I originally tried ubuntu on this old Dell but it wouldn’t load X and I didn’t know what I was doing. I’m familiar with gentoo so I went for it instead.
Booting off the gentoo CD worked fine. I got a gnome session which had an icon to click to run a gentoo installer. I ran it, blew away windows 98, and installed gentoo linux.
A gottcha for gentoo on a laptop is that you need to install pcmciautils as an extra package during the install. I didn’t do this and was wondering why my network pcmcia card wouldn’t work. It tool me a while to workout but eventually, I booted off the CD, chrooted to my gentoo install and emerged pcmciautils. It then started my network card correctly on boot.
The next bit was getting the video card working. I found a post in the gentoo forums saying to use mach64. But I had already emerged xorg with fglrx as the VIDEO_CARDS setting. What i didn’t realise is that I had to re-emerge xorg-server to get it to build the right bits to do the mach64 thing. I’m not sure if I had to emerge x11-drm or ati-drivers first but I’ve got them all emerged now and X works so I’m happy.
I did a emerge -u world at some point since I my gentoo boot disk was about a year old and that all went ok. I had to unmerge coldplug which was a bit confusing as it said that it was blocking udev yet I already had udev so I think that udev does the coldplug stuff now.
So now I have a web browsing machine for my two year old to wreck that doesn’t run too badly. I might see if I can make it into a kiosk too. Oh and I need to get the sound driver sorted out.
[tags]linux, dell, laptop, cpx, gentoo[/tags]
Linux
Have you ever been asked to come up with estimates about things that you really don’t know how to predict? Do you sometimes read numbers in the paper such as the amount of CO2 that we need to reduce to stop global warming? I often wonder how people arrive at these numbers – i know that I’ve felt pressure at times to come up with marketable numbers to give to customers predicting how accurate something will be, or when a given feature will be ready or how much better than the previous version is the new version etc…
I was just listening to This Week in Science and their interview with Dr Orrin Pilkey rung true with me. He’s written a book about scientific modelling and the culture within science of coming up with media releasable numbers that don’t always have a scientific basis. Worth a listen.
[tags]mathematical modelling, maths, orrin pilkey, science, useless arithmetic[/tags]
Science
In the absence of anything truly insightful to post about, I thought I’d share on some of the sci-fi I’ve been reading.
I have been reading a lot of Charles Stross ever since a friend (Nick) sold me onto him and also from getting into Ken Macleod (also through Nick). The Merchant Princes series is pretty cool and a bit different because he’s broken away from his sci-fi stuff and gone for a fantasy / parallel universes story with a kind of Mafia that can travel between worlds. I’ve read the first two and while the third is already in the shops, I’m waiting for the paperback so I can bang it about in my bag for awhile and generally abuse it. So go get a copy of the first one if you haven’t read it: The Family Trade
I’ve also finished the second book of the ‘Foreigner’ series by C. J. Cherryh which is called Invader . These books are also pretty different, once again a fantasy kind of thing but a little bit sci-fi. I once read someone complaining that there are too many humans lost on a planet somewhere who’ve reverted to medieval society books and this series could broadly be seen as that but it’s appeal is that it is really psychological and about culture and politics somehow. It really works. So much of what grabs me about these books is the way Cherryh has invented a whole different psychology of these aliens and a biology that looks fairly similar to humans but is totally whacked when it comes to the basic social instincts. So that’s what keeps me coming back. Oh and I have to find out what happens to the dudes in the thing (trying not to do a spoiler but I wish I’d bought the third book at the same time!)
What these books have in common is that they go into differences between cultures and they have anachronisms where modern technology is mixed with medieval tech in a cool way.
[tags]books, science fiction, stross, cherryh, fantasy[/tags]
books
books, charles stross, cherryh
