Re: adding a hard drive


Subject: Re: adding a hard drive
From: James Dory (jdory@gci.net)
Date: Wed Nov 19 2003 - 08:52:18 AKST


Tim Jordan wrote:

> Coming from a Windows back ground I have never had to dig as deep into
> an OS as I have with Gentoo Linux. All for my own benefit of course!
> I'm becoming a better Linux admin and more importantly a better
> network adminsitrator overall! The icing on the cake is I have never
> -EVER- experienced a nicer workstation then the Gentoo1.4 build on a
> Dell GX240. I can use VM's, play music, run email, compile packages,
> and system management is becoming easier and easier with Emerge.

Hi Tim,

Thanks for the input. I've been lurking for awhile and see some praises
for gentoo. But there's lots of distros. isn't choice great? Just this
morning I was reading an argument on slashdot about userlinux and one
chap said that he liked debian's apt-get but when he couldn't find a
package and installed some from source, it broke apt because apt was
unaware of the additional installations of software. (If I understood).
So I'm curious about emerge - is it also like apt in that respect? First
thing I did was look to see if they had ardour and didn't see it in
their list of packages.

>
> I would proceed with caution when it comes to Gentoo on a multi-boot
> box. I'm a lot like you being new to linux. Gentoo has presented
> consistent challenges. I have not built a multi-OS box with Gentoo,
> but I have with Mandrake and it worked great....for a few months then
> windows stopped booting...
>

Thanks for the warning. First thing I noticed when booting gentoo's
Disk1, was that it didn't recognize my network card. Had same problem
with suse 8.2 and spent several days trying to get that sorted out. No
fun - makes you realize how connected you are or aren't when things
don't work. But difficult to figure out without google access. Luckily
had another windows box sitting there. The onboard network chip is a
Marvell and uses the sklin98 driver which worked fine after I found it.
But there is a message on their webpage about it not working with the
2.4 kernels, so what the? Guess it is all an experiment.

> Gentoo is my main workstation. I have installed it three times in the
> past few months on Dell GX240 & 260 models. These boxes each run 1GB
> of RAM and Intel P4 (1.7 & 2.2Ghz) processors. To build a complete
> workstation with KDE, OpenOffice, Mozilla, Evolution, Mplayer, Browser
> plugins, and a few extra packages it took about 1 1/2 days with a T-1
> connection. I'm going to order the CD's for $15 off the web site from
> now on.
>
This one is an Abit IS-7 SATA with 2.8 Ghz processor and 1 GB ram. Been
tweaking it so much trying to get set up that I haven't really had any
chance to do real work on it to see how it performs. (Couldn't even get
autocad to load on Win98 when I last tried.. loaded but didn't run and
that on a fresh windows install.)

Another battle was trying to get gmmusic working so I could catalog my
cd collection - which is already done in windows. Suse uses kde pretty
much. Went ahead and installed and finally got it working. Then I hit
help once and it brought up Nautilus under KDE and the sh** hit the fan.
All of a sudden I started getting hundreds of instances of Nautilus
trying to run and all producing an error. I tried to get into a shell
and do a killall, but by the time I could get that open the system was
pretty much bogged down and stuck. All I could do was a reset. Of
course, KDE was set to resume session so every time I tried to log back
in it would start up that problem. I finally got quick enough to kill it
before it brought down the system, after a few more resets. I haven't
used gmmusic since. Don't know how I should have handled that. I'm sure
there is a better way.

Anyway - thanks and maybe I'll try for that hard drive tray.. /jim

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This archive was generated by hypermail 2a23 : Wed Nov 19 2003 - 10:53:03 AKST