Login Managers and Wolvix

After a major screw over by GDM and SLiM refusing to log me in I’ve finally just settled on XDM. Its ugly and painful to look at, but at this point it works and that’s all that matters. I’ll try SLiM again after an update or two.

In more exciting news a new self proclaimed programmer has found Wolvix and wishes to volunteer code. I mean no offense by calling him? “sel proclaimed” but you can’t really believe anyone on the internet. Not until you’ve seen they’re code anyway. You can tell a lot about a man’s experience by his code. Don’t look at mine, its embarassing.

On a side note, I finally aDesklets working again. Something about that program it always takes me forever to get it installed and setup. But after I do it always runs flawlessly.  I don’t know, stupid computers. I’ll publish a screenshot soon since my desktop has changed so much.

Enjoy the Penguins!

Miscellaneous

After going through GDM and a spout with SLiM I could neither to really work properly. No matter what I tried with SLiM I couldn’t get it to log me in. I couldn’t even login as root. I ended up having to exit SLiM and just typing start X. Due to this I’ve just reinstalled XDM and I’m going to use that. Well, unless it doesn’t work either then I’ll just have to type startx everytime I boot.

I was messing with my config files today to fix SLiM and XDM and such and I remembered that everytime I booted I kept getting strange error messages about my DVD-R drive not being able to mount? So I opened my fstab. Wow, I must have been half dead when I wrote it. I didn’t write half of the DVD line, and the half I wrote was all spelled wrong and such. It was sad.

Other than that, Fluxbox is good as usual. I finally figured out how to turn those annoying tabs off. What are those for anyway??  Who knows. Since I’m back to Fluxbox I’ve got conky back as well. Right now I’m just using the default theme it comes with. Its pretty and seems to fit well with my current background. I’ve also gone back to using Audacious instead of Rhythmbox. Which then leads me to reinstalling aDesklets here sometime as well. All to complete my Fluxbox setup. Maybe I’m weird but I can only use certain programs with certain DEs.

Enjoy the Penguins!

Gnome how I loath thee

Alright, so I couldn’t update my system for roughly a week because I moved out and had to wait for my lame cable company (one of the big ones, if that random cable guy reads this) to install my internet for me. While that wouldn’t’ normally wouldn’t be a big deal, even for Gentoo, it has turned out to be a major fiasco. We’ll start at the beginning.

First, I booted up as normal, fired up paludis and ran through the Gnome 2.18 upgrade guide thats in the official documentation. Updates installed in order without a hitch. Botta bing botta boom. Next thing I know none of the applications will open. They begin too open, they flash, and then they crash(?). A simple problem resulting from an upgrade to GTK that is usually fixed by simply restarting X. Instead I just opted to fully reboot. Upon reboot everything appeared fine. The update to GDM looks nice, and Gnome itself its looks pretty good too. You can see minor improvements to the overall look and feel. Then started happening again. So I decieded something must be wrong. I got a terminal up and ran check_linkage.rb found in /usr/share/paludis/ruby/demos. Much to my horror it wanted to reinstall like 143 packages all because of one library. Something with pat in it. Afraid paludis was screwy from its own upgrade I ran revdep-rebuild which fed me the same line. I like paludis’ script try to do its thing but it bailed out on me. So I tried to let revdep-rebuild do its thing. After it finished I rebooted again and was confronted with my worst GDM nightmare. It stuck in a continous cycle of starting and stopping. GDM is a nightmare too because you can press Ctrl-Alt-Backspace and it will just continue to respawn itself. Finally I got to console long enough to log in as root and stop xdm.

Then began my horrible session of uninstalling and reinstalling that lasted roughly a whole day. At that point I decided I’ll just wipe my / and reinstall.

/* No this isn’t going to get any prettier, I’ll warn you now. */

After doing my reinstall I deciede maybe I just blew the Gnome upgrade I’ll try it again. Nope, 2.18 is jacked. Same issue cropped up again. But this time I didn’t go through any crap. After initally blaming paludis (sorry =( ) I realized it wasn’t Portage or Paludis it was Gnome. Gnome oh I how I hate thee now. So I’m back to my old standby. Fluxbox. Its still rather ugly and bland, but thats what it does best. I’m going to give conky another go around and see how things work out from here. I still haven’t given E17 a shot yet so I won’t put that out of the picture.

Finally my last problem then comes from SLiM. I like SLiM because its lightweight and seems to fit well with Fluxbox. My only problem is I can’t seem to login with it and now I’m screwed up my xorg.conf trying to fix it. It just never stops I guess. Either way though…

Enjoy the Penguins!

On the interpritation of data

I really hate websites like this one. It presents data in a one sided manner that doesn’t really help you decide anything. For example if you look at the charts Windows “appears” more secure because they patched fewer problems. Well, that doesn’t really mean much. Because you don’t know how flaws there are out there to patch. Which brings up something I never really see mentioned. One of the benefits of open source is you generally can pull up a list of all known problems. With closed source your only privy to a list of problems they will either admit to or allow you to see. So the question then begs, How many problems does MS know Windows has but hasn’t admitted to yet?

Just remember to look at all the fact before you deciede.

Enjoy the Penguins!

I’m back

Alright, after not having internet for a week I am finally back. My internet here is roughly 4 – 5x faster than it was at my parents house so I suppose it was worth the wait. With that said as soon as I got back I found myself in a world of pain that I’m still recouping from (as far as computers go). As far as my new job is concerned I am really enjoying it so far.

More on my computer troubles later.

Enjoy the Penguins!

No internet

I’m moving north for my job. Well because American cable companies are run by the laziest people on the planet, I, with out a doubt, will have no internet or TV till Thursday of next week. So if I don’t get any posts in till then due to lack of internet I’m sorry.

I’m also afraid of what kind of updates I’m going to have to go through because of that. Speaking of which that brings me to another tip when using Gentoo.

When updating your computer Gentoo provides you with several “sets” of packages. These are labeled system, world, security, etc. If you Paludis you even get some extras that Portage doesn’t get. So switch.

Anyway, I find that when I run into a large number of updates it works best if I start with the smallest set and work my way up from there.

So I do

paludis -ip system

check for problems, see how things went, maybe even reboot just to make sure, then I run

paludis -ip world

and for paludis only users after that I might even do a

paludis -ip everything

I find that when doing updates this tends to reduce the number of breaks I have. And though I can’t back it up with any kind of evidence other than experience, I tend to get less errors overall with Paludis. The only errors I still get really are those due to the package not the package manager.

Enjoy the Penguins!

Paludis Tip

Everynow and then I find it a good idea to run

paludis -r

Its list out in plain English what Paludis finds to be “wrong” with your computer. So today I’ll discuss what one error you might get means.

No longer exists in its original repository

If you Paludis hands you this message about a package it means that it no longer exists. For example I got this package about Firefox 2.0.0.5. So if you got /var/paludis/repositories/gentoo/www-client/mozilla-firefox you’ll see there is no longer an ebuild there for 2.0.0.5. Which, in my case means I need to upgrade to 2.0.0.6.

Enjoy the Penguins!

Blah…

So the forums that I am a moderator of appear to be dying a slow agonizing death. Well, I don’t know if they’re dying or not but they’re definitely not going anywhere fast. Its a pity. I liked them. And despite our best efforts they won’t take off. It just doesn’t have enough people posting on a regular basis. Oh well I guess.

I’m still seeding Wolvix Cub. And I’ve had more leechers than I expected to be honest.

Holy cow its raining hard here.

Sorry about that. Anyway download Wolvix and use it. Thats all there is to it.  I guess now is as good a time as any to admit I have been working on a script in Ruby that will do what they call a “frugal” install of Wolvix Cub to your hard drive. I haven’t published the code anywhere and it probably could use some more eyes. If anyone wants to see it I’ll over it for download, if not it will continue to be just for me.  (Yes an installer already exists. No I don’t care.)

Finally the date at which I start job is growing nearer by the day. I suppose I’m nervous to say the least!

Enjoy the Penguins!

Wolvix 1.1.0 released

I only really have three projects I stay in close contact with, Gentoo, paludis, and Wolvix. Gentoo is my main distribution installed on my desktop. In fact, its the only distribution installed on my desktop. Paludis is the best package manager I can find to use with Gentoo. And finally Wolvix is my liveCD of choice. Its pretty much a one man show. But he has several fellows doing some of other things for most noticeably the Wolvix Control Panel.

Anyway 1.1.0 is out and is the first stable release that isn’t a SLAX remaster. I suggest you get it. Especially if you’ve ever used an older version. A lot has changed and a lot has improved as well. The selection of packages is very well balanced and if you for some reason are forced to develop on a liveCD Wolvix makes for an excellent platform.

I am currently seeding Cub on bittorrent so download it now!

Enjoy the Penguins!

The beauty of blogging

I love blogging. Why you may ask? Because of the community, the friends that you find while doing it. The internet becomes like a “family” with you and your friends. I mean obviously I have never met 100% of the people I meet on line, but it doesn’t matter. You still get to know them and they get to know you. I’m sure I have a certain reputation within the Gentoo, Paludis, or the Wolvix community. Are they all good? No, probably not. But they’re not all bad =). You must stay positive after all.

Enjoy the Penguins!