20 years of amphetamines and failure.

Originally published at ScummBlog. You can comment here or there.

As hinted in the last post, Scummbox.org is running some new services.

To facilitate remote access to my network, OpenVPN has been installed. It was a cinch to install, and through some trial and error I have gotten additional routes passed through to access my home network range from any remote location.

Also installed was TinyProxy. This allows users connected to the VPN to (transparently!) access sites that may be blocked at their location.

A final new service running is GnuMP3d… A remote playlist/streaming client that is tucked behind the VPN to prevent rampant and unauthorized usage.

On the workstation front, I’ve gone from running Kubuntu to Windows Vista to Windows 7 Beta/RC. Windows 7 is running extremely well and has offered me no problems as of yet. A side effect of going back to Windows is that I’m playing World of Warcraft again, as well as EVE Online. And what’s the side effects of playing games on a PC?

Hardware upgrades. The workstation has gotten a new PCIe 2.0 ATI video card. A 4870 HD with 1GB of GDDR5, to be exact. And with that also came two 22″ widescreen monitors running at 1680×1050 for an amazing amount of desktop real estate.

It has been a frenzy of upgrades and updates and taking chances on new software, but it’s paying off big time!

Originally published at ScummBlog. You can comment here or there.

First, an aside: Today I am a real Blogger. I am posting this from a coffee shop in Toronto!

January 10th (or thereabouts) marks the 1 year anniversary of me getting bored with a Windows XP workstation and installing Linux for the first time in many years. Since then I’ve added a wee Ubuntu box and a PowerMac G4 running OS X Leopard (a topic for a different post) to my managre,  and I haven’t missed having a Windows OS machine yet!

The Gentoo machine (Rands) has been running like a champ for over a year, with only a couple foibles (all my fault) ruining it’s uptime. Since I posted about setting it up I’ve migrated to the unstable AMD 64 branch (~amd64) and had nary a problem. A memorable futz-up on my part was me un-emerging coreutils after a package blocking problem… leaving me with no basic Linux utilitys (like LS or RM!) Thankfully, some kind soul on the Gentoo Forums saved me with a tar of his AMD 64-compiled coreutils!

I loved my year with Gentoo, and look forward to many more!

Originally published at ScummBlog. You can comment here or there.

I usually leave my computer on over night, for seeding purposes. When I went to wake it up this morning, I noticed that I had no keyboard activity. No num lock, ctrl+alt+backspace (Kills the X Windows session) wasn’t working… nor was ctrl+alt+F12 (the DMESG view). The monitor came on to a black screen (power saving mode.) The thing was hung. My keyboard has an LCD built into it, which shows the system time. It was stopped at 3:15 AM. So, I reboot.

On reboot I see that there are several major errors: Udev wasn’t loading properly, the System Clock cannot be accessed, ALSA (Advanced Linux Sound Architecture) won’t load, nor will my network card. Crap.

What did I do last night? I ran a deep system update based on a new portage listing. What was updated? Umm… my Vorbis libraries… oh, the Linux Kernel Headers. Well, that might have something to do with it. So, genkernel -all, wait 30 minutes, reboot… success! I don’t know if the kernel rebuild was strictly necessary, but it seems to have done the trick.

Going through the logs from last night, all I can see is the cron agent running at 3:00, and then some NTFS checks happening. Nothing that *should* have caused a major freak out. We’ll see how things go tonight.

*Update*

After posting on the Gentoo forums, it turns out the issue had to do with my NTFS driver and my localization settings. Two commands and my system hasn’t seized in days!

Originally published at ScummBlog. You can comment here or there.

First things first. man emerge. Seriously. You’ll be using it a *lot*

Originally published at ScummBlog. You can comment here or there.

2006 was a topsy-turvy year… I went from XP installs to Vista installs then back to XP installs… but I was feeling very *meh* towards my computer. It was boring. No umph.

So a new year has started, and a friend managed to get me interested in Desktop Linux again. I’ve run a couple day-to-day Linux installs, but they never lasted for one reason or another. The last one was probably in the very early 2000’s.