Lain's down again...

Well, I finally got fed up with the performance bug in the window manager for Lain, so I tried to repair it and, no surprise, screwed it up badly enough that I had to do a reinstall. I should learn not to mess with RedHat.

Anyway, since I'm doing a re-install, I decided to try the new Gentoo. I am not reassured when it fails to find my network card. I am even less reassured when it crashes trying to instantiate pcmcia from the command line. I get the boot CD running and discover that the module dependencies are for the wrong kernel. When I apply the correct module dependencies, it tells me that the pcmcia module has unresolved symbols. It turns out my pcmcia network card is a common chip with a pcmcia wrapper, and since depmod is broken I don't know which kernel module has instructions for the chip. With my two favorite tools, find and grep, I locate a file with the symbol in question, and load it, then the wrapper. Success!

I run through the common installation routine, which is much more involved than it is for RedHat. This is really the installation for geeks. I'm going with the Stage 3 install, which is the wimpiest of them all.

I actually get all the way to the end of the install and reboot without a problem, only to learn that I can't log in. A small bug in the security operations lists my laptop's keyboard as not a valid login terminal. My fault. I fix it, adding the laptop keyboard to the list of secure TTY's (duh), and viola', I'm in.

Then, I discover that I can't find the CDROM. What the? I go into the device tree and it's not there. In fact, there's not a whole lot there. Getting an odd sensation, I look up the process table.

DAMN. Gentoo runs devfs. And it's not working correctly. I can't find the CDROM at all. And it's not something I can remove; the whole system is build around that kludgy dynamic device allocator. Oh, well. I'll have to figure it out. In the meantime, I have an unuseable laptop. Grr....

Kouryou-chan loses her two front teeth.

This morning, Omaha and I awoke about half an hour late, bundled up a very sleepy Kouryou-chan into the car, and drove to the dentist. Earlier this winter I recounted how she smashed her teeth while sledding. They broke off from her jaw, but she wouldn't let us take them out.

Well, we discovered that they were infected and would have to come out anyway. The dentist was very professional, very calm, and in the space it took me to go down to get coffee (Omaha sent me out because I hate having my kids go through any kind of pain and my anxiety is transmitted to them very easily) the teeth came out. Kouryou-chan was very brave, although it took time to convince her that it was now time to taek them out.

She's back home now, in bed, resting with Omaha. We have children's Motrin ready for the pain. I'll post pictures in a few days, once she gets used to it.

Sabotaged!

Arrgh! I left the transformer for Lain's power supply at home! I can't leave it on while I'm in the office so it can run through the build. Grrr.... Damn, damn, damn. A whole day lost!

Newsflash!

Mary-Kate Olsen checks into a clinic for an eating disorder. World goes "Duh!"