rullzer

So my base system is running smooth. Distcc and crossdev are up and running and the server is doing a great job compiling everythin for it. NFS is running which safes a lot of space and keeps me from cleaning the distfiles every day. Since well 4 gb is not a lot .

Other than that I’m supprised how fast the system boots. I guess it is because there is not much hardware to detect. Other than that the kernel is also very small and when I get over at my folks tomorrow I can get it even smaller I believe.

Right now KDE is compiling since I promised my gf’s father to check what the old thing could do. currently I’m at packag e 146 of 192 since this morning. So that will be done tomorrow. And it will be time to run KDE…. that would be the ultimate test. Howver I feel fluxbox or something will run a lot smoother. But maybe I’ll test that later.

I’m wondering what I could do with the laptop. Cause it would be nice to put it to good use. Now useing it for presentations or something would be great. Or other than that using it for some basic school stuf for one of my sisters or something could also be the case. Ah well I’ll check it tomorrow

After going trough my /usr/portage/distfiles/ I found a lot of tarballs that belong to versions of packages that are no longer in portage. Now these tarballs take up a lot of space. Doing a nice rm -rf * will ofcource take care of the problem but then all the tarballs that are still in portage will have to be downloaded again if once of the gentoo boxes in the network needs it (currently 4). Now it is not that I have a datalimit but it is a matter of principle.

So there must be an easier solution. I’ll try to look into it but python is writen in portage so maybe I can just include it and check for all packages and versions and remove the tarballs that have no corresponding ebuild. This script doesn’t have to run every day since it would take some time I guess but once a week or so just to keep the system clean.

Please let me know if anybody is interested in such an app or knows if it already exists…

So this weekend my girlfriend father pointed out that they had an old laptop lying around. I decided it would be fun to run gentoo on it and use it for anything I could think of. First to give you an impression

Compaq Armada 100s
550 Mhz Cpu
56 meg ram
8 meg video-ram

This laptop is old so that means the CD-ROM does not react that well to CD-R’s. This is bad when you want to boot from a CD-ROM. But I got it working. Now after booting the kernel (nofb ofcourse, and more options). An error messgae kept spamming my screen wich was caused by udev loading the usbmodule (while I gave nousb as one of the options to the kernel). This is not what should happen so I filled a bug (#206954).

The solution was easy just rmmod uhci_usb and it stopped. So that ment no USB support into the kernel. The USB port (yeah only 1) is know to be broken on this laptop I read on other sites.

Now since I wanted to use the laptops full potential I ofcourse changed the CHOST etc. But a downside ofcourse was that gcc and glibc needed to be recompiled….. It is compiling gcc for 10 hours straigt now. And I have no idea how long it will keep on going. But if it isn’t finished in another 10 hours It will be killed and I have to think of something else.

I’ll keep you posted on the process with this laptop.

It has been some time since my last post where I wrote I had the need for a Project in the vacation. And well I found one and altough the vacation is already over for a week I’m still (when I’m nog busy for school) working on it with Sander. For more info about why and the program see his blog.

But in shoort. We are working on a Qt4 frontend for mpd: QtMPC. So far it is already useable. Sander even kicked apache from his media PC since he didn’t use it anymore. We are far from supporting everything MPD supports but we are getting there. Soon (I hope) 0.3 will be released since we are making good progress but ofcourse the svn is available all the time

svn co http://qtmpc.lowblog.nl/svn qtmpc

Working on QtMPC made me realise that I had way to many music files. So maybe it is also time for me to get a media PC. However the budget is limit. But after talking to Sander yesterday I realised that an old pc would also work. However they make way to much noise. So right now I’m looking for some kind of old thin-client or something like that. Since crosscompiling can be done on the server or on my old laptop.

Now I could ofcourse get a cable and connect it to the server and the stereo but I’d rather not have alsa running on my server. Also if it is a pc with lets say 300 mhz. That would be more than enough to play music. It would consume much less power than my old laptop (wich is currently hooked up to the stereo). So that is again a big plus.

Ah well maybe when my next salary arrives.