Mindless Techie

I just found a couple cool programs called turbotail and multitail while searching for rbot using eix.

Turbotail is just like tail, but it uses dnotify instead of auto refreshing a defined number of seconds.  I always thought it was kind of silly to keep refreshing the screen searching for new content with tail.  Turbotail just sits there until the kernel notifies of a change in the file that you are tail’ing and then it updates what you see.

Multitail looks like a VERY robust way of viewing multiple files.  It can tail any number of files and supports text filtering and even syntax highlighting.

Turbotail works great, but unfortunately multitail crashes when I try to run it from my Yakuake console.  I get this:

--*- multitail 5.2.0 (C) 2003-2007 by folkert@vanheusden.com -*--
 
A problem occured at line 511 in function mynewwin (from file term.c):
 
Failed to create window with dimensions 55x9 at offset -27,-4 (terminal size: 167,19)

Seems to work just fine from a regular console though.  It will take me a while to actually learn all of the features of multitail.

This is more or less a follow-up to my previous blog post Good ole Gentoo. Where art thou? Anyone can just complain about the status of things, so I thought I would provide a little help with finding out more about Gentoo and what’s going on with the distro.
So, you’re a long time Gentoo user getting tired of the old stale web page that shows a 2 month old GWN as the latest news. What to do? Well, you can make your voice heard in the forums. Lots of other folks have had the same concern lately. There has been some talk about changing the name of the GWN in the forums, as well as questions of whether Gentoo is even practical.
Ok, you’ve voiced your opinion, now what? Find out what’s going on in Gentoo yourself by using the huge amount of resources that are available.

• Use the forums
  • This should really go without saying. If you’re a Gentoo user and you don’t use the forums, you’re not really a true Gentoo user. The forums are the just about the best source out there. Whether you’re looking for information on fixing a problem or just chatting about politics, the forums has it all.
• Look in the planet
  • Planet Gentoo is a collection of rss feeds from various Gentoo developer blogs. There’s lots of good information on there about various Gentoo related topics.
• Look in the universe
  • I’ve noticed lately that there are less and less posts on Planet Gentoo. It turns out, the main planet page only shows blog posts specifically in the Gentoo category. There’s another section of the planet that includes all posts from the developers. I’ve found that quite often there is very good information in these other posts. Sometime there is quite important information that doesn’t make it in the main planet feed because it’s not just Gentoo specific.
• Look at Larry’s Planet
  • Planet Larry is a collection of rss feeds from Gentoo users (not developers). I have my feed on there and there are lots of other users blogs on there as well. This is a great place to find out what other Gentoo users are talking about.
• Find an interesting mailing list
  • Gentoo has lots of mailing lists for just about every topic you can think of. So… if you are a Gentoo server admin, subscribing to the gentoo-server list would keep your inbox up to date with the latest discussions about running Gentoo on your server.
• Get on IRC
  • Just like the mailing lists, there are lots of IRC channels for just about every topic and project. If you stuck on something and your hoping to get some quick help, IRC is the place to do it. The #gentoo channel usually has about 1000 users on at any given time.
• RTFM
  • Well, this should really be RTFD, but you get the point. Gentoo has tons of documentation. There are docs for each project and each project usually has many docs related to the project. For instance, if you curious about how the Gentoo release process works, take a look at the releng documentation.

Of course, there’s lots of other ways to get information about Gentoo, these are just a few that I use regularly. Occasionally, I find some good stuff just by googling for Gentoo.
Hope this helps some of the frustrated users out there.

I remember when I first started using Gentoo (back in the Gentoo 1.4 days), the community activity was just amazing. Each and every day or week, there was always something new and exciting going on in the Gentoo community. I looked forward to the GWN (Gentoo Weekly Newsletter) coming out each week, so I could try to catch up on what I might have missed or not even realized was happening. Sure, the other Linux users would say, “Gentoo, that’s for ricers.”, but at least Gentoo was still regularly mentioned in a fairly positive manner.

Fast forward to today. What happened to my beloved Gentoo? I’m not necessarily referring to the distro… not yet anyway. What happened to the Gentoo community and the thriving young developer community?

The exciting buzzing Gentoo community seems to have fizzled out. Surely, they haven’t all switched to Ubuntu have they? The number of posts in the Gentoo forums seems to have steadily decreased lately. The #gentoo irc channel doesn’t have half the users it used to. Gentoo Planet used to contain dozens of posts every day from different all of the different developers. Now, sometimes a day goes by without even one post. Worst of all, the front page of Gentoo shows a two month old GWN as being the latest news.

Surely my beloved Gentoo isn’t destined to die a slow painful death, is it?

Wow! I guess I created this post quite a while ago, but I never did publish it. It’s old, but still pretty relevant. Here ya go …

Gentoo seems to be one of the most controversial Linux distributions out there. It seems, people either completely hate it or love it. Not much middle of the road in Gentoo land. This was brought to my attention again after reading a couple articles that I ended up coming across on Digg. If you would like to see the original articles, you can find them here and here.

The main problem with Gentoo (if you want to call it a problem), is that it is VERY customizable. Unfortunately this makes it very difficult to install and maintain for a Linux newbie and even Linux administrators that are used to the GUI administration utilities provided by Redhat and most others. Well then, if I admit that Gentoo can be difficult even for some Redhat admins to use, why in the world would I defend and use such a distribution? Because Gentoo works and it works how I want it to.

Josh already did an excellent job of countering many of the complaints that Alex had. Let me just say, that I completely agree with Josh’s rebuttal. Even Alex admitted that Gentoo was a darn good distribution. So… let me list each complaint with solutions for each (along with some web linkage ).

1. Gentoo is hard and time consuming to install.
   • Oh c’mon. The official Gentoo 2006.1 x86 install guide is only 66 pages long! Of course, they’ve really cut out a few things out of that one, so I much prefer the good ol Gentoo Linux x86 Handbook which is a mere 99 pages. I guess you could go with the tiny 11 page Gentoo x86 Quick Install Guide, but that’s just way too tiny.
     In all seriousness, with the exception of the quick install guide, these books are this long only because it thoroughly explains each step. It’s a wonderful way to learn how Linux works. If you don’t want to a command line install, you can always use Gentoo’s shiny new graphical installer. While the graphical installer isn’t perfect, it does a pretty good job of getting you up and running pretty quickly.
2. Gentoo takes forever to build packages.
   1. 1. GLCU - This is a wonderful little program that automates updating your system. It runs as a cron job and automatically prebuilds packages for you and sends you an email when it’s ready for you to install them.
   • Josh already did a great job of explaining how to solve this problem when you have multiple machines.
     But… what do you do when you only have Gentoo on your 1 machine? You actually have quite a few options.

Technorati Tags: linux, gentoo, server

Say goodbye to Microsoft today …

Now this  is really cool.  Now you can start a Debian installation from your Windows desktop.

I finally hope to start using this blog. At the very least, I want to start putting Linux tips and tricks in here. Most will probably be from the Gentoo Weekly Newsletter, while others may be original.