confusion

Are you drunk? I’m not, too bad, I would have liked to have gone out to a Fat Tuesday party, but had no one to go with. Oh well, I did go out over the weekend to Five with S██████, K–, J– and N——. K– had never been clubbing so, we broke her in with something a little main stream before we take her to Velvet. We went out early as N—— had a train to catch at seven in the morning. The music was a little lacking, too repetitive and flat (yea, I’m a techno snob, no it does not all sound the same.) Drinks where a little expensive, but we all had a good time, The inside of the club reminded me of a lot of the smaller clubs in London, and especially Match EC1—but without the food. I don’t know everything reminds me of something on Europe. I can’t get my time in Europe out of my head—sometimes just driving down the road I will have sudden, very vivid, flashbacks. Out of nowhere I will be recalling every detail of some place in Europe—the inside of St. Chapelle or the hall of the hotel A—– and I stayed at in Milan. I don’t know. Is it just my life is that boring since I got back or what? Oh well, it keeps making me want to go back more and more.

It snowed last night. About four inches. And when I went out to my truck this morning guess what? No truck. They towed it. Now this made me mad. They declared a snow emergency last night sometime and towed me because I was parked on Florida Ave. and Florida is designated as a ‘snow emergency route.’ I was really pissed when I called the police (but, of course I was polite with the lady on the phone.) they told me that I had been towed to the 1800 block of 18th street. I felt much better when I got off the phone thinking that they had just towed me out of the way—ok, inconvenient and such but understandable. Then I got to my truck and started cleaning it off and you know what I found? A $250 ticket for ‘SNOW REGULATION.’ What really pisses me off about this is that two weeks ago it snowed 18 inches and they did not tow anyone off Florida Ave. and the other day they did not tow when it snowed, nor did they tow when it snowed twice in January. I really don’t want to pay $250—that’s outrageous. A regular towing fee would be acceptable, since they did tow me, but $250 is just ridiculous.

Ok, so I’ve installed, uninstalled and reinstalled so many things in the past week (on top of all my past upgrades, which come in burst – not the best way to do it,) that my computer now has so many issues it thinks it is a weekly news magazine first published in 1843 to take part in “a severe contest between intelligence, which presses forward, and an unworthy, timid ignorance obstructing our progress.” And it seams to be leaning towards the ‘obstructing out progress’ side of the contest. At least it’s obstructing my progress.

Last we left out protagonist it was compiling gcc. That worked, took like 6 hours but it worked. So, % make World >& world.log then % tail -f world.log. An hour later: Structure has not member named ‘fds_bits’… 8000 times! To make a long story short: I gave up on compiling X but I did find a distribution of XFree86 that would install. Of course when I rebooted, the interface kept crashing, but in all our X Windows misadventures we have learned what? To make backup copies of all the init files! So it only took a few minutes to find the correct setting for XF86Config to get everything to start correctly. (Though I could not just copy the old init file in place of the new one, they changed the format, so I had to manually edit the new one but that did not take too long.)

So on to the next adventure: installing Gnome2! First off, Gnome says they have binaries for many distributions of *nix, but I only found two or three on their ftp, and of course, none for my distro. But I did find this thing called Garnome which claims to download and install all the Gnome2 components with a minimal amount of user interaction. But there are prerequisites! I down loaded all the things they listed links to and installed them, fairly easy. The last thing on the list or prereqs did not have a link though—it said I would need docbook-xml (Docbook DTD 4.1.2) + docbook-xsl (Docbook XSL Stylesheets) and Gnome’s website said that any ‘modern’ install would have that. Well an hours into running Garnome and most of the way through the compilation process I got, you guessed it, an error telling me I did not have Docbook installed.

So out to the web to find Docbook. Google knows all! So I download a bunch of tars of various components of Docbooks and untar them. Ok, these are not things that need to be compiled they are just XML and XSL files. But the tar’s did not contain any notes on where to install the files. After several failed tries to get Garnome to find the file by placing them in random places I went back to the web to find some rpms of Docbook. I found an rpm, well call him A.rpm. A.rpm requires b.so|prog, off to rpmfind.net to get B.rpm. B.rpm requres c.so|prog. rpmfind.net -> C.rpm. C.rpm req d.so|prog. rpmfind-D.rpm-Oh look no more .so|prog to find! Yea! So: rpm -U D.rpm: OK. rpm -U C.rpm: error /x/y/z confilcts with /x/y/z from install of D.rpm, exiting. If I unistall D.rpm I and rpm -U C.rpm I get: error C.rpm requires d.so|prog! Ahhh!

S██████ says the solution to all this is to download apt-rpm and use it to figure out everything. So I did. And after having to uninstall several things to get it to run, I started a system upgrade—660 packages to be upgraded, 15 to be installed and 4 to be removed. That was still working this morning when I left the house. We’ll see if I can install Gnome2 tonight. I doubt it. But—”We love this stuff!” Before you leave you can check out CableTechTalk AM4 ITX boards reviews or more information.

Been almost a week since I posted anything and… no body noticed! I would say I am feeling unloved but I got an email from C███████ today, played d&d with friends and went to Fado’s on Fridays for a few pints with friends… so I’m really not feeling unloved.

:: n.b. the following is only really going to make sense to you if you are a computer geek, so save yourself the headache and confusion if you not a geek…::

I decided I was board with my current setup on my laptop. I guess it started because I am running RedHat 8.0 at work and while some if the stuff it does pisses me off, the graphics are soooooooo much better. This is of course because the version of X that is included in RH8 is much newer than mine, and the Gnome and associated libraries are also newer and render better—they even have anti-aliased fonts… ooh pretty!

So I decide to try to upgrade some of the stuff on my laptop. I stated with a new kernel. That was easy, in fact RH’s update system, which I had never used on the three years I have had RH on this laptop, downloaded, configured and installed the latest and greatest without so much as a warning. Yea!

Then I decided to start on X…. now X only comes in one flavor—large amounts of raw code to be configured and compiled by you. Ok, configuration was not a problem, the Imake system is fairly easy to understand, and even the severe lack of documentation (which is the biggest issue I have with the X consortium—the take take a very snobby, ‘well it works for us’ point of view to their code. Not as bad as the guy who codes gaim but still, snobby.) So configuration complete: % make World >& world.log

An hour later, looking at the out put of: % tail -f world.log what to my wondering eyes should appear, but 8000 errors! (god that was cheesy!) All the errors where the same ‘structure has no member named ‘fds_bits” I spent quite a while trying to figure that one out. No luck, seams only one person on the Internet has the same problem, and no on replied to his request for help. However today, just before d&d S██████, J████ and I where talking about it and we think it might be an issue with my version of gcc… so for the past three hours! gcc has been building on my laptop. Maybe this will fix it. But I won’t know till tomorrow night… I need to go to bed, and it’s still building!

And to think I could solve all this by copying my important stuff to a separate partition and installing Gentoo from scratch! Oh, why do I have to be difficult?

:: n.b. non-geeks will under stand the rest :) ::

Koodos to all the peeps from Lockheed that have cleared since I left. Most of the people I knew are cleared now. Ha Ha! Anyway, off to bed now. Bouna notte!

Lots of snow, I went home on Friday and the snow started to sleet on Saturday about two pm. It did not stop sleeting until Monday at about ten am. In the end the ground was covered with a sold sheet of ice 14 inches thick! You had to jump up and down on it to break it. I with it could have been snow rather than sleet, but it was beautiful outside regardless. I had today off because of Presidents day, but going to work tomorrow will be fun. The main roads are ok, but getting into my neighborhood was a challenge, there is 16 inches of heavy wet snow on all the streets—everyone is walking around (and they are using the streets not the sidewalks!)