Linux

My Personal How-Tos

My JoinWavs How-to discussing how to join multiple .wavs into one file that can be converted into an MP3.

One thing that drives me nuts is SendmailConfiguration

Gentoo

When Redhat decided they were going to stop directly supporting their demo version, instead opting for the Fedora, I decided it was time to shop around for a replacement distribution. Having tinkered with Gentoo in the past, and being thwarted, I decided to give it another go. Now that I understand how to install and maintain Gentoo, I am convinced it is among the best distributions available.

• Gentoo Wiki

As Gentoo is a high-mainenance product, I'm collecting a few Gentoo maintenance tips worth consideration.

Pentium MMX 233 MHz Laptop

Once upon a time, I bought an old AST Ascentia M 233 MHz laptop from Ebay ($250) to install Linux on–that was 2001. It was going to be my first Linux machine. Old systems are harder to get Linux to work on, especially when they are a limited issue laptop. I tried Debian, but was unimpressed and had problems getting both the GUI desktop and networking to work. I put it on the shelf and proceeded to install Linux (Mandrake, then Redhat, then Gentoo) on all my home computers. A few years later, I tried again with Gentoo 1.4 -- March, 2004. Of course, once I got online (wireless, orinoco), I updated the entire system to Gentoo CURRENT. Because I optimized for size in my CFLAGS, I had to recompile the entire system. I preferred to compile on the system itself, rather than use a sandbox on a faster computer. As a consequence, it took 37 hours, 25 minutes to re-compile.

Here are key files:

• XF86Config -- I used an automated configuration executable to produce this, then edited some of

the device names for human readability.

• World File-- I chose to use Fluxbox for my windows manager, Fcron for my crontab, Eterm for my terminal, Links, and Mozilla-Firefox for my web browsers, and Mutt for my email client. Your mileage may vary. I also use frame buffer support. Except for Firefox, this setup kept me close to my initial 64 Mb memory limit. I'm planning to upgrade to 128 Mb soon.
• Make.conf -- This optimizes for size (Os v. O2 or O3). I noticed that the O3 optimization took 50/20 (RAM/swap) but O2 took 47/0. It might be a bit slower, but avoiding using swap is more than worth it.
• Kernel Config This is stable, but not yet 100 percent. I also have problems with USB and some event handling. It includes frame buffer support.

Chrooting Apache in Gentoo

This is my copy of How-To Chroot Apache in Gentoo?.

Dual-Boot: Windows XP and Linux

Most suggestions for dual booting have you boot from Grub or Lilo. I encountered a problem with the Grub bootloader that caused me to have to re-build my laptop from scratch. So, I have a different WindowsDualBoot approach that lets Windows control the initial process. (:commentable:)