OK Computer plays from my CDRW drive as I write this. I’m using Windowmaker, which I haven’t touched since Red Hat 5.2. I ::heart:: wmaker. I forgot just how amazingly wonderful it is. I’ve got my iBook on my desk to my right, and I check it every 30 minutes or so for new e-mail.
I’m sure I paint a lovely image of computer geekery . . . but I’m booted into Knoppix 3.3, because somehow I hosed my login thingy (gdm, I think?) over the weekend. I’m pretty sure it has something to do with the kde 3.2 install I did, but I’m not exactly sure. All I know right now is that my /home partition is safe, as are all the Just A Geek and Dancing Barefoot files within said partition. I’m pretty confident that I can boot into runlevel 2 and fix it . . . but holy shit, man, I’ve been running Knoppix for . . .
knoppix@ttyp0[knoppix]$ uptime
23:05:52 up 11:05, 0 users, load average: 0.11, 0.30, 0.25
twenty-three hours eleven hours. (Yes, I realize what a total lameass I am. Here’s my cap, my pocket protector, and my sliderule. But you can have my polyhedral dice when you pry them from my cold, dead hands . . . provided I fail my saving throw, of course), and it’s awesome. Because I’m running Knoppix out of RAM, it’s moving at transwarp speed. If you’ve even shown the tiniest hint of geekery in your life, you owe it to yourself to give Knoppix (or any LiveCD, really) a go.
So the burning question is: do I get to a free spin on my propeller cap because I’m doing this from a live CD, using my CDRW drive to play an audio CD, and seriously looking at Gentoo, (The idea of a linux distro that’s optimized just for my machine is so alluring to me, and I’ve spent several hours looking at Gentoo’s site tonight) or do I lose 5d12+10 nerd points for not spending the last 23 11 hours tracking down the problem and fixing it?
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Yay, first comment. It’s nice to read a new post before going to bed. I feel like I’ve been waiting all day!
Very cool!
Once you’ve learnt the wonders of gentoo’s build system you’ll never want to go back to an rpm distro. No more rpm hell! Just type “emerge program_name” and it will download compile and install including the required versions of all libraries – sweet!
Hey Wil,
Two things:
1. close your italics tag after your book titles….
2. your uptime is actually 11:05; 23:05 is the time.
your uptime is actually 11:05; 23:05 is the time.
Well, we just answered the geekpoints question, didn’t we? I’m turning in my pocket protector now.:)
I :heart: Wil Wheaton.
That is all I have to say.
ack! i am blinded by the geekiness!
there’s nothing better than a day spent geeking out … woohoo! and you can keep ALL your nerd points. there’s a BIG difference between a ‘search and fix’ geekout and a ‘happy feet geekout’ 🙂
Write more late at night so I can read it when I switch my machine on and get nearer to the first comment.
Also AUDIOBLOG !!!!!! please
Wow
I recognize all of your post as English…but fuck me running if I know what any of it means.
Bowing to a bigger geek
Sean
I totally HEART Gentoo. I started using it for hardware troubleshooting – if I couldn’t boot a WinX install I’d boot from a Gentoo CD, and if it’d boot from that I could safely assume it was an OS issue and not hardware. The one time it wouldn’t boot from a Gentoo iso it was a failed hard drive. Stupid hard drive.
Anyway, after doing that a few times I fell in love, and never looked back. Of course I have to use other distros on occasion for specific reasons, which are far too nerdy to go into here, but yeah. Try Gentoo. You’ll want to make out with it.
Still got to cross out the “23 Hours” at the borrom
Mmm. Knoppix.
(Useless comment of the day, but I heart Knoppix and debian.)
“Borrom” ??? – BOTTOM
Getting lost in thinking about ways to totally rebuild (figuratively or literally) it bigger, better, or faster rather than just fixing it scores high in geek points. It is also how a lot of good things happen. You can’t be bothered to put a bunch of work into just getting back to where you were.
That’s better, you’ll get the hang of these computer thingy’s soon!.
AUDOIBLOG !!!!
“All I know right now is that my /home partition is safe, as are all the Just A Geek and Dancing Barefoot files within said partition.”
Should be a moot point considering it is all backed up all over the place… RIGHT??
“…or do I lose 5d12+10 nerd points for not spending the last 23 11 hours tracking down the problem and fixing it?”
Nah, keep your nerd points. But once you go through the very-well-documented Gentoo install, you’ll know so much about the inner workings of the distro that it won’t take that long to track down the problem and fix it.
I gave Gentoo a try because of the optimized-system thing, but I learned a ton along the way. And man-oh-man do I ::heart:: emerge.
The *real* geek question is – did you fire up the KBinaryClock applet in kde 3.2 before you got locked out?
The barcode clock screensaver is pretty neat, too.
And forget gdm. Real nerds run startx… 😉
I’m a BSD geek!!! I’ve never used gentoo or “emerge” – but I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t want to as FreeBSD’s “ports” system sends anything similar to /dev/null. It currently includes over 9000 applications! YES – 9000!!!
hey wil,
i too saw all that as english, but didn’t have a clue what it was going on about! tee hee….i still like reading about it, so when one of my geeky friends says something, i can say…”yeah, i know that…Wil Wheaton uses that!!!!” YEY!
take care wil
rach
Firstly, you will lose a few geek points (as we prefer to call them this side of the pond), but maybe not 5e12+10 (unless the d thing is too geeky for me to understand, in which case you can have them all back, and then some) if you don’t sort it yourself.
Having said that, I’m using gentoo atm, and it really seems rather good. BUT be warned – kde takes an age to compile, and 3.2 doesn’t seem to be in their portage yet.
Oh my god, when you said the thing about the pocket protecter and being a geek, I was thinking of Revenge of The Nerds. Hee hee hee.
You know you could of been in that movie as wormser?
Ok I could find a picture of a nerd and take off their head and put your head on there. hee hee hee.
Ok sorry, got lost in the image.
I think you need to fix the problem dude.
I myself I’m grateful for a brother who knows everything there is to know about computers.
Because of him I still have my computer.
Enough said.
Good to see things are going great for you.
Man, judging by the post titles, you have been on a serious OK Computer burn for a couple of days – if you haven’t checked out Airbag/How’s My Driving yet, you really should – it’s pretty much side 3 of OKC. And don’t mind the high price, you should be able to find it cheaper on eBay.
Wil – also such a fan of OK Computer…might I recommend “Pilate”- they’re a Toronto band, and quite good…check them out at pilate.com (sorry, I lack the necessary geek skills to make this into a hyperlink…). Enjoy – and keep writing…I heart Wil Wheaton’s writing!
“But you can have my polyhedral dice when you pry them from my cold, dead hands . . . provided I fail my saving throw…”
*laughs* Wil!! You just made my day!! I love you man!!
Monica
Knoppix rocks! My employer recently decided to “lock down” all PC’s in the company. But they didn’t do anything from preventing me from booting with a CD….mwahahaha!!!
I take back what I said earlier, it’s in the portage, but you need to arse around, or something.
Hi,
[paranoia]
RUN! Do not walk, to the cupboard, and grab out a blank CD.
RUN! Do not walk, back to your PC, and burn a copy of your home directory (or at least your DB and JAG files, and any other files you can’t live without).
[/paranoia]
This is, of course, assuming you don’t already have multiple backups stored /everywhere/.
I have my stuff backed up nightly onto 3 machines here in the office and across the road, and the ultra important stuff is backed up onto 2 separate servers on the other side of the planet every night.
‘Paranoia is Good.
Paranoia is Right.
Paranoia Works.
Paranoia cuts through, clarifies and captures the essence of the sysadmin spirit’
rgds
Alan
Wil,
Be wary of the call of the Gentoo, it may prove your undoing.
I’ve made the installation attempt approximately one hojillion times and only on the last attempt did it succeed and it was really nothing spectacular. Anticlimactic one might say. Running a Gentoo system is more about being a huge geek than actually having a nice stable Linux system. IMHO, of course.
Besides, everything compiles from source, so even with a speedy new machine you’re looking at a 8-12 hour install.
Tim
Because I’m running Knoppix out of RAM, it’s moving at transwarp speed.
Dude, transwarp was just a fad. And, as you know, PETA stopped them from building those engines, because instead of running on antimatter, they ran on baby harp seals. Just chuck a few of those soulful-eyed bad-boys in the intermix chamber, and voom!
Just Say No.
CU
I don’t know how emerge compares to apt-get, but I :heart: apt-get. Especially with synaptic. I can wander around in synaptic seeing what’s available, what’s new etc and Debian is like a rock. Two of my machines are approaching 100 day uptimes (not bad for P75’s built of spare parts) and my “unstable” desktop machine went has only gone down to hardware or power failures. KDE 3.2 isn’t into unstable yet though. Oh well.
Wil, give FreeBSD a try. It’s designed more for server use than for desktops, but it’s much more bulletproof than the various Linux distros for that exact reason. XFree86 runs great. The ports system is so much easier to use than RPMs, and why mess with Gentoo when they copied the portage concept from the BSDs? IMHO, the various Linux distros are fine for messing around, but if you’re serious about using a Unix-like OS, go with FreeBSD.
And besides, a demon can kick a penguin’s ass any day.
Just my thoughts on the gentoo thing, and really I don’t mean to be a troll…
With Gentoo, you’ll spend more time compiling apps than using them, and they won’t really be much more optimized than any other distro. Plus, gentoo is so quick to toss the latest and greatest version of every app into the distro that QA must be a dirty word to them. Unless you actually know how to optimize an application for your architecture, then aren’t you just trusting the gentoo team to get it right for you? In which case, why not use a precompiled, tested, STABLE package from a distro with an actual QA process?
Wil, if you want to take the advice of the people here who are trying to steer you away from Gentoo, may I suggest running Debian-unstable? It’s darn near as bleeding-edge as Gentoo in many respects, but you don’t have to spend all that time compiling stuff…just “apt-get update,” “apt-get dist-upgrade,” and Bob’s your aunt’s third husband with the weird hair. 🙂
Oh…you did remember to yank out that Radiohead disc, insert a blank, and back up those DB and JAG files, right? Otherwise, that WOULD lose you some major geek points, and I don’t have any Potions of Geek Healing handy…
I love Knoppix. I first used it about a year ago. The thing that most impressed me was that I first used it on my laptop. It autodetected everything correctly, including my wireless card and touchpad. I can’t even get my touchpad to work half the time in the regular linux distros I use.
Mostly, now, I use knoppix at work when I want to do something in linux.
Gentoo is a very nice video game, but I would not wish it upon anyone. Say goodbye to stability, usability, and peace of mind. I would suggest Debian instead. As it has been previously pointed out, apt-get is just as useful and easy as portage but relies upon solid builds.
And just to prove my street creds, I am a SysAdmin that supports Windows of all types, Gentoo, Debian, Mandrake, RedHat, FreeBSD and OpenBSD.
I don’t know about Gentoo… is it better than LFS? I spent a week getting up a linux from scratch distribution, only to realize I was sick of compiling any new updates for my system.
You might see from the email addy that I’m not entirely impartial, but you might want to look at lunar linux. The install process tends to go easier . Lots of help available in #lunar on irc.freenode.net
I myself have tried several live cd’s. Knoppix is by leaps and bounds the most stable, usable, and reliable one. Totally amazing for a single cd install. When I last used it KDE hadn’t touched my machine in a long time, it made me realize that it’s come quite a long way.
With that kind of talk, you should feel lucky that you’re a married man, Wil. The only thing polyhedral dice ever saved me from was getting a date on Friday night. 😉
Eric B
Feel free to give me a shout if you need help installing gentoo. I run gentoo (have been for over a year now) and WM, firebird, openoffice etc etc.
Also have a few ebuilds in portage with my name on ;P
Henti Smith
As a secondary note.
Feel free to play with varios distributions, BSD’s and other free operating systems, and then decide for yourself. Each one has it’s merits and drawbacks. Find what is right for you. bigots be damned 🙂
Henti Smith
OOPS!!!
How did that trend of putting actions in those star things start? Why can’t you just describe your actions in the old fashioned way?
Hey Mr Wil,
Just a quick note, since you were interested in Gentoo, I may be able to help you if you decide to switch to it. If you need any advice or anything of the sort, just hit me up by email or whatnot.
I have a copy of it running on one of my spare machines, and it’s pretty nice. Makes RH look like Windows…. *snicker*
Good luck!
Sorry, Wil. I have no idea what you are talking about.
You have achieved a state beyond geekdom.
Wil, I -so- wish I lived next door to you. 90% of our lives are mirrored — theatre/computer geeks unite!
I’ve got gentoo on my UltraSparc2 at work, and I love it. I’ve also got it running on a couple of the computers at home, although my current main computer is still running mandrake 9.2 (my new computer has an SATA-Raid card that isn’t quite supported yet.. Grr!)
And i’m looking at a new laptop here, so I can get rid of some old clunkers — and it’s going to be gentoo all the way. It’s just so much cleaner than nearly any other install.
ciao!
Wil, you really are Just A Geek. Gotta love it.
Wil, my dear, I understood about 2 out of every 10 words, but that post still turned me on. Anne is a lucky woman.
(And I probably need professional help.)
I’m with WIntellect and Mike Jackson, I use FreeBSD almost exclusively now. It has a vast ports collection, its easy to update the OS and the ports using cvsup, you can recompile the system for your computer and install just the apps that you want similar to gentoo. I will have it on my laptop at Penguicon if I run into you I’ll show it off. I think there is a live CD of it running around here somewhere too.
Best Regards,
FreeBSD Knight 😉
I was once a gentoo fan but after a while the time it took to compile apps lost it’s charm. I’d definetly recommend installing it at least once just for the experience. The speed increase isn’t that noticable. As a matter of fact I find Slackware to be speadier than an i686 gentoo install and Slackware is targeted to i386! Try Slackware if you get a chance… by far the best Linux distro IMHO 🙂
By the way, Knoppix can be installed on your HD if you so desire. It comes with a script to install it I believe…look it up.
At the end of the day though I always go back to my tried and true companion, my ibook. Nothing beats it… nothing.
Cheers!