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Seems there's some delay when sending messages from a jabber.belnet.be JID to someone at one of the amessage-servers (or in the other direction but not in both). Very annoying. I emailed a belnet-admin, who replied with the message they know about it and are looking for a solution together with the amessage and jabber.org admins. Let's hope they fix it soon. After a previous problem with the server2server connections of amessage, there seems to be some work to do on it.

My gentoo is kind of complete now B-) Today, I connected the harddisk of my previous computer to my laptop with a IDE-to-USB2.0 connector cable I borrowed from our faculty-admin Jeroen. Very fast :-) Now I have everything to work back in full force. Maybe just some little tweaking on gnome or gentoo will be necessary. So I should search how I can make my system detect if there's a cable connected at boot time of if there's a registered WAP in the environment to connect to. This may not take a very long time, so I don't think in terms of dhcp-timeouts. If you use windows and plug out your networkcable, there pops up a message your cable is detached, all without dhcp- or ping delays. If you know a good solution, please be my guest.

My girlfriends final year thesis is finaly complete. She wrote the last things today. Tomorrow she has an appointment with her mentor for some final touches.

While emerging media-video/ffmpeg-0.4.9_p20050226-r3, needed for Amarok wich is highly promoted by Ikke, I recieved following errors:
i686-pc-linux-gnu-gcc -O3 -Wall -Wno-switch -O2 -march=pentium-m -mtune=pentium- m -pipe -fomit-frame-pointer -ftracer -mfpmath=sse,387 -msse2 -mmmx -fPIC -DHAVE _AV_CONFIG_H -I.. -D_FILE_OFFSET_BITS=64 -D_LARGEFILE_SOURCE -D_GNU_SOURCE -c -o i386/idct_mmx.o i386/idct_mmx.c
i386/dsputil_mmx.c: In function `dsputil_init_mmx':
i386/dsputil_mmx.c:3076: warning: assignment from incompatible pointer type
i386/dsputil_mmx.c:3077: warning: assignment from incompatible pointer type
i386/dsputil_mmx_avg.h: In function `put_pixels4_l2_3dnow':
i386/dsputil_mmx_avg.h:58: error: can't find a register in class `BREG' while re loading `asm'
i686-pc-linux-gnu-gcc -O3 -Wall -Wno-switch -O2 -march=pentium-m -mtune=pentium- m -pipe -fomit-frame-pointer -ftracer -mfpmath=sse,387 -msse2 -mmmx -fPIC -DHAVE _AV_CONFIG_H -I.. -D_FILE_OFFSET_BITS=64 -D_LARGEFILE_SOURCE -D_GNU_SOURCE -c -o i386/motion_est_mmx.o i386/motion_est_mmx.c
i386/dsputil_mmx.c: At top level:
i386/dsputil_mmx_rnd.h:59: warning: 'put_no_rnd_pixels8_l2_mmx' defined but not used
i386/dsputil_mmx_rnd.h:155: warning: 'put_no_rnd_pixels16_l2_mmx' defined but no t used
i386/dsputil_mmx_rnd.h:300: warning: 'avg_no_rnd_pixels4_mmx' defined but not us ed
i386/dsputil_mmx_rnd.h:59: warning: 'put_pixels8_l2_mmx' defined but not used
i386/dsputil_mmx_rnd.h:155: warning: 'put_pixels16_l2_mmx' defined but not used
make[1]: *** [i386/dsputil_mmx.o] Error 1
make[1]: *** Waiting for unfinished jobs....
make[1]: Leaving directory `/var/tmp/portage/ffmpeg-0.4.9_p20050226-r3/work/ffmp eg-0.4.9-p20050226-shared/libavcodec'
make: *** [lib] Error 2
Very less information...

Let's find out!

There are also some more troubles with my machine: I have very regularly X-crashes. In the output, I see much errors of Synaptics who're not fatal, but sometimes, one is fatal. I'll post more information here soon.

I added my make.conf file to this post. You can find it here.

Ikke has done some great work fixing my installation. As we tried different things, including genkernel, it didn't work. Now he has configured the kernel manually, did some research on it, and now it works. My system boots! I don't know what the problem was, it sure had something to deal with my SATA. Ikke, if you remember the solution, please post it here as Christophe was interested in running Linux on his system.

Now everything seems to work fine, except the error I recieve when compiling gnome-extra/evolution-webcal-2.0.1:
checking for gtk+-2.0 >= 2.4 libgnomeui-2.0 libecal-1.0 >= 0.0.91 libsoup-2.2 >= 2.1.8... Package libecal-1.0 was not found in the pkg-config search path.
Perhaps you should add the directory containing `libecal-1.0.pc'
to the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable
No package 'libecal-1.0' found

configure: error: Library requirements (gtk+-2.0 >= 2.4 libgnomeui-2.0 libecal-1.0 >= 0.0.91 libsoup-2.2 >= 2.1.8) not met; consider adjusting the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable if your libraries are in a nonstandard prefix so pkg-config can find them.

The package libecal doesn't exist, so I'll take a look at it in gentoo bugs and forums. If you know the solution, please let me know.

Installing the Gentoo Base System

Humm, so not everything in my previous post did work as good as I told you. First of all, emerge, ctrl+c, modify cflags,... did not work the first time. When I stopped the proces and added gcc in my packages.keywords, the bootstrap proces wanted to continu installing gcc-3.3.5, even while "emerge -pv gcc" told me gcc-3.4 should be installed. Ikke came for help and looked into the bootstrap-script, deleted a process-file so the whole bootstrap process restarted instead of recovering. Everything went fine then.

So, if you want to install gentoo with gcc-3.4, make sure gcc is in your package.keywords file before you run the bootstrap-script.

Progression from Stage2 to Stage3 went fine.

Configuring the Kernel

This part is fatal for now. When Ikke and I manually configured the kernel, he won't boot. In the liveCD-environment, my hard disk is /dev/sda, but when we put that in grub.conf, it doesn't work. My / partition isn't found while booting. When we use genkernel, the system tells me he found the Toshiba controller, but booting the kernel (genkernel or the other one) keeps resulting in a kernel panic pointing me at the fact /dev/sda2 or /dev/hda2 doesn't exist. Seems there are some problems with the combination of IDE and SATA support. Disabling IDE support in the kernel didn't help. Searching google and forums.gentoo.org also didn't result in a solution. Ikke can't accept he can't install gentoo on my machine, so this night he'll look up everything he can find about my type of machine and running linux on it. Let's hope he finds some solution. If you know anything to help me further, please be my guest.

So yesterday, I configured my network. Because I had to go to a little birthday party, I couldn't work further on it.

Preparing the disks

I have a 80GB harddisk, so this is my partition sheme:
/dev/sda1 64MB /boot
/dev/sda2 512MB /
/dev/sda3 the rest -> LVM

So I made one LVM-cluster and made these logical partitions in it: /var /tmp /home swap /usr and /opt, each one 1GB big (swap is 512MB). All filesystems are XFS, /boot is ext3.

Installing the Gentoo Installation Files

I've chosen to download the latest stage1-tarball and portage-snapshot from the (Belnet-mirror. CHOST and CFLAGS were a bit difficult. Because of gcc3.3 doesn't recognize "march=pentium-m", wich my processor is, I had to bootstrap with "pentium4" until gcc. After gcc3.4 was installed (wich is in my package.keywords, ~x86), I could adapt the new pentium-m setting. Normally, I should use "-O3" for faster operation, but Ikke told me that's useless because the filesize makes it run slower so there's no netto-effect.

Installing the Gentoo Base System

My profile is the default one, I'll post my use-flags later, when my installation is complete and I can just copy-past ;-) I didn't touch locales, it also isn't in my use-flags, so now I'm bootstrapping and taking a nap :-D