Bye bitch…x ;)

That ellipses was a comedic pause. You may laugh.

Anyway, I got rid of BitchX. While I was glad that I tried it, this client called Irssi is much better. It was one of those feelings where the program just feels crappy. Irssi doesn’t feel like that yet, but we’ll see. And if you need any help simply follow this guide. Worked for me. Irssi appears to rememer commands on its own which is nice, but I’d like to edit some conf or script files. Haven’t looked for them yet, but I’ll see later

Enjoy the Penguins!

Setting up Gentoo

Setting up Gentoo has become, for me, more painful than installing these days. Everything from SLiM to Fluxbox to Conky to bitchX gives me trouble.

I’ve got everything installed and restart and SLiM won’t start despite the nVidia logo popping up. Well, apparently I had the mouse named one thing in the device section and something else in the screen section. Then I tried again and the same thing happened. Apparently on Gentoo you have to install the evdev driver independently. So now SLiM will start but Fluxbox will not after logging in. Yes, you can see where this is going. So apparently leaving the ampersand off of the command to start conky on login stopped fluxbox in its tracks. I cannot explain that one but that appears to be what happened.

I then spent the next hour or so trying to figure out bitchx. I never would have guessed that making bitchX appear in the background as part of the desktop was such a painful ordeal. Yeah, well it is. If anyone ever wants help doing it leave me a note. Maybe I’ll stuff on article in the Gentoo Wiki on it. Maybe I’ll do it for my own sake. Either way I think I now have it working. Here’s another oddity though. I set the geometery of the Eterm terminal through the command and through Fluxbox’s app file. For some reason doing that made bitchX take up 100% of my processor usage. I can’t explain that one either.

Good luck setting yours up. This is crazy. Oh yes, and lets not forget my adventures in font land. Needless to say Paludis still works flawlessly with no setup hassle.

Enjoy the Penguins!

Vim trickery

I found two new things to stuff in my vimrc file. I thought I would post about them here so that others could revel in the glory of v-i-m.

set backupdir=$VIM\vim71\backup
set directory=$VIM\vim71\backup

On Linux these two commands do not really appear to help you that much. On Windows though (haven’t tried on any other OSes) these two lines are a life saver.

If you have backup set in your vimrc you’ll notice that Vim leaves little backup files of every file you edit in the same location as that file. Well, generally, these are hidden files on Linux so you might very well have hundreds of them laying around and you don’t even know it. On Windows though they’re not hidden and constantly clog of you desktop along with every other folder full of text files. So the first one is a lifesaver.

The second command, the directory setting, is were Vim will store its swap files that it creates. I do not honestly know what exactly is kept in these things, but they’re temp files who are removed as soon as the editor is closed. But this command keeps them out of sight if nothing else. I’m anal about my desktop so that explains my love of the second setting as well.

I put both of mine in a directory, simply titled, “backup.” I do not know what the difference is between the vimfiles directory and the vim71 directory, but I put them in the latter. Everything else seemed to be there.

So there you have it. Two little tidbits to tiddy of your desktop.

Enjoy the Penguins!

Exherbo!

These new beast they call Exherbo looks tempting. Almost tempting enough to ruin a perfectly fine Gentoo installation just to see if I can do it or not. For now though I believe I will hold off and wait. At least until the new init system is fairly usable. Then you can bet your ass I’ll be all over it. But until it gets to that point I’ll have to settle for the feed. Which has thus produced some fairly interesting posts.

Being built from scratch with paludis makes this distro more than interesting. Paludis has always felt like it was only living up to half its potential on Gentoo. But various parts of the distro were holding back. Hopefully Exherbo will cure that sensation.

Another Install Story

If there is one thing I love, its a good install story. The trial and tribulations of the people who think they know what they’re doing and how badly they screw it up.

I actually installed Gentoo this weekend. At this point my only  saving grace when it comes to installing Gentoo is I’ve screwed up in just about every way possible so when I screw it up these days I generally know how to get out of it. Everything went great except for the vga parameter in my grub.conf. I should write down which one I use because I spend at least an hour rebooting a blank screen every time trying to figure out the right one.

One thing I have noticed though is the ridiculous amount of posts (blogs and forums) on the speed comparisons of the various package managers. Personally, numbers mean nothing to me, speed is subjective. Just like how my car feels really fast at 50 on curvy road but slow as hell at 50 on the interstate. What I’m getting to here is that the discussion of speed always leads to other talks about how terribly hard it is to setup the various package managers. Well, I’ll just tell you right now, anyone who cannot get paludis up and running within 5 minutes of installing is an idiot. The portage2paludis.bash script has worked flawlessly for me every time.

Regardless of all of that, I now have Gentoo Linux, Fluxbox, and Paludis all working together to make me a happy camper.

Enjoy the Penguins!

What is this?

I swear, you take a hiatus for about 6 months, and this kind of stuff happens!

Exherbo

Enjoy the Penguins!

Gentoo Software that never made it :(

1. The Gentoo Fork – Its been rumored, and its even been attempted at least once I believe, but it has yet to happen. Personally I think some home grown competition would do Gentoo well. Would I switch if they forked? Maybe… They’d need a new tree, a replacement for the ebuild, a replacement for portage. They’d need at least a handful of very skilled technical people, and another handful of people to do all the non-technical work. Could easily be done in my opinion, only a lack of desire is really staving it off. Perhaps this is a sign Gentoo isn’t as bad off as some like to think.
2. The Portage Replacement – We’ve got at least two contenders. Both are probably, at this point, more than able to do the job. Both are without a doubt a better system with more modern approaches to package management. Only nostalgia is really holding this one back. Sort of sad really.
3. Graphical Package Management – Despite actually having several of these out there for Portage there is a pretty good reason why these never really caught on with John Doe Gentoo. Mainly they’re not really a good idea. Sadly running a system like Gentoo just involves to much command line work to make these really worth using. Using one would only mean having to switch back to the command line every other install to check and fix the reason(s) it failed or to update my conf files. Pointless…

Your picks?

Enjoy the Penguins!

Categories or Tags?

The semantics of computers are more often than not more annoying than they need to be. Especially since something like the internet is ruled by mangled mess of people who “know” more than you do. So when WordPress suddenly starting giving me the option to give posts Tags and Categories I become terribly confused.

Thus I have all kinds of Categories and no Tags. Does it really matter? Well, in all honesty, it doesn’t. Because I’m not going to suddenly switch over.

Enjoy the Penguins!

The blog is back…

Okay, okay, I lied. I never came back and reported back. I never actually reinstalled Gentoo Linux on my computer either. So life doesn’t always serve you lemonade. Either way though, I’m starting to regain my enthusiasm to blog and for Linux. I recently finished two computer science courses and I find when I’m forced to do work on the computer my desire to non-work things on the computer tends to diminish. I will get Gentoo back up and running though. Its not hard to install and this point and I’ve done it so many times now its not even really that time consuming, its just a matter of sitting down and doing it. Waiting for Gnome to compile, hell I might even go back to Fluxbox at this point. Just because its so quick and easy. Ya know, I really like Fluxbox and other than the two reasons I just laid out I have no idea why. Gnome runs perfectly well on my computer. 3.7Ghz CPU and 2Gs of RAM is plenty for either. Just something about the minimal style that Fluxbox presents entices me.

McCreesh has decided to once again bless us with his “more than likely over your head” wisdom and opinions (he’s in the roll now too). Either way though, we can all look forward to the many threads on the Gentoo Forums about what ever he said.

Enjoy the Penguins!