spoonfork

One of the best thing about Gentoo is that - you don't have to use the LiveCD . In fact, what you can use is any Linux on a CD distro, such as Knoppix. In fact, Knoppix is a better choice than the Gentoo 2004.1 LiveCD because it has a far better hardware detection. For example, the LiveCD could not detect our Seagate hard disk on a Pentium-Xeon dual proc box. I gave up using the LiveCD even after trying various combination of boot option as smp doscsi and smp noraid and proceeded installation using a Knoppix CD.



Why is this possible? Because you only need the stage file and portage snapshot for Gentoo installation! Prior to that, all that you do is preparing your hard disk - partitioning.



Who says Gentoo is difficult?

Well, why not use those idle machines install distcc on them, and look ma! I've compiled the kernel in 10 minutes! At work, I haven't truly harness the power of distcc since most of the developers are, well, really anal about their workstations and if they know that the system administrator is using their workstation for, well, okay nevermind. What is distcc?

distcc is a program to distribute builds of C, C++, Objective C or Objective C++ code across several machines on a network. distcc should always generate the same results as a local build, is simple to install and use, and is often two or more times faster than a local compile.



distcc does not require all machines to share a filesystem, have synchronized clocks, or to have the same libraries or header files installed. They can even have different processors or operating systems, if cross-compilers are installed.

Also, I've added ccache to my FEATURES section of my make.conf (ccache), and the gain from using it is very very substantial. What is ccache?

ccache is a compiler cache. It acts as a caching pre-processor to C/C++ compilers, using the -E compiler switch and a hash to detect when a compilation can be satisfied from cache. This often results in a 5 to 10 times speedup in common compilations.

NOTE: for Gentoo users, make use you set USE="-ipv6" when emerging distcc, otherwise it will not work.

Yep, we take our Gentoo workstation seriously and anything less than -O3 will be subject to severe criticism and and the "What? -O2?" look. Yup. Something. Like that. Just take a look at my make.conf file:


USE="X gtk gnome -kde -qt alsa cjk unicode -ldap tiff unicode"
CHOST="i686-pc-linux-gnu"
CFLAGS="-march=athlon-xp -m3dnow -msse -mfpmath=sse -mmmx -O3 -pipe -fforce-addr -fomit-frame-pointer -funroll-loops -frerun-cse-after-loop -frerun-loop-opt -falign-functions=4 -maccumulate-outgoing-args -ffast-math -fprefetch-loop-arrays"
CXXFLAGS="${CFLAGS}"
ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~x86"

PORTAGE_TMPDIR=/usr/portage_tmp
PORTDIR=/usr/portage
DISTDIR=${PORTDIR}/distfiles
PKGDIR=${PORTDIR}/packages
# PORTDIR_OVERLAY=/usr/local/portage/spoon
SYNC="rsync://rsync.asia.gentoo.org/gentoo-portage"
RSYNC_RETRIES="3"
MAKEOPTS="-j3"
AUTOCLEAN="yes"
FEATURES="sandbox ccache buildpkg distcc"
GENTOO_MIRRORS="http://203.98.189.18/mirrors/gentoo/ http://164.115.5.2/pub/mirrors/gentoo/"


The CFLAGS, courtesy of our Software Architect, is really an overkill. During emerge -DU world, at least one package broke and can't be compiled.



Just another day at Gentoo-land.



Listening to: FC Kanuna - Hayling

Until my gf decied to switch to Gentoo, I don't care much about the Unicode characters displaying on Firefox. (What I meant was that the Chinese characters were not displayed as they were supposed to be, but they were replaced by boxes with Unicode). To fix this is really simple (I did this in my Gentoo box):



1) run /usr/bin/fc-cache -f - this will rebuild the font cache

2) reemerge fontconfig



Khairil gave me another solution:



3) Install Cyber Bitstream font into ~/.fonts directory



This font is available at ftp://ftp.netscape.com/pub/communicator/extras/fonts/windows/Cyberbit.ZIP



Listening to: David Bowie - The Man Who Sold The World

CanSecwEST 2004 started yesterday. Kamal, one of My-Snort members is there - spreading the words about the security scene in Malaysia, and most importantly, the upcoming HITBSecConf2004, to be held on the first week of October this year. Enjoy your journey, bro.