2006

Gentoo Linux on the Dell Latitude C400

This guide started off some time after I upgraded the 10Gb drive on the C400 to an 80Gb Hitachi and replaced the Debian installation. Gentoo has a wealth of documentation so this is intended as an installation specific supplement.

Disclaimer: This document comes with no guarantees. The steps I followed worked for me but may not necessarily work for you or your hardware.

Configuration

Gentoo

linux-2.6.18-suspend2-r1 kernel
no Windows installation

PIII-M 866MHz CPU

768 Mb RAM (256Mb + 512Mb)
A12 BIOS
Crystal 4205 audio
3c905C-TX FastEthernet adapter (built-in)

80Gb 5400rpm Hitachi 5K80

TrueMobile 1150 wireless (disabled)

Netgear MA401 PCMCIA adapter
Netgear WAG511 PCMCIA adapter

Post-install

genkernel

Thinking the genkernel built kernels to be a little bloated I resorted to using the more traditional make menuconfig and make bzlilo. After much fiddling, recompiling & rebooting every time I needed another driver it was time to give genkernel another shot. I was pleasantly surprised - it actually built most of what I needed! I'm now a genkernel convert.

Read more...

posted by James Gemmell on Wed, 24 May 2006 at 17:09 | permalink | tags: gentoo, laptop, linux

Scripts

news.py and urlCache.py

Used to display and cache RSS newsfeeds using the Universal Feed Parser.

RSS_Generic.pm

An RSS/RDF grabber used in the past for the news page in conjuction with NewsGrabber.pm.

delay

A perl script that parses the Received: fields in a mail header and then calculates the differences between their timestamps. It's been very useful in the past for quickly highlighting the source of mail delays - usually a corporate mail gateway or spam filter.

posted by James Gemmell on Tue, 14 Mar 2006 at 18:15 | permalink | tags: perl, python