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badcomputer.org

Tuesday, September 12, 2006

Now part of a 85.32% Gentoo shop

As you can see (if you look up) the tagline for my site is "badcomputer.org :: Part of a 100% UNIX shop". As of today, 6 of my 7 boxen run Gentoo. If I can get my hands on another SATA drive it will by seven for seven, as I will put it on my G5 too and dual boot with OSX. Might as well use the Mac for something, right?

Anyway, I was talking earlier about how it may be the end of Arch and yesterday I finally went ahead and did it. I must admit that I have not installed Gentoo in quite a while, the last time was probably over a year ago when I got my Sparc machine. Hell, it's a testament to the stability of the entire Gentoo infrastructure: My main desktop on which I am writing these words is still using the original install from May 2004!

At first I was upset, wary, and apprehensive when I heard the stage 1 install was unsupported, but it really is no big deal. The install took an afternoon instead of three days, and with my stable of machines running distccd I went from putting in the install CD to a full X desktop in about ten hours. I had also forgotten how much fun the install is. I was as giddy as a schoolgirl!

And things seem to just work for me with Gentoo. One of the major reasons I decided to leave Arch was because the box in question (nina) was supposed to be a file and print server. I spent some time researching a Linux compatible printer and bought an HP Business Inkjet 1200. I did originally get it to work with Arch, but when the hpijs driver was deprecated for hplip everything fell apart. It never worked again. I tore my hair out for weeks, cursing Cups and everything to do with Cups. I tried getting help unsuccessfully (I got told to RTFM!, trust me, I read it 10 times), and finally just plugged the printer into my Mac, because you know, I wanted to print stuff.

I am happy to say my hatred of Cups was unfounded. I spent about 20 minutes installing Cups and skimming the Gentoo printing guide, and hooked the printer back up to nina. Everything worked flawlessly, and I just printed the test-page. Now my print server can print! Yay!

Google ads - gotta go!

The other thing I wanted to mention was the google ads. I hate them. They mess up the design of my site. The best thing about my site was that the design scaled to match any resolution/browser size. Now everything scales except the damn ads! I figured they might help pay the bandwidth bill, but my site gets so little traffic that the bucks are adding up painfully slow. I have already decided to get rid of them, but for some reason I can't bring myself to do it until I get enough clicks for at least one check. I want a phat google check! Google, bastards that they are, changed the minumum payout amount from $50 to $100 long after I already signed up. At the current click rate I will get my $100 check by, oh, Summer of 2008...

Fish or cut bait?

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