Installing Gentoo on a laptop. My experiences with this distro.

I have just installed Gentoo hardened Linux on my laptop. This distribution is far more hands-on than Ubuntu and Linux Mint, but it was enjoyable to install. I have not built and installed a desktop environment yet, I am just using the framebuffer console and this suits me fine. Once the system is installed, the … Read more

Some very useful Gentoo Linux tips for using the emerge command to install software.

The emerge -atv emacs command will tell you what packages will be merged when installing a copy of Emacs on your Gentoo GNU/Linux system. ec2-user@ip-172-31-30-35 ~ $ sudo emerge -atv emacs   * IMPORTANT: 8 news items need reading for repository ‘gentoo’. * Use eselect news to read news items.     These are the … Read more

Cool Linux tricks and hacks for the desktop and server user.

Using the shellshock bash bug on an iMac. iMac04:~ admin$ env VAR1=’me() {echo "hello"}\ ‘ /bin/echo "hello" helloiMac04:~ admin$ env VAR1=’me() {echo "hello"}\ ‘ /bin/echo "hello" hello Getting free hard disk space easily. iMac04:~ admin$ df -Hla Filesystem Size Used Avail Capacity iused ifree %iused Mounted on /dev/disk0s2 89G 64G 25G 73% 15757422 6089307 72% … Read more

Useful online resources for learning the bash shell and other useful Linux documentation.

Some useful links and bits of information for budding Linux users. Bash cheat sheet. http://www.catonmat.net/download/bash-history-cheat-sheet.pdf. This is a very useful bash cheat sheet that will greatly assist you when you are learning the bash shell. (PDF). The .bash_history file may be blocked by using the unset HISTFILE variable in your .bashrc file. Read more about … Read more

Windows Powershell not as good as BASH shell and other thoughts.

It is really amazing that the new Windows Powershell is moving Windows Administrators back towards the command-line instead of using the GUI for everything. Powershell has some very good features; but the difficulty I have experienced installing extra cmdlets is very grating indeed. It is better to use the BASH shell, as it is very … Read more

I am installing Gentoo again on a spare partition. This will be fun.

I am installing Gentoo again. I have decided to try out this source based Linux distribution one more time and see whether I can use this distribution on my computer again. I erased the contents of a spare bootable partition and I unpacked the Stage3 tarball into it and then I unpacked the Portage tarball … Read more

Copying an Ubuntu kernel to a Gentoo installation

I have had someone come to my website looking for help on how to copy an Ubuntu kernel over to a Gentoo installation. This is not too hard to do. Let us say the kernel is version 2.6.35-14-generic. Then you will need to copy the /lib/modules/2.6.35-14-generic folder into the /lib/modules folder on your Gentoo installation. … Read more

Gentoo kernel installation.

Performing a kernel upgrade on Gentoo GNU/Linux How best to upgrade the Gentoo kernel. Installing a vanilla kernel for the Gentoo GNU/Linux distribution is very easy. This is necessary when a kernel upgrade is required. Just install the vanilla kernel source from kernel.org and then unpack the sources into /usr/src/linux as shown below. I am … Read more

Installing Gentoo once again. The source based distro based on BSD.

My computer is now running Gentoo once again, I installed the x86_64 stage3 tarball and the latest portage tarball and installed the system from within a chroot using my Ubuntu 11.04 distribution. The installation was different from the last time I installed a Gentoo system, I am using newer hardware this time, but now it … Read more