This is coolness! Right now I'm posting this blog from within a VMWare session running Gentoo Linux. Speaking of which, I'd betterget some more mileage out of this trial before it runs out. :) That software (VMWare) has got to be the most impressive software I've worked with in a while. Let me find out some more packages I can emerge into this session. I'm trying out this ratpoison package I made. It's good to be able to work in X without the mouse, since my machine at home doesn't have a working mouse. :) Now that I think about it, I need to start making packages to put on my other machines.

At some point I need to get that distcc thing going again, so my compiles will be quicker.

I was thinking about some itches to scratch, and I've come up with a few, which should sharpen some of my skill on many fronts.

At my current employer I get floppy disks of information to be put up on the web site. I thought about making that process interactive over the web. I think I can use a combination of XML, for the data and CGI with Perl to pull this off. The only problem now would be the authentication mechanism. I probably can find a Perl module to take care of that, too. More on that in a minute

I was also thinking of configureng screen scraper to download all of my Yahoo email. That's another itch to scratch.

On the way to work I was thinking also about how to migrate users from one computer to another (that's happening a lot now.) Usually I just copy files to a network drive, but being able to package those files would be helpful, as I can preserve the directory structure of the files I back up (or migrate.)

I have stopped working on putting Gentoo on my old desktop and laptop at home for right now. I was setting up the desktop for working on my web stuff. I found another neat way, in my opinion to utilize Gentoo in the meantime. I'm using it to generate Slackware packages for software that's not part of that distro, like ratpoison and Mozilla Firebird. A lot of the software I'd like to install at home isn't part of the Slackware distribution, so I can use Gentoo to compile a package for me to take home.

I usually get those Linux Format magazines, and this issue had the DVD with the whole Linux Documentation Project on it, as well as a guide called RUTE. I'm burning a CD with that on it now. Speaking of which, let me download the latest FIRE (Biatchux Lite) CD.

I've noticed that I don't have any programming itches to scratch. One thing I want to do now is get Gentoo installed on my 486 laptop (good luck, huh?) I came up with an idea on how I can accomplish this.

It seems like I just need to get a stage 3 tarball installed on the laptop, and install all of the packages. But how to put the stage 3 tarball on the computer. Sounds like a trusty floppy distro should work. But since I don't have a network connection (like ethernet) I have to go the parallel port route. Then I can use the same methods to install any packages I may want. First, lets create the binary packages to be installed. While the computer's making the packages, I'll test the plip connection at home.

Home update: I finally got a chance to try to install Gentoo at home. Time to rethink my strategy. I was trying to onstall it on a UMSDOS folder on a FAT32 partition I have at home (I'm sharing that drive with a Windows installation.) In situations where file permissions were really important I haven't had much success with UMSDOS. So the next time I try it I'm going to make a loopback filesystem and go from there. Which means I'll need a ramdisk. Time to look at my documentation

I keep hearing about getting "blogrolled" so I went to this site to try it out It's a place where you can keep track of all your blog links. Now I'm blogrolling all of the blogs I visit frequently, and some I don't :) Also you can put all the links you blogroll on your own blog using some javascript. Interesting.

I finally got an opportunity to install Gentoo on my Pentium 200 computer, and what happens? I can't find the CD I made with the packages on it! Oh well...just make another CD with the packages on it and try again.

I tried installing a binary package I made inside this virtual machine, and it worked. So I shouldn't have any problems installing the binary packages at home. I've started creating binary packages for my main machine at work and my web server. While that's going on....back to work.