On Thu, May 26, 2011 at 6:57 PM, Mark Shields <laebsh...@gmail.com> wrote:
> 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. > Of course it's doable. It's just the last straw. This left my web site down for a week; I obviously can't always keep up with Gentoo's requirements, so I'm going to an easier distro that I'm equally familiar with. -- Kevin O'Gorman, PhD
