Sojourn of the Mind

It usually hapens and you need to install Windows for some reason or another. For me it is to VPN back in to the office and to be able to do something on an Internet Exploder only internal system. VmWare to the rescue!

For those that do not know VmWare is a company that makes quite a few products, some are free and some are paid. It is a good system and allows you to do various things with Virtualization. There are some nice changes in the 6.5.X linux version which is inclusion of a network configurator which used to be a royal pain in the …caugh…

In either case how do you get it installed. With Gentoo it is actually quite easy because it is in the repository. Here is what was done with 6.5.3.185404 on 2.6.29-r5 kernel. If you have a later kernel it should be the same.

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Tags: 64 bit, alsa, Gentoo, install, oss, Virtualization, VmWare, vmware workstation
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Today there has been an update to The Brain software. The beta software adds a lot of useful features that can directly translate to your productivity. You can read more about the features in the release notes which can be found here.

Some of the features that I like are as follows:

• Ability to import Word outlines.
• New way to copy pictures in to your notes gives me the ability to use the software for research.
• Better navigation and new view types.
• Expandability to the calendar.
• Keyboard commands can now be used and assigned to most of the menu items.
• Improved tags. Tags is the one feature that adds a whole dimension to The Brain software.
• And many, many more.

Take a look but please backup your brains as once opened you can not go back.

Tags: brain, cross platform, Java, update
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It looks like in the 64 bit installation the developers forgot to include some SATA (can not say all because I do not have all controllers) controllers on the system. This causes the SATA drives to be recognized as IDE drives (hda) instead of Sata (SCSI) based drives (sda).

This is only a minor annoyance but if you have a known sata controller and during the install you  exhibit this behavior just save yourself an extra reboot and inside the fstab file put in /dev/sdax (where x is the drive number), instead of /dev/hdax as per the instructions.

Tags: 64 bit, controller, Gentoo, install, Linux, sata
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If you are doing an update on Pam you might run in to an error after Pam is updated. This error showed its ugly head when I updated to Pam Version 1.0.4 (under 64 bit). The error exhibits when a group or an Id needs to be automatically (or manually) added to the system with

groupadd fails @ Pam: Authentication failed error

Or something similar. The problem exists because PAM does not pull in Pambase as part of its install. Bug ID  259954 has been filed for this. The short term solution is to manually emerge Pambase and then continue with the emerge.

Tags: 64 bit, emerge, error, Gentoo, Linux, pam, pambase
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4.2 KDE has been the standard as part of a few KDE based Linux distributions. But if you would like to install it as part of  Gentoo you have to take a few steps to get it installed. The full documentation exists at http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/desktop/kde/kde4-guide.xml#doc_chap2. There are a few highlights that I would like to mention here.

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Tags: 4.2, Gentoo, kde, kde 4.2, Linux
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