Blogosphere news from you friendly OSS dude.

1 of our beloved cats (Spike) is having difficulties with doing his "duties".
over the weekend we had to bring him to the veterinary surgeon twice for check-ups.
my wife and i are very worried about him.
today it was the 3rd time he had to go back to the vet for a check-up.
Spike didn't have to stay for observation, so i brought him back home.
that does mean someone has to be home to keep an eye on him though.
today that's me so i'm working from home right now.
every 2 hours i go downstairs to the living room where Spike is just to see if everything is going allright.
poor fella, we hope he's gonna be himself real soon again.

posted by Marco @ 13:03 0 comments

Just 3 days after having installed Gentoo Linux (2005.1) on a Dell latitude d600 laptop i've already experience my first "problem" with the XFS filesystem.
i started emerging a bunch of packages in the evening and went to bed.
when i returned the following morning i noticed some packages had failed to install due to I/O errors.
the /var partition got corrupt somehow and since the portage package database resides in the /var filesystem i was faced with some emerge problems.
i rebooted into single user, mounted the /var partition so xfs could read the replay log of that particular filesystem, umounted /var again and went for a xfs_repair.
after performing a dryrun first, i was not so hesitant anylonger and went for the real thing (Tm).
after a while all errors had been corrected and i decided, keeping fingers x-ed, to boot into multi-user mode.
all my kernel modules, which i had setup to autoload via /etc/modules.autoload.d/kernel-.2.6 wouldn't load and i had to go rebuild them.
fortunately, this worked and i was back to where i was before the XFS weirdness.
coming from the BSD world, this did not boost my confidence for, IMO, the coolest Linux distro out there.
although having faced this filesystem trouble, i've decided to stick with gentoo for a while and will google for the problems i've experienced.
hopefully it's already been reported and is being worked on by the gentoo team.

posted by Marco @ 20:03 0 comments

Well, after some thought, i've decided to go for a dual-boot setup on my laptop.
i've installed solaris10 x86 and gentoo linux on the same harddrive and am successfully using gentoo's grub bootloader to switch between the two.
Installing solaris10 first is currently required though!
If linux is installed first, solaris10 fdisk will not be able to install into the remaining diskspace (eventhough 2 more primary partitions are available on the disk).
Once you take that into account it's not that difficult getting both os'es onto 1 harddrive.

posted by Marco @ 12:48 0 comments

I took the geek test at http://innergeek.us.
I got a score of 32.54438% - Total Geek.
What score did you get?

posted by Marco @ 10:07 2 comments

The development gone into the latest and greatest version of the Enlightenment window manager (E17) got me excited to switch back to the wm I started out with many years ago.
Currently, E17 is considered to be in a pre-alpha state by its developers.
However, it hasn't dumped core on me once and it's really looking beautiful so i'm gonna stick with it for a while.
For those interested, just check out Get-E.org

posted by Marco @ 23:03 0 comments