On Thu, May 26, 2011 at 6:28 PM, Kevin O'Gorman <kogor...@gmail.com> wrote:
> It looks like it's time to take Gentoo off of my main machine. I feel a > little sad about it, or I'd just quietly go away. > > A few months ago, an update made the machine headless -- well, it could no > longer bring up X but I could use the console-mode for admin, and log in via > SSH from my laptop and run GUI programs. I was busy at the time, first > deciding and then implementing my retirement, so I let it go. > > Now, a couple of months into my retirement, I'm trying to fix things up, > and the latest Gentoo live disk cannot talk to my monitor at all. Whatever > it's trying is unacceptable to the HD monitor I've had on there for a year, > and I can't even run the consoles. The video card is an ATI Rage XL on the > motherboard. Like the rest of the machine, it's vintage 2000, so maybe > support got dropped. But I'm not inclined to drop the machine -- it was the > ballyhooed thing in Linux Journal in 2002 when I finished my PHD, so I put > together these pieces: > * Two XEON chips. I didn't know it right away but that means 4 cores. > They are old Pentium IV-based 32-bit chips. I got the slowest still being > made, so the clock speed is 1.6 GHz. On 4 cores, it's not bad at all. > * 2GB of DDR ECC memory > * about a dozen hard drives (some old, but mostly 500GB - 2TB Sata drives), > I feel it's still worthy of respect. Some of these are in EZ-Dock docking > stations and are used for rotating backups (including off-site). The main > directories are on hardware RAID 1 so I have ongoing redundancy. > * a Smart UPS 1500 for everything except the laser printer. > > So, since I am familiar with Ubuntu from work, and have it on a couple of > laptops, I'm installing from the Ubuntu 11.04 live disk (video is just > fine). > > The real headache is all the stuff I'm going to have to port. > > 1) Apache and dynamic (Python CGI) web site. > 2) Postfix > 3) About a dozen accounts that just do wget(1) data gathering triggered by > the cron daemon. > 4) DNS (I run my own domain on a commercial DSL account) > 5) NTP client and server > 6) Whatever else I forgot I set up over the years. > > My original reason for using Gentoo is that this machine was pretty exotic > when I bought it, and I wanted to be able to tweak the compiler to get the > most out of it. I can still do that for specific applications I'm working > on, but otherwise it's really a non-issue now. I have gotten pretty tired > of updates that take over 48 hours to compile, and the occasional mess-up > that once or twice led me to rebuild with empty-tree and took a week or so. > > > So I guess I shouldn't complain (and I'm not). I'm just not in the target > market for Gentoo any more. It was fun, though. > -- > Kevin O'Gorman, PhD > > You let a small problem like the latest live cd not booting your system scare you away? Have you tried using an older live cd? If it's a video issue, maybe detecting your monitor wrong, how about turning on the framebuffer (there's an option for that)? It's doable man, don't give up.
