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My new Dell notebook is finally arrived. So now, I am installing Gentoo Linux from stage1.

Booting the minimal liveCD went fine. Even the art in this LiveCD is very nice! I booted "gentoo -nodhcp" while dhcp should only take time because I have no wired connection and the wlan needs encryption. After booting, my wireless card didn't work. In dmesg I found the messages "ipw-2.2-boot.fw load failed: Reason: -2", "Unable to load firmware: 0xFFFFFFFE" and some other messages indicating that starting my wlan card failed. After an "rmmod ipw2200" and "modprobe ipw2200", there were no errors in dmesg so I could start using iwconfig to prepare my wireless connection.

I live at a student home from Ghent University so I need VPN to access the internet. Fortunately, my girlfriend has some windows-pc standing here and doing nothing, so I configured VPN on that machine and shared the internet connection, so I can start a stage1 install.

I'll post all my experiences here, as asked by Christoph.

...since my last post on this blog. Lot's happened in meantime: a few parties, LANwars, we've choosen the new boss of our university, I'm selected for an internship developing an L3 multicast switch at Barco. I was quite busy, so I didn't have much time to write some stuff here.

Some bad (or maybe even good) news: my computer is broken. The IDE-connector (or controller) on the mobo doesn't work anymore. It's a quite old Pentium 4 system, one of the first types of Pentium 4, with an Intel D850GB motherboard and 512 MB RD-Ram (Rambus, Rimm,...). So a change would be a new mobo and new Ram. Maybe my parents'll do that to use my computer at home. It was a very good system, running still very good. I'll miss it, and the good configured Gentoo where I had put lots of time in.

But with that sad news, there's also very good news! My parents decided to give me a new system! As mobility is getting more and more important, they bought me a notebook. Now I can use it here in Ghent, at home, and at all other places I'll hang around. For the interested ones: it's a Dell Latitude D810 bought at VTK. Here are some specs:

• Latitude D810, 15.4" WSXGA LCD (1680 X 1050) Screen
• Pentium M 730 (1.6Ghz, 533Mhz, 2MB L2 Cache)
• 1GB 533MHz DDR2 SDRAM Memory (2X512MB)
• 80GB IDE (5400rpm) Hard Drive
• 8X DVD+RW Drive
• ATI X600 videocard with 128MB dedicated ram
• Networkcard and 56k modem
• Intel PRO Wireless 2200 802.11b/g mini PCI card
• Belgisch AZERTY keyboard
• 9 Cell 80WHr LI-ION Primary Battery
• Delux Nylon Carry Case
• System Documentation, Resource CD, adapter
• 3 year "Next Business Day On-site" warranty + Completecare Accidental damage Cover
• home delivery

Just take a look at the price at VTK and compare with the official prices from Dell ;-) It's a huge difference! I like the VTK services!

The Dell Latitude D810
While waiting for my own notebook, I can use another one. It's the Acer AMD64 I allready talked about. Installing vpnc for use at the student home was very simple. But I've added some other, I think bad, repo's and now the whole system is broken. So now, I'm running windows (that other would-be OS in dual boot on this machine). I think I'll study somewhat the next days, so I won't have time to install Gentoo or another Linux distro. I want WLAN working on this machine to use it at home, but there aren't any AMD64 drivers for the IPN2220 card inside. I'll wait, maybe they release them with the release of windows 64bit. My new computer will be, just like my old one, running Gentoo Linux in single boot.

As I told you yesterday, I've troubles with my gentoo box. Because of some incompatibilities between php5 and xoops, I wanted to roll back to php4. Emerge failed (don't know why anymore, I think it was mysqlclient or something like that), but on Gentoo Forums, they suggest a revdep-rebuild. One of those packages to rebuild was libwww. That one didn't rebuild, and again on Gentoo Forums they suggested to unmerge and re-emerge it, so I did, but only the first part of it succeeded: unmerging. Emerging gives output like this:

emerge libwww
Calculating dependencies ...done!
>>> emerge (1 of 1) net-libs/libwww-5.4.0-r2 to /
>>> md5 src_uri ;-) w3c-libwww-5.4.0.tgz
>>> md5 src_uri ;-) libwww-5.4.0-debian-autoconf-2.5.patch.bz2
>>> Unpacking source...
>>> Unpacking w3c-libwww-5.4.0.tgz to /var/tmp/portage/libwww-5.4.0-r2/work
>>> Unpacking libwww-5.4.0-debian-autoconf-2.5.patch.bz2 to /var/tmp/portage/libwww-5.4.0-r2/work
* Applying libwww-config-liborder.patch ... [ ok ]
* Applying libwww-5.4.0-debian-autoconf-2.5.patch ... [ ok ]
* Applying libwww-5.4.0-autoconf-gentoo.diff ... [ ok ]
* Applying libwww-5.4.0-automake-gentoo.diff ... [ ok ]
* Applying libwww-5.4.0-disable-ndebug-gentoo.diff ... [ ok ]
QA Notice: USE Flag 'macos' not in IUSE for net-libs/libwww-5.4.0-r2
You should update your `aclocal.m4' by running aclocal.
Putting files in AC_CONFIG_AUX_DIR, `config'.
/usr/portage/net-libs/libwww/libwww-5.4.0-r2.ebuild: line 45: aclocal: command not found

!!! ERROR: net-libs/libwww-5.4.0-r2 failed.
!!! Function src_unpack, Line 45, Exitcode 127
!!! aclocal failed
!!! If you need support, post the topmost build error, NOT this status message.

So it seems aclocal can't be found. A lookup pointed that I have aclocal 1.5, 1.7, 1.8 and 1.9. I tried to create a symlink named "aclocal" to aclocal-1.9. This results in lots of warnings when emerging libwww, but it compiles. The big problem is, since then, I have crashes (segfaults) of firefox and thunderbird when I'm viewing some sites (like The Register). I created a new symlink to aclocal-1.5, wich made libwww emerging with lots less warnings, but the crashes remain. I searched around in bugzilla and forums but no solution. I'll create a new bugreport, let's hope somethings comes out of it. I'll keep you on touch!

Yeah! Done my exam Design of Multimedia Applications this morning. I think it'll be good enough. I didn't like it, just two questions: he gave the title of the chapter and we give the content, but it'll be OK. That means there's just one more left! Tuesday, I have Advanced Computer Architecture. Nice course. My lovely girlfriend also has just one more left on thursday, and after that we'll spend some nice time together :-D

With that horrible exam wednesday, I wasn't in the mood for studying this one. I started yesterday evening, wich is very late, so I just slept three hours this night. XX( Even then, badminton was very hard and very nice today. Now, I'm just going to check a few things at my gentoo box and some forums, and then I'll take a long sleep ;-)

My gentoo does some strange things today. Much emerge errors, I'll take a look closer to it. I used PHP5 till now, but I want to go back to PHP4, but that one doesn't compile. Tetex (a dependency of it) also doesn't compile.

I finally gave Ubuntu Linux a try. The LiveCD won't run on my computer, so I tried it at the portable AMD64 at home. Starts quite quickly, seems nice designed (gnome 2.8.1), it just looks good. The WLAN doesn't work, but I'll install Ubuntu x86_64 on this machine later and try it with ndiswrapper. Anything else seems really nice.