Archive for Linux
Switching to Ubuntu… for a while
February 1st, 2005 • 1 comment Linux
“What the hell?! I’ll switch!”. These words kept ringing in my head while I was spending a ridiculously huge amount of time trying to get X.org 6.8.0 on Gentoo to make at least some use of the great GeForce 6800 Ultra.
I’ve heard a lot about this Ubuntu thing, and I laughed at the name when I first heard it. But to be fair, Ubuntu has won this time, it literally saved me from a stroke.
It took me about 10 minutes to get Ubuntu up and running.
A minor setback was that my BIOS for some reason doesn’t
enumerate hard drives correctly, so I had to boot from a LiveCD
(and guess what? it was Gentoo’s) to fix grub’s menu.lst.
I restarted again, and this time Ubuntu started unpacking deb
packages then tried to start gdm and XFree86 crashed.
I didn’t have nVidia drivers installed *gulp*.
Hesitating, I thought that was it, I’ll never be able to use GeForce on AMD64, but my luck led me to a wiki page on Ubuntu’s site and it took only a couple of minutes to login to GNOME. Here’s exactly what I did:
su: entered password- Uncommented repository lines in
/etc/apt/sources.list apt-get upgradeapt-get install nvidia-glxnvidia-glx-config enablestartx
… and voila! Everything works, I mean EVERYTHING. Not a single glitch. They even took care of Firefox’s middle-click-don’t-paste-but-close-tag annoyance. My God I was impressed. The installation was simple, clean, slick, and deb-compliant. Fedora’s yum couldn’t even do it, but then again , Fedora on AMD64 is a joke.
Now don’t get me wrong, I still love Gentoo, and I still prefer to have a minimalistic distribution that I can play with, and I still love the fact that I compiled my own distribution. But with a damn stable Debian base, up-to-date packages, and a 10 minute install, I think I’ll stick to Ubuntu for a while, maybe until Gentoo on AMD64 doesn’t cause me so much headache.
Note to Fedora: By the way, unpacking copied packages after installation is a nice way to save some time. Copy first, unpack later, I don’t really like 30-minutes installs.
On Choosing Linux
August 29th, 2004 • 1 comment Linux
Brian Jones on Linux.com writes:
Many admins who got the OK to get Linux in the door a few months ago have had to face a lot of people with ties on and arms folded standing outside their cubicle after Red Hat made its end-of-life announcement: Red Hat would no longer release updates for Red Hat Linux 9 and would no longer distribute free ISO images of its releases. The alternative, Red Hat Enterprise, costs money, which invalidated one argument that was useful in getting Linux in the door in the first place.
Yes, many admins did get Linux in the door, and the fact that Red Hat decided to stop supporting their free (as in beer) distribution doesn’t mean that Linux is coming to an end, in fact, it’ll probably move in the right direction for once.
Do you Gentoo?
June 15th, 2004 • 4 comments Linux
Finally, I got my perfect Gentoo installation. In the last couple of weeks I’ve been installing, formatting, reinstalling Gentoo like crazy, I was so eager to learn the ins’ and out’s of the portage, ebuilds, the utilities, and I must say… I’m very impressed!
Well, why wouldn’t I?! Gentoo is a very stable system, it’s easy to use, straight to the point (well maybe not the installation process, but still), and for the first time, I get a distribution that doesn’t try to shove all it’s applications down my throat, when I want something I can ask for it, I don’t need a system trying to tell me what to do.
I know I had to get through a tiresome installation, I had to redo a lot of work, I had to wait for about 12 hours for XFree, Qt and KDE to complete, but it was totally worth it, trust me, the performance I gained was too good to be true. I’ve tried Fedora Core 2, tried Mandrake 10, SuSE 9, they were all good, but they were nothing compared to a fully tweaked Gentoo system in terms of performance.
What I really like about Gentoo, is that you can actually choose what you like, you don’t have to stick to somebody else’s compilation and choice of packages, directory structure, kernel modules, tons of drivers and hardware auto-detection. With Gentoo, you can ask for whatever kernel you need, you get to choose what’s compiled and what’s not, you tell it whether to use MMX, 3DNow, SSE/SSE2, and all those buzz-word-sounding acronyms, you end up with a system that can only run on your computer, your hardware, your choices, not somebody else’s, you don’t need hardware detection anymore, you compiled all you need and that’s it, let the kernel do it’s stuff.
Most of the installation is very well documented in gentoo’s handbook, but that isn’t enough to get a full-fledged Linux up and running, so I’ll try to be a bit more useful and talk a little about my installation experience, though it wasn’t very pleasant, I finally liked what I saw. This isn’t meant to replace Gentoo’s handbook, I’m not going to repeat what Gentoo guys already documented, in fact, some steps are even omitted.
Installing Gentoo
April 30th, 2004 • 1 comment Linux
I’m a source fanatic, I like compiling everything from scratch, squeeze every last drop of performance, GCC has tons of tweaks a person can use, architecture-specific optimizations, loops unrolling, math extras and many many other features. What’s good about compiling is that you get to always link against the latest libraries the system has, you can static-link, dynamic-link, build partial packages, complete binaries, pack up a full-fledged application server in a just a few megabytes… things you won’t find in any pre-compiled packages
Not to mention, I also have some bad memories with RPM, you always have to find something that’s compiled against your version of libraries, or something evil might happen, like you might have to recompile!