Why My Life Sucks

Because the damn out of the box version of the ATI Radeon X11 driver doesn’t support xrandr, at least not on current release of ubuntu, I’m going to attempt to get Godzilla working with the stuff I need on it via Gentoo.   Stand by for something like a live geek blog.   Granted, even with this box, I don’t expect Godzilla to be a working box for at least a week, working being defined as “I can read a US Army supplied .DOC file, Read a PDF, Write a pdf, (ideally from Lyx) run DigiKam and Gimp 2.6, ssh into other machines, and run Firefox 3.x, all in portrait mode, with out going nuts on how freaking slow the video driver is.     Displaying a flash animation with sound is optional.   Also must be able to boot in to windows.     Being able to read/write   the NTFS partition would also be nice.

Just got the stage 3 tar ball down.     The fun starts now.
Because I need another test flash file, and well, because it’s Godzilla I’m working on:

First edit 10:18

This is not a good sign.   It takes over an hour to download and untar the stage 3 and portage tarballs?   Gack.

I’m going to live on the edge, mainly because I want Gimp 2.6, so I’ve turned on the ~x86 keyword, in a global fashion.   Done before any compiles or what not, so it should, repeat, should work OK.

Chrooted and about to type emerge –sync   It’s 10:25

It seems to be deleting an whole lot of freaking files, like if I didn’t know better, I would say all of them in the metadata/cache directory, which is what took a ghod damn hour to un tar.

And now it’s putting them back.     You would think something called “current snapshot” would in fact be the current snapshot.   This does not seem to be the case.   Sigh of heaviness.

Finished at 11:03, then wanted to emege it’s self.   Which fail.   My error.     It seems gcc 4.1.2 doesn’t know what a Core2 arch is.   Got to go fix that.   OK, set to noccona for now, and emerge portage went fine.

Told it I’m a ‘mercan that speaks lish and I live in fly over country and we are about to suck down the kernel source.   It’s 11:15.

Didn’t take as long to snarf and barf as I thought.   It’s 11:28.   Now the fun starts for real. Making a kernel.   Oh Joy.

First, of course, get and compile the genkernel tool.

At 11:52 the compile starts.   I did turn on a freaking ton of modules, but then again, that’s why I used genkernel to start with.

That was fairly quick It’s only 12:07 and it’s done?   OK then.

Going to load up vi now, just because I hate nano.

Did the other tools (cron, etc) and grub.   Grub seems to have problems with the lack of a floppy drive

OK, 1:00 exactly and it dual boots.   Granted the Linux side is useless, but that will do for now.   Just short of 3 hours to get the bare bones installed.   Now the real stuff.

Start with X.   It’s 1:31.   Just started to attempt first compile of X11   That’s 101 things it has to download and compile.   Of course, ran into a circular dependency based on having the HAL turned on.     That’s Hardware Abstraction Layer, not some thing that says “Dave” a lot.

Going to bed.   Will launch Xfce4’s emerge in the morning before going to work.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 16th, 2008 at 10:17 pm and is filed under Godzilla, Life, Music, Software, Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.