I’ve ordered a 2 terabyte hard drive to appropriately serve as a backup drive for my home server. This would normally just require swapping the old backup drive out for it, and then performing a backup. But I figure since I’ll have it down anyway, I’ll have enough drives to swap to Arch Linux and get things going again with the old drive as a … backup. I’ve got quite a few services setup on it, and I’m not looking forward to moving all the config files over

Time installing Gentoo: days Time installing Archlinux: 30 mins. I have an old Intel based Dell laptop with 1.8GHz single-core processor. I’ve had Windows XP on it for a couple years, then I switched to Gentoo for the past 5 or 6 years. Well, it’s really not the kind of laptop that you should be compiling everything from source on. I’m tired of going through the “everything’s broken, hook it the ethernet cable and start fixing it” routine after I’ve left it alone for months at a time.

I attempted to get a webcam going on our home server. So, I plug it in, and since I’ve done this before I ran a script I made to grab an image from the webcam. Which didn’t work. So, after checking out why (/dev/video0 node was missing), I noticed that the kernel no longer had support built in. After going through the kernel options, I realized they changed the v4l and webcam support options around and since I just upgrade using “-silentoldconfig” (the bad way to do upgrades), it broke whenever I upgraded to 3.

I’ve been working with a MacBook Pro and OS X 10.8.2, and I have to say I’m not impressed. Coming from a background that consisted almost entirely of Windows and Linux, it isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. It’s still another OS with it’s own set of problems. That said, the user interface is more consistent and usable, in a lot of cases, than Windows and especially Linux desktop environments.

I’ve pulled power and cable from the attic and just powered up the home server again. It’s been asleep for 5 months until now. I’ve just done an emerge -sync, and it took about 10 minutes to complete. However, it went up without any problems, which is good. Considering I turned it off in a working state. I was tempted to backup all my config files and start fresh with, say, Arch Linux, but that would take all weekend.

If your sick of your brand new MacBook just working (more or less), and you just feel like modifying your kernel’s source to get your computer to work right, you’ve come to the right place. I (finally) managed to get Gentoo booting on a new MacBook Pro (15”, Core i7, mid-2012) alongside OS X 10.8.2. I suppose it actually wasn’t that bad, it could have been much worse. I only had to reinstall OS X once after a wonky partition editor….

After fumbling around with various downloads and patches, I was able to find a working QEMU build for windows. I am running Windows 7 64-bit, and I wanted to run an ARM system (specifically, to develop for a Stratus plug computer). Before this, I was running a virtualized Ubuntu using VirtualBox and then running QEMU within that. Performance was not noticeably bad. However, I had problems bridging the QEMU to the Ubuntu host, which was bridged itself.