Last week I had some undiagnosable problem at bootup and I decided to just backup my home directory, /etc and some other key files and reinstall Gentoo from scratch (stage 1). It turned out to take longer than I remembered, but it has proven to be well worth it.

Having run Gentoo before (for a few months now) I knew to set up the /etc/make.conf file with optimized USE tags. Basically, I put in everything I knew I would need and disallowed the rest. Being a fan of KDE my tags looked something like this: USE="kde kdeenablefinal qt -gtk -gnome".

Eleventy-billion hours later I had compiled my system (with only two commands, thanks to Portage). I noticed immediately when I started X that things were different from before. Window response was much faster, applications loaded much faster, and I had more free RAM. Sweet.

I’ve been looking into every distro that’s featured on DistroWatch for a while now and I just can’t imagine giving up my Gentoo. Now, if the Portage tree contained Yast2 for system configuration this would be a flawless OS.

A lot of websites make money off of selling T-shirts with their logo or something funny on them. I’ve seen this around for a while and it wasn’t until today that I realized the Linux community needs more stupid t-shirts. Really, I think it does.

I’m starting some sketches for a T-shirt that isn’t particularly related to this website but used the phrase ‘Certified Distro Jockey’ or something else equally nerdy. I’d totally wear it and I was wondering if anybody else was interested. I don’t expect a lot of comments on this, but if there’s a couple of people who would be interested in a shirt I’ll go ahead and make the design. All of the revenue from the shirt would be given to the favorite distro of the readers of this site (decided by poll). If anybody has ideas for the best online service to use for the shirt (I only know of CafePress) that’d be really handy.

A while ago I came into the posession of three old computers. They’re all micro-atx cases that have 500MHz processors, 128MB of ram and a 5GB hard drive. I got them for free with keyboards, mice, and monitors. I wasn’t sure what to do with them at first but after thinking hard for five seconds I had decided their destiny: they would run Linux. Not just any Linux mind you, all possible versions of Linux that can run on them - and the ones that can’t too.

I’ve got them set up in the basement of my house where none of my housemates nor I ever go. They’re sitting on an old workbench with a giant vice clamp on it and to get them connected to the internet I had to run a 50ft LAN cable down my basement stairs. I call this place my laboratory because when I’m in it I feel like a mad scientist.

I’ll be writing reviews of distros from time to time and when you read one you can be certain that I wrote it while in my lab trying wild new things with four computers (my laptop included). It’s funny to think about how excited I get about using these three donated computers when their combined resources are still less that those of my laptop in every regard. Still, I have a lot of fun down there.

Last weekend I finished setting the laboratory up and the first thing I did was reviewed Dynebolic 1.4. It turned out that the PS/2 mouse with no scrollwheel didn’t work on this distro so I had to swap mice. I also prepared (but didn’t write) a review on the Linux Live Gaming Project and Mandrake 10.1.

This laboratory is to a distro jockey what a good ranch is to a real jockey - it’s a place to ride freely. I hope to be able to try out many more operating systems as the days progress, there’s a lot of good stuff out there.

I’ve been writing on this website for two months now and I’ve had a ball. I’ve had the chance to start getting serious about using Linux and writing about the stuff I run into. I’m becoming a better writer and I’m learning to enjoy the research much quicker than I imagined.

I started out this website with the single idea that Linux is Hard and not many websites were willing to acknowledge that fact. I figured I’d stand out from the crowd because of some radical new perspective. Well, I was silly to imagine that I was the first to talk about how difficult Linux is (everyone knows it’s hard). Also, after two months I’m showing up well under the terms Gentoo, Xauthority, and Suse 9.3 - but the phrase (even in quotes) “Linux is Hard” shows me nowhere to be seen.

So this website is now “Distro Jockey”. Nothing has changed except the name is now much more indicative of the website content. This site is all about trying new things with GNU/Linux and having lots of fun with it. The fact is that many thousands of people have worked hard to create a lot of software and nobody has tried it all yet.

So as I change my tune I invite you all, once again, to get your hands dirty and install some new OS. Yes, Linux is hard, but there’s nothing to lose.

I recently attempted a world update on my Gentoo system. This involves checking every program you’ve installed for a potential new release and installing it if available. There’s a way to do this quickly and painlessly with Gentoo (praise the Lord for Portage):
# emerge -pu world

Portage (Gentoo’s package manager) tells you whether a package is already installed, missing, needs to be upgraded, or is blocked by another package. The natural understanding of dependencies is wonderful and has helped me a number of times.

When I last attempted a world update I was told that SysVinit was blocking a program I was trying to install. Not knowing quite what it was I figured I’d trade it for the new program. As soon as I completed the update I had lost the following commands:
# reboot
# shutdown
# restart
and I realized that I’d never learned an alternative way to shutdown my computer.

Moral of the story: Portage is great, SysVinit is necessary, you should install Gentoo.

Hanna Wallach is working on her Ph.D. in machine learning and has a lot of authority to write about both women (because she is one) and computers (because she 0wnz them). She’s written a short post about the validity of defining Linux culture specifically to include those who are not, by default, included.

It’s pretty clear that there are more men working with Linux (and computers in general) than women. There’s a HOWTO that was written describing How to encourage women in Linux that discusses the structural prejudice affirming the male component of Linux use and defirming the female. While those words may not make the situaition clear, it’s easy for us to understand that nerd-dom has created a culture that leans toward pizza, beer, and male activities.

<soapbox style=”standing: on;”>
If we have any desire to let Linux embody the spirit of open-source (freedom and accessibility) and if we care about the half of all people who are female it’s a necessity for us to open the culture we’ve developed as programmers, gamers, coders, hackers, crackers, and distro-jockeys to those who don’t do things the same way we do them - and to allow for the addition of a new group (or gender) to influence our traditions.
</soapbox>

If you’re a woman, here are some great places to find out about Linux:
LinuxChix
Women.Kde.org

I’m playing around with different themes for Linux is Hard. At the moment I’m running with a modified version of Equix. I hope to be writing useful content for a long time, hopefully this theme will help people enjoy the time they spend on the site.

I recently installed Gentoo on my Dell 600m notebook and I’ve loved it. Immediately after installation I had DVD::RIP installed and began processing the backlog of DVDs that I had to compress to put on my hard drive.

I loved Gentoo from the start because I could simply type ‘emerge’ followed by a package name and it would install for me. I used this so much, however, that I really fouled up transcode and then libdvdnav and then libdvdcss to the point where they’re all re-installed now but DVD::RIP no longer works.

So I guess this goes to show that no matter how good software gets, there will always be some of us who have to play rough with it and find ourselves breaking our systems.

I just found the Fedora Core Linux Blog on Blogspot.com. This guy is doing basically the same thing that I am so I want to give a loud shout out to him. I don’t know his name or his email, but I’d like to get in touch with him to talk about blogging Linux. So if you know who this guy is, lemme know.

Linux is hard enough that we need help with it. The more Linux users to write about specific parts of Linux and give relevant links to other information the better. I’d like to welcome the Fedora Core Linux Blog to the blogosphere.

I’m getting fed up with the way Suse 9.2 is running on my Dell 600m. Things are responding slowly, there’s hangups with the Intel ProWireless 2200 BG package (IPW2200) or its installation, and I’m starting to feel an itch for a new distro.

I’ve heard pretty good things about Gentoo lately, namely that their package installer, Portage, is excellent and unique in its field. Portage relies mostly on source code package for installations, rather than binary packages. Compiling a program from its source code is a little slower, a lot harder, but much more reliable because it creates a product that is honed to your specific system. Its because of this that I’m thinking Portage might be a much better choice for me. I wrote about Gentoo when I first heard about it, wondering if Gentoo could be better than others

If I do an install I’ll likely have another computer by my side so I can record all the stuff I encounter. If it turns out not to be worthwhile I don’t want all of the rest of us to have to go through the same muck.

I was trying to track down a keylogger that would work on Linux and I was having a tough time. Finally I discovered lkl which records all input from port 0×60 (which is apparently the keyboard port number). It’s pretty simple to run but now I have to decide how I want to make this thing run at boot time. I was going to use the SysV-Init editor that comes with KDE but apparently that’s not what I’m looking for. Off to dig some more…

Right, I made a script and put it into /etc/init.d Hope that solves my problems. We’ll see if this actually works.

[later that day]

Well, the keylogger is working more or less. There were some problems where it told me that lkl was looking for a keymap file that didn’t exist. I had to manually copy the maps from the source package to /usr/local and then point lkl in that direction. Even then it appears the us_kmUP is malfunctioning. us_kmALT and us_km seem to be doing fine, but the uppercase map is spewing garbage into my log file.

I’ve decided not to worry about the garbage. It’s too much effort to investigate this problem for such a low priority thing. However, now I’ll have to decode everything I want to read by educated guessing and doing more keylogging to see what letters turn into what junk.

If anyone finds a better keylogger for Linux (maybe one with a more functional keymap), drop me a line in the comments. I’d totally appreciate the help - and so would all the other people who come here looking for answers.

Despite what I might say about the new Firefox patch I’m totally in love with the Firefox browser from Mozilla.

Topping the list of it’s features are tabbed browsing, robust coding (it won’t crash when given malformed html like IE does) fantastic bookmark support (that’s ‘favorites’ to IE users) and most of all the ability to have add-ons called ‘extensions’ installed into it.

There are a few extensions that I don’t run Firefox without.
Web Developer allows me to analyze and test web pages like I’ve never been able to before. It lets me see the size, classnames, and ‘topography’ of a page with one click, it also lets me clear my login and password for any website I’m at. Perhaps the coolest thing it does is let me edit the CSS file in a pane next to the page as it automatically applies the changes that I make.
TabBrowser Preferences is a little bulky, but I need it to be able to move tabs around and reopen tabs that I accidentally closed.
AllInOne Gestures let’s me use mouse gestures. If you’re unfamiliar with gestures I recommend you try them immediately. It’s basically a way for you to hold down the right mouse button and move your mouse in a pattern - and have that pattern turn into a command. It makes for very fast and precise control over your computer like you’ve never had.
Bookmark Synchronizer is probably essential for anyone who runs linux because most of us have another computer we use somewhere too. This lets you ftp your bookmarks to a server somewhere and upload/download as you make changes and move computers. If one computer breaks and has to be reformatted you lose nothing. This is idea for anyone like me who often screws up the installation of their operating system.

One last note and a fulfillment of the title of this article:
Firefox runs very well on my work computer but for some reason has been rather slow on my Linux machine. I don’t know what would make Firefox slow on Linux, but it’s almost to the point where I feel like upgrading my (already pretty decent) hardware. Also, Firefox is known to require far more CPU per flash file than IE. I don’t know why that is, but with the strict coding guidelines by which the browser was written I imagine it could be easy to fix.

Even with the downsides right now, I highly recomment you get a better browser than Internet Explorer and try out Firefox.

Praise the Lord for the Bittorrent network. If you’re not familiar with the Bittorrent protocol, you should check it out the next time you need to distribute a lot of data to a lot of people. In my opinion the single greatest use of this protocol is for exchanging full copies of (open source) operating systems. I found Suse 9.2 in DVD format so I don’t have to waste five CD-Rs each time it’s released anymore. Also, I can take just the one disk with me on the road in case I need to do any emergency installs.

I’m also getting the bootable DVD of Mandrake Linux 10.1. I’m having some issues with the ipw2200 package crashing my Dell 600m and I’d like to see if I can get it running a little better with a different distribution. It’s not that the distro has anything to do with the package software, but the installation of a device driver is so complex that I’m still far short of understanding it.

For those of you who are interested in the Bittorrent network, I recommend Azureus. You have to use your browser to find the *.torrent files (they’re pretty small in size) but you’ll need different software for downloading the real file, and for that Azureus can’t be beat. Named after the poison dart frog (how cool) it runs on virtually every operating system (it’s runs in Java) and it’s fast, secure, and even pretty. It’s a great example of how open-source code can run really smoothly.

I know this is out of context for this site’s regular theme, but there’s something cool that you might want to check out if you’re into RSS feeds or data aggregation or any of that. I’ve altered a WordPress RSS Aggregator to work with my version of WordPress (still on 1.2.2, waiting on the guys at Cpanel).
What I’m doing is running an experiment on whether a site can be made entirely out of aggregated (combined) entries (with the respectful links to the respective authors) automatically. I’m not doing any posting on it, I’m just letting it run to see if it can eventually provide any useful information.

So if you want to check it out, see the Stock Market Watch

I don’t really know about the ethics involved here, so if anybody wants to toss this idea around and get back to me I’d appreciate it.

I’ve been having this weird problem where during times of high network activity my system will lock up. I think it has something to do with the ipw2200 package or firmware or something. It’s happened with each install of Suse 9.2 and I keep waiting for 9.3 or a new Mandrake or something to see if this can be fixed. I’ve tried upgrading the ipw2200 package several times but there’s something about Suse’s modprobe or something that makes the procedure infinitely more complicated than I’m willing to attempt.

Once it crashed in the middle of a major package installation and my db installation got corrupted. Since db is used to keep track of packages, I’m now having trouble updating anything. I’m too lazy to reinstall again this soon after the last time, so I’m going to see if I can just survive off of old software for now. Having to use obsolete stuff now will just make the next distro upgrade all that much sweeter.

The first Linux distribution I ever installed was Mandrake 7.0. Back when that came out it was a huge deal because it was one of the first distributions to offer wide hardware support. It was installed on a dual-boot laptop that ever after only ran Windows. After that I ran various kinds of RedHat (later Fedora Core), Debian (which ended very quickly), and every version of Mandrake up through 10.1
Nothing has been worth keeping until I installed Suse 9.2 last December. Here are some of the major benefits of it:

1. It runs my Intel ProWireless 2200 BG
2. It has up-to-date versions of both KDE and Gnome
3. It comes stocked with a jack-load of open-source games

So maybe the games aren’t the main reason I’m liking Suse, but they’re the best thing about my computer when I’m away on vacation (my girlfriend likes to play Frozen Bubble and KSnake). And even without them Suse 9.2 is an excellent distribution. I’m still partial to Mandrake but I’ll see what they’ve got up their sleeves with 10.2 before I consider moving back to them.