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
