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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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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When building a Gentoo (A Linux Distribution) system during the install there is a portion that tells you to configure the correct cflags for your computer. This is the time that usually beginners through up their arms and say “I quit”.  That is because there is no reference associated as to what the flags are.

The reference though is available on the web. Gentoo Wiki keeps a repository of all the safe flags for different processors.

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Tags: 64 bit, cflags, Gentoo, Linux, safe
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In the past I have played with various operating systems on my work laptop. I have once again settled on Gentoo and started the conversion process. I decided to go with a 64 Bit System. Since when I looked at it last time 64 bit had some problems because a number of vendors did not release 64 bit versions of commercial software. Currently there are plenty of 64 bit commercial packages such as Flash, Java, etc. Plus the 32 bit compatibility layer helps as well.
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Tags: 64 bit, Gentoo, laptop, Linux, toshiba
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