Well Gareth, I would like to thank you and Oliver for teaching me a few things too. Although I may know more about Gentoo you guys helped me with "basics" such as setting up the USB mouse and XF86Config
Actually the highlight of the day for me was me teaching Chris Sawtell something. Robert -----Original Message----- From: Gareth Williams [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Monday, 7 July 2003 2:02 p.m. To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Gentoo IF - Thank You On Monday 07 July 2003 08:45, Nick Rout wrote: > well it would have been nicer if we had distcc working properly. How did > Sunday go? Speaking of distcc, that never did work for me while at the IF (on my P166 laptop). I saw it working for others though, text scrolling up the screen so fast it looked like something off The Matrix ;-) My laptop just never tried to use distcc, ie. it seemed to ignore the FEATURES="distcc" line in /etc/make.conf. I've since then found a simple workaround, for anyone who's interested (was I the only one with this problem?). Just export CC="distcc" and CXX="distcc g++", and it all works :-) Thanks to Nick for the Gentoo Live CD (with distccd) he burned for me (if he even remembers ;-) ... unfortunately, when I got home I found it isn't readable in any of the CD drives in our house, methinks it's a coaster. That'd explain the special floppy you had not booting it ("error: 0xAA") - d'oh! So maybe that would've worked. No matter. In the end, after messing about for the best part of a day trying distccd on knoppix, and remote mounting HD's and chrooting into them to run distccd, and a whole lot of other stuff, that all resulted in weirdness of some sort or other, I found the obvious solution was in fact the best. I was wanting to run distccd on my Debian GNU/Linux (with gcc 2.95.4) celeron 1GHz machine (should help my dinky little P166 laptop along quite nicely), but thought the wrong gcc version would mess it up. In despair, I tried what I should have ages ago: apt-get install gcc-3.2 distcc It installed gcc-3.2 alongside my older version, with /usr/bin/gcc as a symlink (so I can point it at either, hence I'm not screwed for things I still need gcc 2.95.4 for). It just worked. What really annoyed me was that it took less than 10 minutes, 9 of which were download time ;-) I'm not a gentoo convert yet. Apt may have broken things on me in the past, but I've yet to see it uninstall itself for no apparent reason after giving me 5 seconds warning while I was out of the room ;-) [yes, emerge did this on me at the IF - I was emerging something unrelated, and when it finished it decided that "portage" needed to be removed (or upgraded, but it removed the old one first? I'm not sure). Anyhow, it gave me a 5 4 3 2 1 count to abort, but seeing as I was out of the room, I came back to "bash: emerge: command not found". GAH] Emerge seems like a nice system, after reading about it I already like it more than the FreeBSD ports system, and maybe even more than apt - it seems more flexible. But I'm not sure I fully trust it yet ;-) Incidentally, emerge now gives me a warning whenever it's run (but still runs anyway luckily :-) The warning is: # emerge foo /usr/lib/python2.2/fcntl.py:7: DeprecationWarning: the FCNTL module is deprecated; please use fcntl [and then it runs as normal] If anyone knows what this is, or how I can fix it, I would love to know. Thanks in advance =) So, I now have emerge happily chugging away on my laptop, installing packages with the help of distccd on my 1GHz desktop machine. I'm well on the way to a working gentoo system, and looking forward to it. I've learned a lot. Thank you everyone, for a great day. Especially those who organised it; Nick, Chris, Robert, David. (hope I didn't miss anyone). Much appreciated :-) Cheers, Gareth ps. Thanks for those two distfiles CDs Chris, I'm sure they'll be a great help once I get up to installing goodies (and not just boring system files, heh heh ;-) Let me know when you want them back. pps. apologies everyone for the long winded post. I feel sorry for anyone who actually read this far ;-)
