After the changes of last week things were still not quite right. The WET would still periodically fail, usually only for a few seconds, but sometimes for much longer. I began to suspect that this was an external problem; something in the house was interfering with the signal.
After a few days o...
Following a recent rearrangement, I found a number of my computers on the wrong side of the lounge and a solid wall from the ADSL router. The layout of the room, and the solid floors and walls, ruled out running cables but with a wireless access point already in place, running the incomparable Tomato Firmware, the solution was obvious: Install a second wireless router (with Tomato naturally) and make the connection that way.
After writing so confidently about finding a fix for the earlier kernel problems with an Intel D945GCLF board, it returned with a vengeance shortly afterwards. Frustration finally won the day and a completely fresh install followed.
Gentoo had been the Linux distribution of choice on the previous box, but as speed was of the essence here (downtime was almost five days), something else was in order. That something turned out to be Arch Linux — might as well start with something completely different.
To cut a long story short, acpi=ht isn’t the magic solution. Although much more stable than before, stable enough to get X windows up and running, it still fell foul of the same runaway kacpid problem eventually. It had to be another part of ACPI causing the problems. A quick look back through t...
Today’s agenda, a custom Linux kernel for a new Intel D945GCLF-based system. Something in Gentoo’s default generic kernel caused the system to oops on boot, compiling a tailored kernel should fix that. PLD Linux Rescue disc boots correctly on the system though, so we can chroot into the Gentoo syste...
Two minutes to unpack, five minutes to install, three days to get almost everything working. The problem with trying to work with brand new hardware is that there is very, very little information anywhere to refer to. Still, how hard could it be?
The server in question needed a little preparatio...