SaigonNezumi.com

Tomorrow is the last day of Tet, finally.  This has actually been one long boring Tet for me.  Normally I would spend some time out of the city but this year I just felt like hanging out at home.  My alleyway, though quite loud on Day 2 of Tet, has been relatively quiet since with the exception of one yelling kid screaming.

I did get some things accomplished.  I finally finished Traders Guns & Money.  Clifton let me borrow his book first but I was a slow reader so I had to borrow a copy later from another friend.  It was a great book but by the time I got to the end, I was glad to have finished it.  Still, I will get a copy a do a more thorough reading next time.

I met another fellow Linux geek on Day 1 of Tet named Pratik.  He has his own blog titled BirdBrain.  I also met Tung, another new Saigon blogger who authors Saigon in a Cup at the same meeting with Pratik.

Though tomorrow is Day 5 of Tet, I must work and update a website for Operation Reunite.  They will have an interview with CNN on Friday and this could be an official launch of the site.  I am using WordPress with the site and unfortunately a couple plugins broke some features that I will have to manually add such as the Facebook Add button.

By Friday, many people will start to return to Saigon for day 1 of their workday.  The rest will return Sunday night.  Saigon should still be a quiet city until then.  Just need to remind myself not to go out Sunday afternoon.

Today I installed Fedora 10 on my desktop. I need to spend some months working with Fedora to prepare for my Red Hat Certified Engineer exam which I will hopefully take this summer.

I immediately had sound problems.  Luckily, I was able to refer to my old posting from one year ago for the fix.  This is just an edited version of that post.

My desktop is currently using the Creative Audigy SE sound card (ca0106) which can be very un-Linux friendly.  As I mentioned 9 months ago, I was able to get sound from my front 3 speakers but I wanted all 5 speakers to work as well (5.1).

With Arch Linux and Gentoo Linux, I was able to get surround sound on all five speakers with the following .asoundrc file and saved it to my /home directory:

pcm.!dmix {
type plug
slave {
pcm surround51
channels 6
}
}
pcm.!default {
type plug
slave.pcm “dmix”
slave.channels 6
route_policy duplicate
}

With Fedora, similarly to Ubuntu, I was not getting surround sound with the above file.

I remembered that I needed to add the following to /etc/pulse/default.pa:

load-module module-alsa-sink device=”surround51″ channels=6 sink_name=sur51

Still, no surround sound.  Then I reread my old post and realized that I needed to add the entire contents of .asoundrc to /etc/asound.conf as well to make the settings system wide.

I rebooted and got all 5 speakers to work.  Thank God for old posts

Last week I upgraded my motherboard and cpu, a yearly ritual for me now.  Arch Linux is now the main system that I run on this desktop.  Gentoo/Funtoo will be there for testing (Funtoo is really fun to play with).  I will also test Pardus, a Turkish linux distribution.  It may be a good distro to use in the educational setting.

Below are some pictures of me adding the new hardware:

(My tower with the old motherboard removed)

(The P43-series Gigabyte motherboard)

(I just installed the new motherboard in the tower)

(After I installed the new core 2 quad cpu and 4 Gigs of RAM)

(The finished system)

Finally, I got Funtoo Linux, a derivative of Gentoo Linux, installed on my desktop.  Funtoo is a distribution created by the founder of Gentoo, Daniel Robbins.  In his website, Daniel describes Funtoo Linux as a:

Freshly-built Gentoo Linux variant, optimized for your processor, Funtoo Portage unstable branch, includes OpenRC, dhcpcd and git.

He does not call Funtoo a fork of Gentoo though.  I like that since he really wants to keep the Gentoo community intact.

Installing Funtoo, for an average Linux user such as myself, was not easy.  I am not a computer geek as many may think.  It took me three tries to finally get Funtoo Linux to run.  This brings me back to Sept., 2003, when I first tried Gentoo.  It took three long tries and I nearly gave up.  The same happened with Funtoo.

I used the Funtoo stage 3 and Portage builds.  You have to read the Funtoo install guide together with the Gentoo Handbook during the installation.

My first problem was that I decided to tar the Funtoo Portage build before chrooting into the system I was building.  As per the manual, I needed to wait until after I chrooted into the new system.  This would have saved some headaches since git did not work when I tarred the Funtoo Portage build too early.

I was able to correct this problem and move on.  Using git to update Portage was a breeze.  It is much faster than a month ago.  I hope less buggy as Gentoo’s Portage as well.

Installing the rest of the system was easy but in past installs, my system would boot but I could not get my ethernet to work.  I had to manually dhcpcd eth0 to get it to work.  Well, after reviewing the Funtoo install, I realized that Daniel was using OpenRC.  I found this link that explained what OpenRC was and how to get eth0 working with Gentoo/Funtoo.  Daniel should add this link to his Install Handbook since I know several other guys will have issues here as well.

After I finished installing Funtoo, I rebooted.  Funtoo successfully booted up the first time.  It was not difficult but then again, it was not easy.  This brings me back to the time of Gentoo in 2003.  My goal is to create my own Gentoo-based distro using Metro, another application created by Daniel.

Right now I am compiling xorg-X11 followed by Gnome.  I should have a fully working system within the week (I am quite busy this week).  Funtoo’s Git-based Portage should be less buggy than Gentoo’s Portage.

The Linux community owes a big thank you to Daniel Robbins again!!!

Well, last week my P35 series Gigabyte motherboard had some problems.  I thought it was battery related but turns out my motherboard may be faulty.  I decied to replace it with a more power efficient P43 Gigabyte motherboard (P45 series seem still too buggy for Linux).  With that, I decided to replace my dual core 2 CPU with a newer dual core 2 quad cpu.  My old motherboard will be replaced and then sent to Quang Trung as a new server.

I am currently testing Funtoo Linux on my upgraded system.  It is not an easy install.  I am having a bit of problems with the rc-update scripts.

By the weekend, I should be back posting again.