Not having a Pegasos is killing me. I’ve got that “last kid on the block” syndrome — it feels like everyone else already has theirs (probably because it’s true). Both Seemant and Stuart have mentioned how fast they compile, which would be really great since X takes forever.

There are some pretty cool possibilities that I’d like to try out, such as setting up a distcc cluster between the Pegasos and my x86 box with cross-compiling toolchains. Gentoo’s cross-compiling is really getting off the ground, so this would be a great time to help out with it if I could.

I’d also like to see whether there’s anything I can do to make them install and run smoother before X even gets involved. When I used the 2004.1 Gentoo CD, it was a little bit hackish. I had to type in a long command line at the firmware prompt to boot the CD. I’ve heard 2004.3 was an improvement, but I didn’t get a chance to try it out. Also, I put Gentoo into the boot menu rather than having to type things in at the firmware prompt, which seemed like the current status quo. Getting from the point of pressing the power button to an X login screen with little to no effort is a crucial part of being a usable Linux desktop.

With rights come responsibilities. Remember to think about the consequences of your actions, even if you’re fully within your rights to do them.

I’ve got finals Monday and Tuesday in biochemistry and biophysics, respectively, neither of which I’m prepared for. Please God help me.

Gentoo desperately needs people familiar with XKB and with fonts (particularly encodings), as well as NLS in relation to X. If you’re interested, drop me a line.

Updated Gentoo’s Xorg again. Fixed some problems with keyboard, another libGL segfault, updated the Xpm fixes so GIMP will work again, and added a patch to fix xmodmap overflows. Nabbed all the patches from upstream.

In major development-side news, I started actually documenting what each patch does in a DESCRIPTIONS file. If anyone would like to help, please send me a diff to the one in the latest patch tarball.

I think the latest monstrosity’s almost ready to unleash on the “testing” users. It migrates everything in /usr/X11R6/lib to /usr/lib. This breaks some packages with configure scripts that fail to consider that X libraries could be in the default location, so they don’t need to -Lanything. They proceed to -L’nothing’ and die. But we need more testers to figure out exactly which packages have this problem.

There’s a ridiculous tree of backwards-compatibility symlinks developing — I need to see what I can do about reducing their number in the near future.

In a few spare minutes, I wrote an ebuild for C3 — the Cluster Command and Control tool suite. It’s a real popular toolkit for administering clusters. Next on the list is improving our support for Ganglia, a popular cluster monitor.

Last Friday I finally gave in with my attempts to get the old Pegasos working and emailed Genesi to let them know.

Within _five minutes_ (count them: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5), I heard back from them. Now that’s response! So I headed over to FedEx on Saturday with the computer. They were supposed to be shipping a new one Monday or so — I’m hoping it arrives later this week.

The Genesi folks were kind enough to point out a couple of places refuting various claims made against them: One on OSNews and another from the OpenBSD mailing list.

I just got back from going to my cousin’s wedding this weekend to a flurry of emails regarding my previous post on my Pegasos problems.

Many of them were from people who have the ability to help, so I’m looking forward to getting this resolved in the near future! =)

I never imagined so many people would come across my blog.

So, Gentoo got 10 PowerPC computers donated, to be split where they’d be most useful. This particular type is called a Pegasos — the Open Desktop Workstation model.

As the X lead, I was fortunate enough to get one. Unfortunately, I ended up with the cheesy, half-broken one. I wasted a weekend on it last month, and in the past few days I’ve started looking at it again. It randomly locks up. Removing and reseating the processor card generally fixes this up, but not always. I’ve gotten it to the point where it’s actually booting from a kernel on the hard disk and got a basic system running (and freezing, of course).

I’m trying to get a new one, but the upstream folks at Genesi, which makes the Pegasos, haven’t been responding to my cries for help lately.

Jon pointed me at a couple of mailing list posts on the Pegasos, here and here.

So, that’s where yesterday and tonight went.

So, I ended up at Oregon State University for grad school in the biochemistry and biophysics department. It’s been alright so far — lots of work, though. It’s basically a job and a half. I teach two recitation sections, take about three classes per quarter and do about 15-20 hours of research a week.

After that’s done with, I try to find time for my fiancee. Then last comes Linux. It’s been neglected lately. =\

If anyone’s got experience with handling this kind of a work and personal load plus Linux, please give me some advice.

Classes are Biochemistry 590, Biophysics 581, Intro to C Programming, and a couple of seminars. The C course has been a joke so far. But it’s the entry-level CS course around here, and I’d like to start taking more upper-level courses there.

Coupling programming with my science and clustering background has a lot of potential.

Got four grad school apps in: Oregon, Alabama, Washington and North Carolina. Still need to get test scores, transcripts and letters sent, but now I’m committed and the rest is not much work.