Re: [gentoo-user] Goodbye, Gentoo

[Mark Shields <laebshade@gmail.com>]

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On Thu, May 26, 2011 at 6:28 PM, Kevin O'Gorman <kogorman@gmail.com> wrote:

> It looks like it's time to take Gentoo off of my main machine.  I feel a
> little sad about it, or I'd just quietly go away.
>
> A few months ago, an update made the machine headless -- well, it could no
> longer bring up X but I could use the console-mode for admin, and log in via
> SSH from my laptop and run GUI programs.  I was busy at the time, first
> deciding and then implementing my retirement, so I let it go.
>
> Now, a couple of months into my retirement, I'm trying to fix things up,
> and the latest Gentoo live disk cannot talk to my monitor at all.  Whatever
> it's trying is unacceptable to the HD monitor I've had on there for a year,
> and I can't even run the consoles.  The video card is an ATI Rage XL on the
> motherboard.  Like the rest of the machine, it's vintage 2000, so maybe
> support got dropped.  But I'm not inclined to drop the machine -- it was the
> ballyhooed thing in Linux Journal in 2002 when I finished my PHD, so I put
> together these pieces:
> * Two XEON chips.  I didn't know it right away but that means 4 cores.
> They are old Pentium IV-based 32-bit chips.  I got the slowest still being
> made, so the clock speed is 1.6 GHz.  On 4 cores, it's not bad at all.
> *  2GB of DDR ECC memory
> * about a dozen hard drives (some old, but mostly 500GB - 2TB Sata drives),
> I feel it's still worthy of respect.  Some of these are in EZ-Dock docking
> stations and are used for rotating backups (including off-site).  The main
> directories are on hardware RAID 1 so I have ongoing redundancy.
> * a Smart UPS 1500 for everything except the laser printer.
>
> So, since I am familiar with Ubuntu from work, and have it on a couple of
> laptops, I'm installing from the Ubuntu 11.04 live disk (video is just
> fine).
>
> The real headache is all the stuff I'm going to have to port.
>
> 1) Apache and dynamic (Python CGI) web site.
> 2) Postfix
> 3) About a dozen accounts that just do wget(1) data gathering triggered by
> the cron daemon.
> 4) DNS (I run my own domain on a commercial DSL account)
> 5) NTP client and server
> 6) Whatever else I forgot I set up over the years.
>
> My original reason for using Gentoo is that this machine was pretty exotic
> when I bought it, and I wanted to be able to tweak the compiler to get the
> most out of it.  I can still do that for specific applications I'm working
> on, but otherwise it's really a non-issue now.  I have gotten pretty tired
> of updates that take over 48 hours to compile, and the occasional mess-up
> that once or twice led me to rebuild with empty-tree and took a week or so.
>
>
> So I guess I shouldn't complain (and I'm not).  I'm just not in the target
> market for Gentoo any more.  It was fun, though.
> --
> Kevin O'Gorman, PhD
>
>

You let a small problem like the latest live cd not booting your system
scare you away?

Have you tried using an older live cd?  If it's a video issue, maybe
detecting your monitor wrong, how about turning on the framebuffer (there's
an option for that)?

It's doable man, don't give up.

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