[TAG] udev hosed

[Benjamin A. Okopnik]

On Mon, Oct 24, 2005 at 09:44:15PM -0700, Mike Orr wrote:
> Benjamin A. Okopnik wrote:
> 
> >On Mon, Oct 24, 2005 at 10:12:48AM -0700, Mike Orr wrote:
> > 
> >
> >>I was going on a trip, so I set my Gentoo computer to shutdown and 
> >>proceeded to unplug everything in my apartment except the refrigerator.  
> >>But I forgot the computer was plugged into the big white outlet strip, 
> >>and pulled the plug in the middle of the shutdown.
> >
> >Whoops...
> >
> >I guess that means you should install Gentoo on your refrigerator. At
> >least you'll be able to log into it in case of problems and fix
> >whatever's going on elsewhere.
> 
> It'll go well with my Java doorknob.

Could I borrow it? Cause, y'know, it would obviously have to have a CPU
in it - and the hotel I'm staying at here in Chicago needs _some_ kind
of a brain installed. Whether it's part of their staff or of their
furniture, the presence of one in the local population would be an
improvement.

[ Hm, must turn down the 'snark' control a bit. Perhaps not travelling
for a month allows me to forget the general level of cluelessness out
there, and my standards come creeping up unnoticeably. ]

Meanwhile, I'm installing Gentoo myself - I've brought my HP zx6000
laptop with me (along with the Acer and two weeks worth of clothes, etc.
- all in a carry-on bag plus a laptop case. I'm using 'gzip -9' and a
large leather boot.) Their AMD64 release is one of the few distros that
will actually boot on this laptop - and it does so without too much
tweaking (you still have to select the gentoo-nofb kernel, but that's
all.) The hotel room has wireless but not wired access (?), so I've been
NAT-ting it through the Acer until I can figure out what's going on with
'ndiswrapper' (90% of the time, it locks up as soon as I modprobe the
module) for the Broadcom WLAN.

First round of comments: the base kit that Gentoo installs *sucks*.
There's no 'vi' (I've grown to *hate* 'nano'), no 'lynx' (or even
'links'), no decent 'lspci', no Midnight Commander... at least there's
Perl. There's no obvious way to figure out how to use the precompiled
stuff on the Packages CD - 'man emerge' is no help whatsoever.

To be fair, part of the problem is that my hardware seems to be somewhat
problematic: e.g., booting the zv6000 with 'vga=0x318' works fine
_after_ it's been brought up once with 'vga=ask', but produces a glowing
gray screen otherwise. On the other hand, the setup could have been made
a lot easier by, say, having 'emerge' ask you to define the package
source, /a la/ Debian, at the beginning of the whole process. There are
also some problems that are somewhat ambiguous (the initial login
_always_ "swallows" the first character typed. Hardware? Kernel
weirdness? Sheesh, who knows.)

Well, I've got a couple of weeks of being on the road to figure it out.
Wish me luck.


* Ben Okopnik * Editor-in-Chief, Linux Gazette * http://linuxgazette.net *