Colinux/Gentoo dusted off, OpenBSD and Debian

(tags linux, Colinux, Gentoo, Debian, OpenBSD)

I've had some problems with my old Project Asobi computer, but now it's back up and running, so I turned on the Colinux and started to update my Gentoo on that thing. And then I also ran my Colinux/Gentoo instance on my Project Sugar. Both were out of the "emerge --rsync" loop for a while, maybe about 6 months. I was surprised when I only saved about 3 times the data on rsync.

I'm still using Colinux 0.6.1, which means the Linux 2.4.x kernel, but I had to update some user-land packages that now do double duty between Linux 2.4.x and 2.6.x. And then also I decided to use GCC 3.4.x instead of GCC 3.3 for no good reason (well I would have gone for 4.1, but 4.1 can't compile stuff for Linux 2.4 kernel so...). Lucky for me there was a guide. As always, the Gentoo documentation is straightforward, once you find it.

In the end it took a long weekend to compile everything to the new GCC. Something like 80 packages were touched. I suppose I'm just playing with Gentoo because it's fun to fiddle with knobs (USE flags), but my computer was out of action for the weekend because of the compile grind. Dumb dumb dumb, I could have used the CPU cycles to do defragging, ha.

I recently tried OpenBSD in a VMWare session, using the 5MB installer ISO image. It felt good to be in a new environment, looking at my dependancies that I take for granted. Like for example, GNU userland tools. "date -Is" (print date in ISO format down to the Seconds) doesn't work. I wanted to play around with the stable workhorse pf (packet filter). I still didn't get a good configuration done but its coming along, I think. This is very educational. OpenBSD docs are very informative as well.

And then I see Debian just release a major stable version, 4.0 "Etch". W00t. I participated in the download ISO image Torrent already, but I also tried to download a ISO image using HTTP about half a day ago. Unfortunately the official mirrors don't yet have a copy so I cancelled the download from the cdimage.debian.org. I actually use Debian 3.1 "Sarge" at work, but it would be nice to not use Debian backports so much.