King Ink feels like a bug and he hates his rotten shell.

[reddragdiva]

If you are on BT and are finding websites only load for you one try in five or six, it's because their DNS server appears to have had the dick. (Don't expect clue from their tech support.) We have set our DNS to 199.5.157.128, which is aslan.open-rsc.org, an alternate DNS run by crackpots activists. But it works less worse than BT for now.

redcountess has been agitating for some time for her FreeBSD box to be brought back to life, because Windows continues to suck. But dhclient in FreeBSD 5.3-RELEASE has occasional problems with just not bloody working. (What this means is that it can't grab an address from your DSL modem or the network, so you have to set all the network configuration by hand.) The workaround appears to be to use an older version. I downloaded the ancient version 2 and it's working like a charm. Crusty and probably not 100% secure, but should be relatively safe behind the NAT.

So as to keep this box upgradable via ports, I have installed only the base system and am doing EVERYTHING else from ports. I expect to be compiling Xorg, KDE and so forth for the next few days. I'm not completely insane — OpenOffice.org is going to be installed from a binary package. Or just run from a Linux binary. Of course, I just tried installing the text browser links and the fucking thing pulled in Xorg. The pr0ts system does partake of considerable crack on occasions.

Comments

[loosechanj.livejournal.com]

I think my favorite was when I installed xmms from ports, and wound up with a fully functional Gnome install.

[wintrmute.livejournal.com]

Gentoo's Portage system certainly does have a number of advantages over the ports system at times.

[loosechanj.livejournal.com]

Weanie. :-P

[wintrmute.livejournal.com]

Heh, have you actually tried using it, or are you knocking something based upon your presumptions?

[reddragdiva]

3v3ryth1ng l33gnuX is for w33n13s! (never mind if it built on the previous work in a sensible fashion)

[wintrmute.livejournal.com]

You don't *have* to use the Linux kernel & GNU libc, if you really have a problem with fast, good, posix threads support, a range of decent fast journalled filesystems, swappable optimised IO schedulers, decent hardware support, and users with less of an attitude problem than BSDers:

http://gentoo-wiki.com/Gentoo_for_FreeBSD


(comment note: tongue is slightly in cheek)

[reddragdiva]

I disliked Linux (the kernel; the GNU stuff is lovely) from those occasions when I had to administer it casually; I despise it now that my job description includes Red Hat. It's robust, versatile, portable, powerful, industrial-strength and really shows its roots as a student project with added overcaffeinated crackmonkeys when you have to do deep-down stuff. I respect it, but I certainly don't have to like it!

[loosechanj.livejournal.com]

If "it" = "linux", yes I have used "it". I agree with reddragdiva, the GNU stuff is nice, but "linux" meaning the kernel just blows.

[wintrmute.livejournal.com]

No, by "it" I meant Portage. You know, the thing I originally mentioned which caused your initial comment.

[reddragdiva]

15 l33gnUx. must b3 suxx0r!

I just discovered what failed to let the KDE3 port build: the raft of unspeakably crufty code in gimp-print. (A dep of imagemagick, which is a dep of something, which is a dep of something, which is a dep of the full KDE.) I think that code must have been part of a competition to see who could generate the most compiler warnings without crashing out. But someone cut it a little close.

[reddragdiva]

Oh - one thing that REALLY pisses me off is when you're installing a port requiring days of compilation (e.g. KDE onto a minimal system - Qt alone takes 12 hours on Liz's underpowered PIII-450 with 192MB) and it pauses to ask questions in the middle. Fucksake! Has Gentoo added smart ways around that? I suppose it would require a request for initial configuration from all dependencies.

[wintrmute.livejournal.com]

I have never seen Portage stop and ask you questions.
Configuration options (eg. such as do you want X support in elinks, or gnome support on xmms) are pre-set before building anything, including dependancies, and you can view the options on sub-builds too. This includes cases where you might have build a dependancy already, but without a required option - it'll know that it needs to rebuild it to add the option and this is indicated.

The way portage gets around building on slow PCs is twofold:
1) You can compile on another system to create a binary package. (but i don't)
2) You can peer up your PCs to form a compile-farm. It uses distcc, but it's completely integrated into portage. So you emerge something on your slow PC, and the 4ghz server in the corner does most of the heavy lifting.

[reddragdiva]

As far as I can tell, the part asking questions interactively is actually ./configure . FreeBSD does try to mess with the original tarball as little as possible. Grah!