Gentoo is finally working

Yes, it was genkernel and a broken kernel (ck-sources) that were combining to cause my woes. After removing genkernel and compiling ck-sources, I was getting another kernel panic. So I tried a "vanilla" kernel (no patches) and the system is now running happily. This means that I finally get to see KDE 3.2 (yay), and for the first time Linux on my box has colored, 3D cursors.

Are 3D cursors the greatest thing about Linux? Of course not. But they are much better on my eyes than "Kernel panic: aieeee". Heh.

So what happened to gernkernel? It started out life as a tool to make a base kernel configuration file built from what hardware it detected and you could customize from there. It would then install the kernel. It sounded wonderful. Now, it seems to put a lot of bloat in the kernel config, it doesn't seem to do anything based on my system's specs, and it breaks the system. Way To Go! I hope whatever changes in developers and / or process which have caused this kind of instability change for the better. I still love the idea behind Gentoo, and I'm wanting to focus on schoolwork rather than intall the sytem *again*. Slack will still be tested at some point, but I'm glad I don't *have* to do that right now.

After I get the last tweaks done, including sound, syncing the Zaurus & cron jobs, the box will be humming along smoothly once more. Happy day.

Fun colors and a Gentoo rant

Well, the format of the blog is now to my liking :) The code is pretty easy to understand once you fiddle with it some.

*rant on*
Yanno, I was attracted to Gentoo because of its flexibility, power, and the ease of maintaining packages that were all installed by compiling from source. Portage is cool, the documentation was wonderful, the forums informative. New ebuilds were added to portage within 24 hours of any popular application's release (Mozilla, KDE etc). I was thrilled when they released the genkernel script that you can install which will automatically run all the steps to build the kernel. It was wonderbar.

Now, applications aren't quite as quick to get to ebuilds and more importantly some major b0rkage is happening in genkernel. There have been people reporting in the Gentoo forums that they are left with an unbootable systems and kernel panics after running genkernel. Not good. Something has changed in the Gentoo developer community, and it's not for the best.
*rant off*

Other than that, TGIF!! Got a great deal on a new cell phone package and can't wait for the new phone to arrive. *drool*

Behold, my new techie blog. This will contain various thoughts, musings, and verbal geek explosions.
It's also a convenient place to have some information about the resume.