and the final bits are in transit from Ohio via Airborne Express, they should be here today sometime. I'll tell you, given the amount of time I sit and twiddle my thumbs waiting for things to happen, so I can work on them, the new machine will pay for itself in improved productivity in a matter of months.
Finally for now, as I noted yesterday, Garcia is sporting a shiny new Gentoo Linux install, out on the edge a bit with GCC3.1. Almost everything is working nicely, although I have yet to resolve the conflicts that prevent Vim from compiling. One piece of good news that I'm sure that Greg will be glad to hear: the RPM of WineX 2.01 installs and runs very nicely indeed. I played just a little bit of Diablo II: Lord of Destruction last night. Fast, much better too with the 2.4.19-r7 kernel than with the -r5 for some reason. I'm gonna do a bit of verification work on that, too.
See you around. Hardware updates today if it arrives soon enough.
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June 07, 2002 - Updates at 1011
Good morning. Memo to self: set the BIOS clock properly on the next reboot. Right now KDE is telling me that it's 0115 in the morning, tomorrow! That's right, I'm live on the new hardware. I need to do some more testing, but it's clear that even with disk-intensive tasks like building the entire GUI setup with GCC3.1, this dual-Athlon is more than twice as fast as Garcia. 304 minutes to do a raw emerge KDE from a cold start, whereas on the PIII-933 based Garcia, that took about 623 minutes (I ran both boxes, timed, overnight, on clean installs). Greg and I are running another test, timing just a Mozilla decompress and compile, on my boxes and his. Results later.
At left, you'll see the machine a-building. There, I'm actually just about ready to button it up and go for first boot. All the cables are in place and dressed out. I don't know about you, but I use a lot of tie-wraps (there's a trade name in there someplace) when I assemble a box. Loose wires flopping about, interfering with fans and airflow, etc. doesn't appeal to me.
What's in a name? I've tended towards giving machines names that start with a 'g', for some reason lost in the mists of time. My current machines are Gryphon (the laptop), Grendel (the server), and Garcia (the old workstation). What to call a fast new machine? We tossed a few ideas back and forth, like Garfunkel (keeping the 'g' theme and the 'music' association started with Garcia). Then there was Gore, but this isn't a failed box. It is a new box for me, so what about GnuBox? Mmmm. I rather liked that one. But when the dust settled, I found that the name of this new barn-burner of a workstation is going to be called Goldfinger.
Now, I have some more setup to do, applications to compile and install (though I'll give you some good news: the latest build of Gentoo 1.3a with GCC3.1 lets me build Vim again. Woo-Hoo!) Happy Friday, and I'll see you later today, or over the weekend.
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June 08, 2002 - Updates at 1054
Good morning. Sorry for the delay. Two things came up. First, I slept in, way late. It was almost 0900 when I tumbled out of bed. However, I was up pretty late on Thursday night reading a Dale Brown yarn, and got up at my normal 0600 Friday morning. The second thing was that I had to jump into the shower and go tank up Marcia's truck. That's one of our divisions of duties: I do trash. I gas up vehicles. Other stuff. Since Marcia has errands this morning, and under a quarter tank...
Here are the results of the Mozilla compile test from yesterday. First, on Greg's Athlon XP 1800+, running GCC 2.95.3, Mozilla compiled in 31.5 minutes. We'll have a GCC 3.1 result from Greg on the same hardware later today or perhaps tomorrow. Now, GCC 3.1 is a lot slower overall than 2.95, but it builds executables that are much faster. Anyway, on Goldfinger, the Dual Athlon-MP 1900+, Mozilla took 35m2s. And on Garcia, the PIII-933, the compile time was 93m48s. So with identical loads and tasks (both fresh boot, no X, nothing extra), my new workstation is about 2.7 times faster at the sort of task I do a lot. As I get further back into coding, this is going to be a boon!
And now, I find I've ignored this open window for the last half hour while I work with Greg on getting a 1.3a Gentoo install going on his box, Perlith. I'd best just post this, and get back later if I can. TTFN.
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June 09, 2002 - Updates at 0900
Good morning. With coffee starting to perk through my system, and a few spare minutes before it's time to get ready for the Costco run, I thought I'd try to debug the Festival ebuild. I'm told by one who knows that it builds fine under GCC2.95 (of course!). So I'm puzzling my way through the error messages and source files, trying to track down the origin of this bug. See ya later!
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Visit the rest of the DAYNOTES GANG, a collection of bright minds and sharp wits. Really, I don't know why they tolerate me <grin>. My personal inspiration for these pages is Dr. Jerry Pournelle. I am also indebted to Bob Thompson and Tom Syroid for their patience, guidance and feedback. Of course, I am sustained by and beholden to my lovely wife, Marcia. You can find her online too, at http://www.dutchgirl.net/. Thanks for dropping by.
All Content Copyright © 1999-2002 Brian P. Bilbrey.