I miss my KDE...

Since I'm stuck up north on yet another shift I'm beginning to have withdrawals from some of the nifty little features that makes KDE so awesome. Stuff like temporary focus-grabbing on the Kmix dock icon (being able to adjust the volume without having to change window focus is very neat... now that I realise it's missing :P ) and virtual desktops... by default!

I forgot to mention (until now) that I managed to get sound working on the XPS M1730 although doing so confirmed my suspicions somewhat. It seems that alsa in the latest kernel has broken snd-hda-intel (stac92xx) support.

I Still haven't gotten WiFi working yet either (ran out of time last RDO due to Portal), so this beast is glued to the one (hot) spot in the house for now. Maybe this heat will force me to get wifi working so that I can enjoy some nice cool aircond offered in the lounge room?

Gentoo GNU/Linux on Dell XPS M1730

So I just received my brand new M1730 from Dell and since Dell sent a 32bit version of Windows Vista I have decided to decline the Windows Vista EULA, opt for a refund/credit and install Gentoo on it instead.

Heres how I did it (this is not intended as a howto).

First of all I ghosted (both) installed HDD's for the factory configuration (in case I had to restore for some reason).

Next I slid the good 'ol Gentoo 2007.0 LiveDVD into the DVD drive and proceeded to boot the machine with a one-time boot option (F12) but after trying many different versions and arch types I finally resorted to the amd64 LiveDVD which seemed to do the trick (except iiNet's rsync mirror seems to be borked).

Once I installed the base system it was as easy as doing a normal install except for the following options that I added to /etc/make.conf

CFLAGS="-march=nocona -O2 -pipe"
CHOST="x86_64-pc-linux-gnu"
MAKEOPTS="-j3"

I was intending to use suspend2-sources as this is a laptop and it would be nice to be able to suspend/resume this beast between UNI and home (suspend2-sources are patched with both genpatches which includes the patches found in gentoo-sources, and Software Suspend 2 which is a new and improved implementation of suspend-to-disk for the Linux kernel¹) but unfortunately its masked for the amd64 arch.

About the only problem I encountered (other than accidentally trying to use the wrong arch for the stage3) was the CONFIG_PHYSICAL_START option in the default kernel configuration, as it was set to 10000. As per this webpage, I edited the .config and set it to 20000 and then the kernel happily compiled (I even have 32bit emulation too!).

All I need to do now is emerge xorg, wine/cedega, firefox and openoffice, then configure suspend2 (tuxonice), dual monitors and all the other niggly little laptop features on this thing (like aux LCD, mic sense jack, media buttons and wifi) :P

I will try to remember to post as I get devices working on this beast.

UPDATE: 07/12/2007 @ 1336
I managed to get output on the DVI interface in single link mode, but the resolution is all wrong (way too small)! It is either an xorg.conf MetaMode miss configuration or the latest nvidia drivers are borked...

3G4Linux

Since I can't get broadband in my dormitory up north, I have decided to go halves for the cost of Telstra 3G Wireless Broadband with a workmate of mine. Problem is this. I refuse to put ANY windows machine onto the internet without a free (and fully functional) open source firewall solution.

So I decided to look (again) at windows-based free open source firewall software and here it is! WIPFW. If it's truly based on OpenBSD's pf, it sounds very promising. (yes I'm a big OpenBSD fan). It has a very experimental GUI, but I don't necessarily need it.

Acording to this article I think it might actually be a better idea to just buy a Motium MPC-210 Mobility PC (or equivalent cheap but small machine) for use as a (Gentoo) Linux firewall for this thing. Probem is, I have have never used iptables before :P

Gentoo GNU/Linux LiveUSB

Not long after buying a 10Gb ASTONE USB Mass storage device, I decided to turn it into a portable OS. Naturally, I chose Gentoo :)

One small hitch that I came across was the fact that busybox was failing to compile. This is how I fixed it.
emerge --sync
emerge binutils
emerge busybox

Now all I need to do is get wireless support/war-driving tools and some other rescue utils installed and noone will be able t stop me!

Have I ever told you that I love using Gentoo? :P