OneFreeVoice

Well, I broke my New Years resolution… It’s been a week since I’ve posted here. It’s bound to happen now and again. I just have to focus and try to get back in the groove so that it’s not a permanent thing. I’ll try to keep it short here, and that shouldn’t be a problem as not much has happened this week (more…)

Things are finally shaping up on several fronts. Despite the grub madness I mentioned earlier, the HTPC box is coming along. I’ve also been messing around with the Enlightenment window manager, which I must say is quite different… but I like it. It’s a been a little harder to get used to, and to figure things out… There are no icons, and instead of a taskbar, there’s this advanced pager thing. It took a while to get used to it at first, but now that I have, I actually like it much better than a taskbar.

Last night I went to visit my friend John LeMasney to discuss what we wanted to do about icons for the forthcoming LUG/IP GNU/Linux ISO. I think we came up with some quality ideas. John had some major concerns that I didn’t think about straight away. We wanted to create something nice… very clean and simple. Most of all original. But there are already so many really great icons out there. John thought it was important that we don’t take anything and make it look worse. I certainly agree. But we played around and I think we figured out a good way to make original icons that look nice and don’t ruin anything already established.

And also last night I updated the bios on the HTPC. Since I don’t have a floppy drive, I thought I was in for trouble. I surfed around, and it turns out that you can make a bootable CD to do this. First, you get a bootable floppy image… maybe an old Dr. Dos disk or something. Then you mount it to a loop device in Linux. Add your motherboard’s bios and bios loading program, and then burn it to a bootable CD. Worked like a charm. I was afraid I was going to have to trash my gentoo install and put windows on the machine just to get the bios updated.

Despite having major issues early in the week, I finally got Gentoo running on my new HTPC box. Of course, right now I just have a minimal install… just the core packages, but at least I’m able to boot up and log in and all… and my initial kernel is pretty sound. It’s missing a few modules for ancillary stuff, but it’s sound.

But I have this really strange issue, and I’m not really sure what to make of it. I even had one of the guys from the #gentoo-amd64 IRC channel trying to help me out. When I reboot, instead of getting the grub boot menu, it takes me to grub shell. I can actually boot the machine with the following:

>kernel /kernel-2.6.9_14_gjh01
>boot

This suggests to me that grub is installed correctly, and I’m able to actually boot using grub. I triple checked my grub.conf file, and it seems to be okay, but I don’t get the grub menu no matter what I try. Eventually, I got really into what I could do with the grub prompt, since that’s all I could get. I found out I was able to successfully load the splash image – but I didn’t get the menu… just the grub prompt over the splash image:

>splashimage=/grub/splash.xpm/gz

Finally, I found out that there is a command to load the configuration file from the grub prompt:

>configfile=/grub/grub.conf

And lo and behold… when I did that, the menu screen came up.

So the state of things appears to be… When I reboot, the grub menu doesn’t come up, but I can load the menu manually and then boot the system using the menu.

One other thing to note: When I follow the instructions to load grub into the mbr manually, All indications are that the process was successful. If I try to use the install-grub command, I get some BIOS drive error.

(note to self: when you get home from work check to see if the bootable flag is set on /dev/hda1 with fdisk)

Well, it looks like WordPress 1.5 is finally available as a stable download. I got the email announcement today, and you can find it at wordpress.org.

It looks like I’ll have to grab it right away and test it. I’ll put it on my workstation and make sure that it updates everything correctly (I have a couple of template customs), and of course that means now I have to finish that theme that I started a while back. I kind of forgot about that thing… what with my new HTPC box that I’m working on, and the LUG/IP ISO which I’m *supposed* to be working on…

My my my… it’s no wonder I haven’t finished resurfacing and painting the kitchen cabinet doors.

I think I’m going to blame it all on the 4-5 hours a week I’m doing Tennis related stuff.

So anyway… if you’re a wordpress user, grab the update. You’ll see 1.5 here sometime this year when I get around to it. :-D

I’ve been a little frustrated this week with my new PC… the one I put together last Saturday. I still don’t have a complete operating system on it. I’m trying to use the 64-bit version of Gentoo, and I keep running into problems. I botched the first install attempt by forgetting to run mkfs on the boot directory. The install procedure put files over the old vfat formatting, but then I couldn’t read/write to it, so after going all the way through the install to the point where I needed to reboot, I was a little frustrated. Then on Monday I tried a fresh start, and somehow now there are problems with the latest Portage snapshot for amd64 (http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=82027). Thanks to the help of the nice folks in #gentoo-amd64, I was able to get a working snapshot tonight and get through the bootstrap.