:-(

“In accordance with the recommendation from the committee on admission, I regret to inform you that you have not been accepted for graduate study tot he Department of Computing Sciences.”

Pacman problems

I went to upgrade my Arch Linux install using pacman of course and I was given the following error.

error: the following file conflicts were found:
codecs: /usr/lib/win32: exists in filesystem

Thats not much of an error. I was hoping pacman would tell me more than that. Paludis and Portage usually given a hint or two as to how to solve your problem. All that says is I have a file conflict. It doesn’t even say with what. So on that note perhaps the makers of pacman should see about including more verbose error messages. Perhaps run Paludis once or twice and see what good error messages look like.

Enjoy the Penguins!

USB problems, distro switching, and Wolvix

I discovered today that my new Gentoo install is once again having problems with hard freeze ups when I plug in my USB thumb drive. I have, on the other hand, determined that my USB problems with Gentoo seem to stem from the USB ports I use. For some reason it will only freeze up if I use the ports on the front of my case. But if I use the USB ports on the back of my G11 keyboard though I don’t have any problems, though I do receive a message about not being able to use the VFAT file system, though it is compiled into my kernel. I don’t know what I’m going to do. I don’t have this problem Arch Linux. Its just a Gentoo thing and I have no idea what to do about it.

I was recently accepted to the Wolvix project as a… well I guess I’m a developer. I haven’t officially been titled yet. My job? I have been charged with maintaining the Fluxbox side of the distribution. If your unfamiliar with Wolvix it is a live run distribution that allows the user to use either XFCE or Fluxbox for their desktop manager. It also has a installer to allow you to use it as a hard drive based daily use distro.

With that said I’m thinking of whether or not I switch to Slackware 11 instead of Arch Linux. I would just installed Wolvix but I still see Wolvix primarily as a live run distro so I’m going to develop it like a live run distro. On the same hand though the leader of the project wants to expand the installed half of the distro and focus more on upkeep and maintaining. Even setting up a package repository. I have on the same note volunteered to help maintain some packages for Wolvix. So now that I’m on the team I guess I just need to sit back and let things role. This does seem to fit in well with my acceptance in graduate school for Computer Science.

Enjoy the Penguins!

Hopefully we can learn from Fedora

I stole these word for word from the now famous letter by “ESR” about how he’s leaving the Fedora Linux project. There are the reasons he highlights in the letter as the reasons Fedora is failing or has failed. I’ve reposted them here because I can see a lot of this in more distributions than just Fedora *cough* Gentoo *cough*.

• Chronic governance problems.
• Persistent failure to maintain key repositories in a sane, consistent state from which upgrades might actually be possible.
• A murky, poorly-documented, over-complex submission process.
• Allowing RPM development to drift and stagnate — then adding another layer of complexity, bugs, and wretched performance with yum.
• Effectively abandoning the struggle for desktop market share.
• Failure to address the problem of proprietary multimedia formats with any attitude other than blank denial.

You can find the original letter here.

Enjoy the Penguins!

Politics! You can’t beat this…

Okay, so I used to steer clear of politics. I mean what’s the point? All it does it cause you and everyone else grief. And for what? I never see anyone get anything useful from it. So why do people do it? I may have discovered it. It feels good! Something about insulting people all in the name of politics is very fulfilling. For example: the latest piece I’ve found is over the retirement of a Gentoo dev named Diego. Do I know Diego? No! Only heard of him in passing before. Do all the people who comment on his blog know Diego? My guess is most of them don’t. So I didn’t comment on his blog. I thought about commenting here but I have decided I’ll stay out of this one. I don’t honestly have a say about any of it as I was not exactly there to see it go down. On the same hand though watching the brawl unfold is rather amusing. Check the comments on his blog. Its no longer about Diego giving up his job, not really anyway. It has instead became a blame game. If things get to bad I’ll revert back to the Penguin of Sith and jump in the ring wearing my underwear on the outside of my pants just like superman would. It’ll be an awesome show!

Enjoy the Polit… I mean Penguins!

Monitor Blues

My beautiful 19″ Samsung monitor has developed two dead or maybe dieing pixels. I’m not sure which it is yet. If I’m displaying a light color like white then everything looks okay but when it shows something sometimes these two pixels are stuck blue. I guess they must be dieing though because it doesn’t always do this just sometimes. Okay most of the time. Either way it really bothers me. The two pixels are near the lower left middle of the screen so their fairly obvious. According to Samsung’s return policy though my monitor (940BF) isn’t considered defective unless I have 10 of those. Could you imagine having 9 dead pixels? Would that not be enough to make you want to really hurt someone? Its all based on size. Mine is 19″ so I have to have 10, 15″ only have to have 7, and 20″+ have to have at least 12 I think. So at this point I guess I’m stuck with two dieing pixels. Really is a pity. I was so excited to get my monitor for Christmas and not see any dead pixels only come back two months later and see that I’m getting one. This and the poor refresh rates (when compared to CRTs) are my only complaints about LCDs thus far. Overall though I still have to recommend Samsung monitors to anyone buying one. Their a very good brand, I’m just unlucky I guess.

Enjoy the Penguins!

Okay, I give up

After reading my last post a second time a realize I may of been just a tad harsh. Off topic comments bother me, but maybe I shouldn’t be so mean about it. I think I may have even contributed one or two in my time. So if I insulted anyone over that, I’m sorry.

It also appears I’ve pissed off an Arch Dev. And it wasn’t even over my spew about off-topic posts (that wasn’t about him anyway). It seems as if I’m destined for the dark side of the Open Source force. They might have to start calling me The Penguin of Sith instead. My posts have all turned sour and now I’m making people angry. Well at least I haven’t upset the Gentoo gods yet. I guess we’ll soon find out where I’m going. So if the worst case scenario happens, who’s the Emperor of the Dark Side of the Open Source force?

Enjoy the Penguins!

More Arch Gripes

So you’ve probably grown tired of me complaining about Arch Linux. I mean its not a bad distribution. It really isn’t. It just has a couple of quirks that really really get under my skin. What is it now? The same thing it was last time. These stupid example vimrc and gvimrc files in /etc. Whose idea was that? I could smack that guy and not feel the least bit guilty about it. So yeah, I didn’t realize that the gvimrc had items in it that the vimrc did not. So I’ve spent a considerable amount of time trying to get that figured out. Not to mention they came back after been deleted once. So now because of this annoyance I find myself symlinking my gvimrc back to my vimrc so that it won’t get overridden by the gvimrc in /etc.

Finally, on a side note. Anyone who has ever been on a forum will know I am talking about. Have you ever asked a question and got responses that were either totally not what you asked for or just plain random and off topic? Those really annoy me. Especially when they come in and give their lame/wrong answer 4 posts after my problem was solved. Do you think at that point your helping me out? Or helping anyone else out? Your not. Your just making your post count higher. Stop it! If the question was answered the question was answered. Your lame attempts to do it a second way aren’t cute nor appreciated by me.

Sorry.

Enjoy the Penguins!

The Matrix on Windows

http://xtermin.us/shutter/humor/DaShoe1.jpg

There is no caption associated with that picture linked to above, but I imagine it reads something similar to “The Matrix if run on Windows”

It was to good to pass up, I couldn’t help it.

Enjoy the Penguins!

Alittle Arch vs Gentoo

Alright, so as your well aware I’m dual booting Arch and Gentoo. Lets have a little run down.

Arch
+ Fast system install
+ Fast package install
+ Fast updates
+ Generally works out of the box

Gentoo
+ Great for development
+ Allows for massive amounts of customizing
+ Fast overall performance
+ Excellent community and support

With all of that said I’ll explain why I’m writing this. I have a problem with my new Arch install. Upon installing Gxine for my videos it won’t run. Why not? It can’t find a library. Something that Gentoo would have no problem fixing with a little revdep-rebuild. That in mind how do I fix a problem of this nature in a binary distro? I don’t know. I have yet to ask so I may not have an answer for awhile. So lets look at some minuses for each distro.

Arch
– Community is small
– Binary blues (discussed above)
– Being new Pacman shows its infancy

Gentoo
– Slow system install
– Slow updates
– Slow package install

So in the end who is the king? I don’t know they really cut it about even. With the advent of Paludis Gentoo is really starting to look up. While for a binary I still like Arch I don’t think it will ever be able to replace Gentoo. Custimazation in Arch is there, but it is still no where near Gentoo without going through ABS (Arch build system) which in the end begins to blur the line between Gentoo and Arch. If you build your own Arch then what seperates your distro besides your package manager? Even as big a deal as that may be there are some seriously philosphocial questions there. After all Arch is a bianary distro, to build stuff really isn’t part of the game. In the end if I want to build it myself I’ll use Gentoo. I think I’ll let the public decide.

Enjoy the Penguins!