Success with Gentoo on Sun Ultra Sparc II

Between 10:30pm and some time this morning I managed to get a functional copy of Gentoo installed on my Sun Ultra II. Why Gentoo? My first choice was Solaris 9, but it took forever to install and ran like a snail trying to navigate a pothole. Part of that fault lay with the fact that my Ultra's CPU is only 200MHz and it only has the minimum RAM 128. The RAM is of course proprietary, so I won't be adding SDRAM anytime soon.

I checked out Aurora, but it kept dumping where partitioning would occur. FreeBSD 6.x simply locked up. Finally, my Debian-SPARC disc was scratched. But all these obstacles were not the primary reason I chose Gentoo. The main reason was because it simply looked more impressive during the install phase. I know it's pathetic, but I love the colours on the command line. I also thought it would be great having the system better optimized for my hardware. So while I was dazzled by the pretty colours, the real reason was because I couldn't think of any other OS that might be more optimized for the hardware (other than LFS... but try LFS in a couple of hours...I don't think so).

There were a couple of bugs in my installation. Some modules did not load properly. I'm concerned because syslog-ng was one of the programs that didn't seem to be properly configured. The others were the sunhme, the cs sound driver, the flash module, and the openpromfs module. It's a bit puzzling, but I'm sure I'll figure it out when I get home from work 14 hours later. ;-)

100th post & Midnight Commander

If you've read my past web log posts you know I go back to the Commodore 64 days in 1983. Back then my family was lucky enough to own a 1541 floppy drive for the C64. One of the things I learned back then was file management. Dealing with files was different in the PC world, but one thing was the same - there were tools to make file management simpler. One of those tools was Norton Commander for DOS. During my Windows 9x-phase (all 2 years) I really missed Norton Commander. Quite some time ago I discovered Linux has something similar to Norton Commander called Midnight Commander (mc).



Midnight Commander makes file management a breeze. But one of the things I found annoying about it was that it always displayed .dotfiles. The fix is for this is quite easy. Just browse to your ~/.mc directory and edit the file named ini. In the ini file there is an option show_dot_files. It's set to 1 by default. Set it to zero, restart midnight commander, and viola, no more dotfiles.

Well, it seems like just the other day that I started this, my first web log, and here we are at the 100th post! I'd like to thank everyone reading the web log, and special thanks to those who've left constructive feedback.

Resources:

• Info page about Norton Commander
  
• Wikipedia's Commodore 64 page
  
• Linux GNU Midnight Commander
  

Yet another screen shot!

I have no excuse for not posting lately. I simply have not made the time to post. At home my latest project is working on a mp3 box. I thought I was going to finish it last night, unfortunately the network card refused to work! Since the box was going to be a web-activated player, the NIC was necessary; besides, I also wanted to update the box. The version of Fedora Core 4 I have has about 100 new updates. The Fedora project seems to be gaining a lot of momentum lately.

I'm just about to nuke the 60GB Ubuntu installation on my notebook for SuSE 10 and Fedora Core 4 (I'll probably upgrade to the latest testing version later) Before I did that I wanted to post a screen shot, and just let people know I'm still trying to write in all my blogs, I'm just a bit swamped with projects at, and outside of work.

I've also finally got my Sun Ultra 2 powered up. It's currently in the middle of a Gentoo install. If I can gleam some more RAM for the box I might try out Solaris 10, but with only 128MB (4 x 32MB) currently installed CDE and Gnome are really boorish.

Resources

• Fedora Project
  
• Open SuSE
  
• Gentoo
  
• Sun's Ultra 2 page