So even more surprising than his move to Microsoft was his recent departure. But he wasn’t even fired, he quit! When this story first broke there was lots of confusion and speculation as to the reason for his resignation. Many people including myself were waiting to hear a story about the bad things going on in Microsoft’s Linux laboratory.

But this was not the case. Daniel came out and said that the reason he left (and I paraphrase) was that he was not able to fully utilize all of his skills at his position at Microsoft. That’s a fairly boring and generic reason to quit for most people to hear. Whether it is true or not I do not know. But what I can tell you is that I feel the exact same way.

I don’t know if you’ve read my about page on this site, but I have an entire lifetime of technological skills at my disposal. I learned Logo in Kindergarten for crying out loud. Yet at my job right now I only use a very small subset of those skills. Not only that, but I’m not really learning anything new. I think this has been a large part of the reason why I am not 100% satisfied with my current employment situation.

Every day I go into work and I don’t really do much. I have a project to work on, but I’m waiting for the full specifications. I’ve got a few features to add or bugs to fix to existing projects, but if I really wanted I could do all of that in one day. I refrain from doing so simply to maintain something to do if I really wanted to. If I did them all I would literally have no work to do and no reason to leave my house.

Some days the only reason I get out of bed is because I might do this little bit of inane work I have yet to do. Daniel Robbins, I understand why you quit Microsoft. Hopefully by the time I finish the project I’m working on I will be able to find some more exciting work. More than money, more than fame I just want to do something fulfilling and challenging every day of my life. Maybe I should get off my ass and start a company despite my large debt.

I also rebuilt my Gentoo. That Gentoo had been installed since a very early 2.6 kernel. Now you’re saying, “I thought Linux got better over time!” Well, it did. “Then why did you re-install?” Well, I’ll tell you.

That install of Gentoo was the best. It was perfectly customized for my needs and was becoming more customized every day. However, it had fallen victim to a Gentoo specific problem. Other Linux distributions just update packages to newer versions. e.g: Ubuntu will update package 1.0 to package 1.1. Gentoo doesn’t force you, but encourages you to update to the newer technology. So you switch from devfs to udev, or from supermount to submount to dbus, hal and ivman. Theoretically all these things can go smoothly. But, as they are newer technologies you are just learning, they get messed up. You have the choice not to update if you don’t mind missing out on the new functionality. But if you don’t update you’re not getting a better Linux, are you?

Technically I could have made the system perfect without formatting and re-installing. However, when that system was first built most of my hardware was very new. I needed the latest and greatest ~x86 software just to make it work. Nowadays I only need stable packages to make it work. Also in those days it was more difficult to customize different options for different packages in Gentoo. Your only choice was the dreaded ACCEPT_KEYWORDS. Nowadays /etc/portage exists, works and is well documented. Since it is not possible to go from unstable Gentoo to stable I rebuilt the whole thing. I imagine I wont do this ever again unless I get a new computer because all these technologies look like they are here to stay. /me crosses fingers.

The last reason I did a system overhaul was to try out my strategy for the greatest USE flags. It’s an obvious way to do things if you know anything about Gentoo. But back in the day it wasn’t easy to do. The -N flag to the emerge command looks for packages with USE flags that have changed and marks them to be rebuilt. Before that argument existed changing USE flags was a nightmare. You would have to manually search for which packages you had installed that used that flag and rebuild them. So what I would do in those days was read the list of USE flags and set as many as I could at install time. If there was even a thought I would need a flag I would set it. However, I often got caught on undocumented package-specific flags. It also sucked when I had a flag I wanted to remove.

So for this new install I had a new strategy. Every time I emerge a new package I do emerge -pv to see which USE flags will effect the build. I go through the list figuring out what each and every flag means. I set all the ones I want then run the command again to see if any new dependencies have appeared that might have their own new flags. This way my system has all the flags I want, and I am guaranteed not to fill make.conf with flags that don’t effect my installation. If I forget a flag it’s no big deal. I add it and use the -N.

I would also like to note one more thing. This latest installation took less time than any other Gentoo install I have ever done. It might be because I have a lot of experience. It might be because the handbook is improved a lot. But a significant factor was simply that installing Gentoo is more streamlined and a little bit easier than it used to be. It is still not for newbies, but it is less troubling. It took me only 24 hours this time, instead of the usual 48+. Way to go Gentoo guys.

There is also a new graphical installer for Gentoo now that is in Alpha. In its current format I wouldn’t use it for any production system. But it’s still pretty slick. It’s basically a Gentoo LiveCD with X, like a Knoppix or Ubuntu CD. In true Gentoo fashion it wows you with beautiful purple graphics, and then it starts Gnome. It’s a standard Gnome, but on the desktop is a link to run the install program. It’s a very nice GUI program that takes you step by step through the Gentoo install process. It reminds me a lot of the old Mandrake installer with the steps listed in a column on the left. Maybe that’s the idea since a lot of Gentoo users, including myself, switched from Mandrake.

So it seems that the computing situation in my house is just about in order. After I get back from vacation I’ll take a little nap and then enter high-productivity mode. Expect awesome.

First, why was I doing this? Couldn’t I just continue the way things were going? Well, no. I was constantly telling people they should use linux if they didn’t play 3d games. I told them it could do everything windows could so. But I wasn’t using Linux for everything. I didn’t have the printer, scanner and joystick working. I didn’t have A lot of things working the way they should in linux. So in fact I was being hypocritical in my promotion. Also, my computer at work has linux only. It was the first gentoo box I built to perfection. And since I use it 9-5 5 days a week it is pretty flawless and slick. I figure if I can use it at work without trouble I can do the same at home. And guess what, I did. I’m typing this in Nedit right now, yay!

First I had to back up my mp3s and videos onto my new 160 gigabyte SATA drive. Not hard. I know that XFS is a very reliable file system that handles large files well. Since I’m only using this drive for videos and music I made one giant partition. Take that NTFS! Also, doing this served as a way to force myself to use Linux because now I can’t play my mp3s from windows because windows can’t read XFS. I put a picture up online that shows a nice view of my backup drive from Konqueror in Knoppix. FYI Knoppix is the greatest tool in the world. I used it to format all my drives and sort out all my data perfectly before I booted the gentoo livecd and got my groove on. Some of the files I backed up there I really should have deleted. I had some movies and other junk you can see that really was just taking up space and I didn’t need to keep it. But it was just easier to back up the whole drive and not have to pick and choose.

Then I went through the standard gentoo install process. I gave gentoo my entire 80 gigabyte SATA drive. 32MB for the boot partition and the rest for /. I still have a 20gig drive in my computer that isn’t SATA. The first 10 gigs is windows XP. Which I haven’t booted since I isntalled it. Then there is another gig for swap space. It’s nice to have that on a seperate drive. Of course, this drive has the MBR on it. I over-wrote the one that windows put there with grub. I also made a 5 gigabyte FAT32 partition on there. I need some easy way to transfer files between linux and windows. And the most efficient way is a nice FAT32 partition. The rest of the space on that drive is wide open, I’m planning on putting some sort of DOS there so I can play the old-skool games from my childhood.

Now that I had a Linux install I did my favorite xfree/gdm/xfce4 combination. Man I can’t wait for xfce4.2. I hear that xinerama actually works properly in it. Everything worked perfectly, except… Here are the problems I had. Consider this. I can now consider myself an old pro at linux/gentoo. I’ve been using linux for 6 years and I’ve been using gentoo for 1. I’ve installed gentoo many times on many machines. I’m at the point where I can do it perfectly every time. I barely look at the handbook anymore, although I still need it. Yet, I still had problems making my system exactly the way I wanted it to be. This is why linux isn’t quite ready. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a shit-ton more ready than it used to be. However, I had only one problem when I installed windows XP. And it was much less difficult to fix than the problems with linux.

What was the problem with XP? Just a USB mouse trouble. After I installed the nforce drivers, which updated the USB controller drivers, my mouse stopped working. I Just had to navigate to the logitech site with the keyboard and get mouseware. Piece of cake. Other than that, windows just worked. What were the problems with linux you ask? That’s a new topic and requires another paragraph.

Ok, the worst problem was permissions. Why was this a problem? Because I previously had all my mp3s on NTFS and FAT32 partitions because they are the only ones that windows and linux can both read. Now all of a sudden I needed to chmod every mp3 I had. So I had to make a group called music and add myself to this group. I recursively chowned the entire drives to be root:music. Then I had to manually chmod, sometimes recursively and creatively every folder to be 775 and every mp3 to be 664. It wasn’t fun, but now its done. There should have been an easier way.

The second problem I had was with sound cards. They both worked perfectly. However, since I built them into the kernel (not <M> but <*>) they loaded in the order they desired. So ALSA made my on-board audio device 0 and my SBLive! device 1. I couldn’t reverse it without rebuilding my kernel 3 times to find the optimal config and without messing with /etc/modules.d/alsa until it was just right. That shouldn’t be. There is still a small problem of storing mixer settings. Good thing I don’t reboot often anymore.

Next a small problem. Joystick wasn’t working. Detected and driver loaded, but no /dev/input/js0. Oops, forgot to emerge hotplug. Getting the printer working was a snap. But it wouldn’t have been without the gentoo printing guide and xfprint4. I don’t know shit about CUPS. Other problems include the fact I can’t get silent splash to work. Frambuffer and bootsplash both work great. however, I can’t get the progress bar and logo to cover up the kernel output. I don’t want it just yet since my kernel is fresh and needs watching. But the fact that it doesn’t work is icky. Maybe I need a different initrd?

I’m going to have an adventure trying to get my cd burner to work without scsi emulation and then making the scanner work also. Other than miscellaneous unsolvable bugs in software that’s it. I’m an all-linux guy now. I figured this might be a story that can be used as evidence in any Linux arguments. Conclusion, Linux IS better than windows if you don’t want to play 3d games, and that is changing. A Linux system CAN be made to do everything you want. Easy to use distros like Red Hat will mostly work perfectly out of the box. But the one or two things that don’t work will be nearly impossibly to fix. I know this from years of Mandrake and Red Hat using. Using a more difficult system like Gentoo requires you to set up everything and takes some practice, time and knowledge. However, everything will work. Its just a matter of time and looking up stuff on forums and google. Once you have the info you can make it go easily. Easy to use distros modify the system so much from the default that things don’t want to go. Use Linux if you want to, its worth it.