Gentoo! (Gesundheit!)

[elfs]

Well, there are a lot of spare corners in Gentoo with which I have to contend, but at the moment a lot of the system is running quite nicely. I have movies and music, both quite stable-- in fact, both keep running after a suspend and restart, which the 2.4 Redhat kernel could not do. The battery life seems comparable, although I won't really know that until later next week when I have bus trips. The 2.6.7 kernel does seem to do some things better, such as allowing me to keep running even when the harddrive is locked up-- which frequently happens on massive writes. XFCE is a stable windowing environment and Galeon 1.3 on top of Mozilla 1.6 is very, very nice. I have my editor of choice, and neither XMMS or MPG321 lectured me about copyrights and patents when I installed the MP3 code.

So far, about my only concern has been for the video decoder on mplayer; it seems unnaturally slow compared to the one that I had when running RedHat. As far as I can tell, it's the same one that's running on P'nyssa, which is a RedHat system. Running through the various modes, it seems to be a problem with the audio/video decoder; the display engine works great when using different codecs.

There are the odd corners: after a reboot, I have to manually reload pcmcia, sound, laptop, font and secure shell services. PCMCIA isn't configuring my networks right when I slap in a localized card, and network identity is a hazy thing for lain right at the moment. Not so bad I can't LJ, though. I've got Usenet, LiveJournal, the web (and too many freaking browsers), some email, most audio/video (I even have APE now! Whoo-freakin'-hoo), suspend, battery, wireless (but still set up manually), bittorrent and the binary harvester... all the geeky goodness.

Now, the only question is, can I get pygtk2 up and running? When I last lost lain, I lost a lot of the work on Plotlines. I figure it would behoove me to prototype it with pygtk2 first, get something up and running, and do the rest afterwards. (Yeah, I know, python is a perfectly good language in its own right. But I write these toy programs in C because I don't get to do C in my daily life anymore.)

Comments

[lucky-otter.livejournal.com]

For making your services start up automatically:
rc-update add ssh default
And so forth. Run it with no options for help. As root, of course.

For the wireless, I've been using waproamd fairly happily. It's not without quirks, but it works fairly well. It lets me run an arbitrary script for any known network, too, which is handy for networks which require me to poke a web interface to get authenticated.

And as a side-note...

[wolfwings.livejournal.com]

...just in case it wasn't obvious from the above, or from rooting around yourself:

ls /etc/init.d

Each of those files can be used in place of 'ssh' in the above command, and can take 'start', 'stop' or 'restart' at a minimum.

Re: And as a side-note...

[lucky-otter.livejournal.com]

I'm pretty sure they can also take commands like "zap", too, when it gets confused and thinks a service is running when it actually isn't. At least, if they use the Gentoo dependancy stuff, which all the ones in Gentoo ebuilds do, at least.

Re: And as a side-note...

[wolfwings.livejournal.com]

Ergo the "...at a minimum" part, as I wasn't sure off the top of my head what other required commands were needed, and any others would likely need some explanation. Start, Stop, and Restart are pretty self-explanitory. :-)