Unix & Linux
Unix & Linux
"sandbox" was the name of my first Linux computer, ca. 1995. It was an i386sx, 16 MHz, 8 MB RAM, with a 340 MB harddisk, a 3c509 NIC, and a Teles 16.3 ISDN card for routing. It ran Slackware with kernels 1.2.mumble and 1.3.mumble. It was later upgraded to a i486 DX4, 120 MHz, 32 MB.
Current config is a AMD Duron, 1.2 GHz, 512 MB RAM, 120 GB IDE, with a Soyo K7V Dragon Plus! motherboard. The mobo includes Ethernet and audio both of which are nicely supported by Linux. The graphics card is a Leadtek GeForce FX 5700 with 128 MB RAM.
The LAN connects to the Internet via ADSL, which is fast becoming wide spread and affordable in Germany. Until recently I used my old system (PII, 400 MHz, 256 MB RAM, 4+8 GB SCSI) to route traffic but replaced it with a LinkSys WRT54G router/switch/access point. It's not as flexible as a pure Linux system but for now it suits my needs.
Apart from that I have an old Sun SPARCstation IPC (CGthree, 36 MB RAM, 340 MB + 1 GB harddisk, 150 MB QIC tape) running SunOS 4.1.3. Cost a boatful of money at the time. I don't use that at the moment, but keep it anyway since it's just too painful to throw away. (Ah, sweet memories ;-)
The latest addition is a Toshiba SatellitePro 2100 laptop that's fast becoming my main machine for development, e-mail and office stuff. I rsync it at irregular intervals with the desktop PC.
I've been using various flavors of Unix since 1989, starting with SCO Xenix (came on around 20 5¼" disks and didn't include X11 or networking), SunOS 4.x, Solaris 2.x, IBM AIX, HP/UX, SGI IRIX, and finally Linux.
Since summer 2004 I've been trying to get kernel 2.6 to run on my desktop. Not a problem with an older Knoppix from March 2004 but no such luck with more recent kernels.
After booting the kernel the PS/2 keyboard (it's an older SGI keyboard) does not respond anymore (console and X11) and I'm unable to login. ssh works however so it's not a general problem. So far (Feb 2005) I've been unable to find any help or similar problems on the Internet.
If you've experienced anything like this please let me know. This is very frustrating. Switching to a USB keyboard would probably help but I would rather 'solve' the problem.
Mar 05 2005 I finally found help in the kernel bugzilla. Someone else reported similar problems with PS/2 keyboards and was able to solve the problem by passing the boot option i8042.dumbkbd=1. This disables the keyboard LEDs but I don't care for that as much as I enjoy finally being able to run 2.6! :-)
Gentoo LinuxEarlier this year (2002) I read about Gentoo Linux possibly on slashdot or root prompt and was intrigued by the adoption of the ingenious BSD ports system. And since both the PII system and the RedHat 6.x installation were due for an overhaul I decided to give it a try.
Gentoo is quite different from your usual everything-and-the-kitchen-sink distro out there. The base install starts with a minimal boot system that only includes a basic kernel and all the tools needed to get you connected to the Internet and download the rest of the system. All additional packages come in the form of ebuild files that tell the package management portage what the dependencies are, where to get the source code, and how to configure it.
Beware that the setup is not as easy as the recent releases from SuSE, RedHat, or (I suppose) Mandrake. You have to do a lot of lower-level stuff such as setting up partitions, swap-space, networking, etc. The documentation however is adequate and should get you through the process in one piece. Personally I found it much easier than Debian.
Since everything is downloaded from the Internet and compiled on your machine you should have both a good Internet connection (like ADSL or Cable modem) and a fast system so it doesn't take too long. The likes of Xserver, KDE, firefox etc. can push ones patience.
There's a very flattering article on LWN about Gentoo. Some of the comments are also worth reading.