Adventures in widescreen-land

My girlfriend got me a 19" widescreen monitor for Christmas to replace my 20" CRT monitor that had been hogging the better part of my desk for the last 10 months or so. I shutdown my computer, rebooted, and when it came back up, things were a little odd. My resolution was set at 1280x1024 (my old resolution) even though the native resolution of my new LCD screen is 1440x900. I was a little puzzled, so I downloaded the nvidia-settings program to set the resolution manually; after I set it to 1440x900, I was asked to restart X to set the resolution correctly (or something like that). After I rebooted (I know, I could have just reset X), I couldn't even load X, had to try to fix my Xorg.conf from the cli, which wasn't really a problem, except it didn't seem like X was even looking at the xorg.conf file...so I was stuck. Luckily, I'd installed Gentoo on a different partition, so I booted into that, emerged k3b (which took at least 2 hours), burned a new gutsy cd, and re-installed ubuntu.
My adventure doesn't stop here. After I reboot and boot from my new ubuntu partition, I'm stuck at 1024x768 with about 3 inches of black on the left side of the screen. Daunting. I installed the nvidia-glx-new driver, rebooted, and I was set...I just got compiz fusion going, and now I'm happy.
What I'm not happy about is the time it took me to get the whole thing up and running. Just to get the correct resolution on a new monitor, I spent at least 10 hours configuring, installing, reinstalling, and praying. Whenever I read stories about how hard something was for somebody to do with linux, I tend to roll my eyes and think "No way it was that hard. I could fix that in a minute", and I'm sure someone is going to do that here as well. Just let me prefix the flaming by saying I'm pretty experienced with linux, and it took me 10 hours. Just think about how a linux novice (someone using an eeepc/gPC) would react!
That's all, let the flames begin.

Installing Gentoo for real

I know it's been awhile, but I haven't really been doing anything blog-worthy lately, so there it is. The other day (more like last week sometime), I started to ponder installing Gentoo on my desktop box. I printed out the gentoo handbook, burned a brand-new minimal-x86-2007.0 disk, rebooted, and I was off!


After about 2 hours of emerge --sync, compiling, and untarring, I was set to go. I followed the handbook to the letter, except for a couple of things: For one, I didn't make a separate 32Mb /boot partition, because I already had grub configured on my root drive for ubuntu, and I _really_ didn't want to lose my beautiful working operating system. I simply edited /boot/grub/menu.lst on /dev/hda2 (my ubuntu root drive) to include a couple references to the gentoo root partition.
Also, because I was dual-booting, I had to modify my partitioning a little bit, but nothing major.

In other news, I'm engaged to a beautiful girl, and we're set to get married in May, God willing.

Updates, and some events of today

Wow, where to begin? I finished installing Gentoo on the box I got from the mafia guy, fooled around with synergy, vnc, ssh, fluxbox, and eventually set it aside. I really like gentoo!

My girlfriend works at Radioshack, so I can get stuff at a reasonable cost, but that's not really what I'm going to go into right now. There is a new shopping center opening, and the local Radioshack is moving from an old location to a new one in the brand new shopping center. I assisted in the move, and noticed some older computers in the back, which I eventually purchased (with 2 monitors) for about 10 bucks! When I get these boxes home, I realise two things: One, neither of these computers have any RAM in them, and two, both computers are under 300Mhz...not ideal for anything really.

My friends and I are starting up a computer-oriented business together at the end of December, and one of the services we want to offer is a free-of-charge internet cafe. Of course, since we're all under 20, finances are of the utmost importance, and anywhere we can save a buck or two, we try to. I was using stumbleupon, and found this . After about 4 hours of trial and error, I was able to get each computer to boot from an etherboot floppy, load a minimal OS from a central server, load X, and get to a desktop! The cool thing is, 90% of the processing is done on the server, the crappy box that the customer sees is just a thin client. Of course, we want to look professional, so we're not going to be displaying 10 year old technology in the front room, these boxes were just for me to practice on. Now that I know the theory and practice, we'll be using these <--link to 533Mhz box as our thin clients. Small, cheap, stylish. I'm digging it, for sure!

In totally unrelated news, I slid off the side of the road (it's been pouring down rain lately), got pulled out, locked my keys in the truck, and had to break the window to get them...what a bummer! :(

Power Failure due to lagomorph

Yesterday morning, I woke up and felt the bed vibrating. At first I wasn't sure if I was still dreaming, or if I was actually feeling it, but after 10 minutes of vibration, I decided it was real. I looked under my bed, and my rabbit was there, chewing on the bedpost! I grabbed her and locked her in her cage (I still can't figure out how she got out...).

That's when I noticed it. The silence.

All 3 of my computers were silent, as was my router, and dsl modem (which is normally silent anyway, but there were no lights on). Something was very wrong. The reason we keep the rabbit in her cage is that she has a...penchant...for chewing on anything insulated, like electrical cords.

Cursing my luck, I pulled my desk and entertainment center out from the wall, moving my stereo, tv, xbox, 2 computer towers, a monitor, printer, and various paraphernalia in the process. Luckily, she hadn't chewed on anything, but simply stepped on the power switches for both my surge protectors. Unluckily, I sitll had to put everything back and get to work...not a fun morning!

Update on my mafia box (and other things)

I encountered that weird freezing bug again on my 400Mhz test box, so I pulled all the cards, cdrom, and RAM, and scrapped it.

...Anyway...

I went back to the home of the mafia guy, installed Microsoft Office Suite for him, and hauled his old box to my house, where I promptly set it up. The good news is that it booted up into Windows 98, but proceeded to BSOD directly after that, but that's ok, I wasn't planning on using Windows 98 anyway. I replaced the 64Mb stick of RAM with a stick of 256, effectively quadrupling the available RAM, tossed in a Gentoo minimal install cd, and waited...and waited...

The livecd was hanging when it tried to mount the cdrom to a mountpoint (probably in RAM, somewhere) for about 10 minutes, than offering to let me select the root device (which I couldn't do), or to drop me to a shell (ash). Once I was in the shell, I looked at dmesg, which revealed a bunch of "Unable to Read" messages in relation to the cdrom, so I chucked a new(er) one in, popped in a cd, and it loaded lickity split!

Now I'm installing gentoo 2007.0 again, and praying that it works. ;-)

Free computer, courtesy The Mafia

One of my dads friends wanted me to "put together" a new computer for him. Before he could go on, I was already thinking about hard drives, motherboard, all the components needed...then he told me that it was all in boxes, and he didn't want to put it together. Some background on this gentleman before I proceed: this guy is about 5'6', Italian as the pope, and he owns and operates a "Disposal Facility" (Dump).

So, I get to his home, meet his charming wife, then get down to business. All really easy stuff, monitor plugs into tower, dsl modem plugs into NIC, etc...the only sketchy part was agreeing to the Vista EULA, but I figured if Microsoft tried anything on this guy, someone'd get their knees broken.

After I finished setting up his new computer (which is crap laggy), I inquired about the status of his old hp 500Mhz "never obsolete" box. He said he'd think about it, and called me today saying I could have it. When I go to pick it up, the first thing I'm going to do is wipe the hard drive, just in case the feds come looking for information about him, ha ha.

If anyone's wondering about the other box I was posting about earlier, I did a reinstall, and everything is working great, so I don't know what the problem was, but it's gone now (or for now, at least)!

A tale of Gentoo and bad memory

So, I have that 400Mhz box kicking around under my desk. It's not powerful enough to do anything graphical, but I have been looking around for a new test box; I hauled it out, plugged in all the relevant cords and cables, and lo and behold, it booted...into a bios (oh boy)

I've already tried out Gentoo on an old Dell Inspiron 8100 laptop, but there's something screwy with it, because I could never get it to install correctly. Now that I had that "new" test machine, I decided to give Gentoo another shot.

I booted from the 2007.0 livecd, followed the guide here, and I was set. I rebooted, and a working system came up on the first time. I know that there are probably a bunch of gentoo experts reading this and thinking 'What a moron, to get excited because it worked the first time', but if you'd been there during the Gentoo on Inspiron debacle, you'd understand my frame of mind.

So there I was with a perfectly working computer, now I needed to install software. Of course, I wanted this to be remotely accessible, so I had sshd running so I could access it from my desktop computer (way easier than switching chairs).

Emerge screen....yay! Success!

Emerge vim....yay! Success!

Emerge x11-xorg....ya...no, wait...what happened? ssh connection closed by $REMOTEHOSTIP ? What do you mean, I can't raise my computer by using the keyboard? No response? Huh, must be a freak occurence...hard reboot and...
Emerge x11-xorg...same problem, hard reboot needed.

So, I jump on the #gentoo channel on freenode and ask the gentoo gurus what's going on. The general consensus seems to be that it's hardware related, so here I am, running memtest86+...for the next 20 hours or so. If it's a bad stick, I'll just yank one out, since I've got 2x256Mb installed, and I don't really need all that RAM...

If it's not the RAM, I guess I'll have to get another test box, which brings me to my next story....which I'll relate tomorrow. If anyone has any other ideas on what it could be, go ahead and leave a comment!