After Upgrading, or why I still use Gentoo

Another blogger commented on Gentoo being "bleeding edge", and told a story of how his system didn't perform all that well when he chose builds from unstable.

Yep, that happens.  I used to use Debian extensively, and switched to Gentoo a while back. I still have one Debian box around here somewhere, but I use Gentoo on the 4 or 5 others.

For me, the switch to Gentoo was predicated on not being able to find prebuilt .debs for all the packages I wanted to install simultaneously. I mean, sure, I could find this deb, or that deb, or the other deb, scattered about various archives, but they each depended on different versions and patches of other base packages and, as a result, couldn't be installed on the same system. Same problem but worse for fedora. Success with these distros seems predicated on wanting to build a system that does the same combination of things that someone else wants and has built some binaries to do.

By contrast, with Gentoo you use a combination of flags and the world list to specify what the box is for, and it builds all your packages from source, taking into account everything else you already have installed. Thus it neatly sidestepped the problem I was having with prebuilt packages.

I also wanted to build a home security gateway on a low power box (an analyst friend comment that it used less power than her toothbrush), with little ram, that runs a weird cpu, and gentoo is really good at that, allowing me to fine tune what packages I want installed, and even cpu architecture and compile flags and such to make it as efficient as possible on my tiny system.  There's little chance I would have found debian packages prebuilt for that system.

So for me, Gentoo has done a lot of what I need.

So far as installing packages from unstable ... well, that used to be painful for me as well with Debian. Gentoo is no worse.

But the underlying pain that Chip expresses is that Gentoo is indeed a bit bleeding edge, and yeah, requires a little fiddling and a bit of devil-may-care when upgrading.

An issue I've encountered with Gentoo is "there is no way to get there from here."  A common example is trying to upgrade the udev package and either hotplug or lvm packages - whichever one you try to upgrade first, won't work. Upgrade udev first and the new udev isn't compatible with old hotplug. The opposite order, same problem.

I've even run into a case in which a new install on a clean box fails because 2 packages each depend on the other. C'mon, that's plain wrong.

There are scads of cases of this, examples are all over the gentoo bug system.

There are a couple of workarounds that can help. One, which is appropriate if the packages will build fine but might not work or have just not been listed as working together, is to build those packages without dependencies to get the right versions in place, then rebuild. Another workaround is to tune USE flags (another way of tuning the dependencies) to get the packages in place, then return the USE flags the way you want and rebuild.  If you're feeling particularly frisky, you can uninstall the existing udev, hotplug or lvm2 and then reinstall them, so there are no incompatible older versions in the way.  And hope you don't have any problems along that patch that require a reboot.

Sometimes these work, sometimes they don't. I can understand why many folks wouldn't use Gentoo for a business-critical system. Or even a business-useful one.

Me .. well, my wife's TV runs on Gentoo. She's still my wife. :)

The saving grace for me has been Gentoo's ability to create a binary package from your running system.  Certain key packages, I create binaries before I emerge a new version, and if things don't work I can return to that version, including my config settings, easily, even though it may not be supported in the distro any more.  This isn't very practical for a wholesale kde upgrade, but for some packages like postfix or shorewall or even mythtv-* ... when I've really needed to back out an upgrade, it has worked fine.

Irony-R-Us: distraction

Driving to work this morning, I heard something about a new law against texting and emailing while driving. Unfortunately I didn't catch the details, I was checking email at the time.


Ok, for the record, I was at a stop light, and had only picked up my bberry after I was stopped, and put it away when the light went green. Still ... I was amused.

Double Barrel

Last Saturday marked the 15th homebrew competition in a friend's backyard, and as usual it was a lot of fun.  Last year I won the competition with a "Barack Obama Black Ale".  As that was my 4th consecutive win there was some talk at the judging table about asserting term limits.

This year we had a great turnout, 15 brews from maybe 10 brewers. I won "best name" for Double Barrel Palin Ail (puns intended).

The beer itself was only moderately popular (my other entry, "Red Head", did very well so far as actual beers went), but here is a recipe for the Palin Ail for those who might be interested, for a 5 US gallon batch:

• 8 oz 60L
• 6 oz Cara Munich
• 6 oz US Victory
• 2 oz Malto Dextrin
• 4 oz flaked rye
• Steeped 30 minutes at 150 F
• 6 lb light malt extract
• 1 lb dry malt extract
• Bittering: 1/2 oz Horizon 11.4 + 1 oz East Kent Golding 4.5
• Flavour: 3/4 oz East Kent Golding + 3/8 oz Nugget from my new hopyard
• Aroma: 1 oz East Kent Golding
• 3/4 tsp Irish Moss
• 1 tsp DAP
• Pitched a Nottingham dry yeast

Overbite in web pages

I'm probably dating myself when I remember (wistfully) the old Dr. Dobb's Journal slogan "Running light without overbite."  Certainly these days, in many parts of the high tech industry,  I don't see a lot of care and attention to load generated by this or that feature.

I returned to my desktop earlier this morning to find the fans cranked up and the cpu spinning at something like 50% load. I wasn't running anything in particular on the machine, no background compiles going on. No, I tracked this down to two web pages with some active content of some kind that I'd casually left open. The pages were: viewing an article on www.economist.com (about 15% cpu); and a friend's blog www.rklau.com/tins/ (bounces between 12-40% cpu).

Remember when 'engineer' was a verb?

en•gi•neer  vt  to contrive or plan out, usually with subtle skill or craft
en•gi•neer•ing  n  the application of science and mathematics by which the properties of matter and sources of energy are made useful to systems

Amusingly, when writing this note I visited ddj.com. It too loaded up a pile of crap, including a video with sound. Boy how DDJ has changed! And I guess (from the video) they don't see their apparent developer audience as populating cube farms.

switcher-backer

A guy I drink with from time to time recently posted that he finally switched to a Macbook Pro from a Thinkpad, and he's eating a little crow for all the times he's harassed his colleagues about their laptop choice.

Me, I switched a while ago, and while there are lots of things I like about the MacBook Pro, there are some things I hate.  Another drinking buddy of mine put it eloquently, the Mac is real pretty, but not ready for business.  I'm not sure I completely agree, but here are a few data points.

The Window resize handle. Singular. As in, one. You know, I want to use the shortest mouse gesture as I can to get to my window controls. Having just one resize handle in a corner, that's dumb. And it in the lower right corner, when I spend most of my time closer to the top left (eg, in a mail application, I'm selecting mailboxes and messages from lists on the left or top). Neither of these choices help usability at all, IMNSHO.

External monitors.  As a business user, I drag my laptop between my desk, with a big widescreen monitor; a meeting room, with a stupidly low-res projector; and my home, with something in between. Strange as this may seem, I don't close all my windows every time I plug into a new monitor.  That means my windows are already there, already as big as they are, and that single resize handle is off the bottom or edge of the screen so I can't reach it.

Application menus. Windows puts application menus in the window you are using, so they are close to hand. As if it weren't bad enough that the mac always has the menus at the top of the screen, here I am with two monitors. The window I'm working in is in one of them, meaning my mouse is in one of them. But all my application menus are in the other monitor. Short mouse gestures, remember?

Drop down selection lists.  My browser is in my nice big monitor, I start typing an address, and a drop down appears with matches against what I've typed so far. The drop-down is in the other monitor.

I could go on. Little frustrations, each of them, but add them up and its like the notion of two monitors and day-in-day-out use was something of an afterthought.

And while many folks blame PCs or Windows for flakiness with suspend and so forth, I've frankly found the MacBook to be worse. Every now and then mine just doesn't come back. Or it fails to suspend when I close the lid, and I take it out of my bag scorching hot.

Don't get me wrong, there are things I really like, too. I like having a shell prompt. I like the fact that a lot of Linux software runs. Heck, I ran linux exclusively on a laptop for about 4 years. I like Firefox on the Mac, which doesn't have the utterly brain-dead left-click-copy thing that firefox does on the PC and linux. Wireless networking is much better on MacBook. I like the magnetic power connector. I love love love the anti-glare screen, which I can use comfortably with full sunlight shining on it.

The thing that is an absolute killer, though, is gotomeeting. The fact that gotomeeting doesn't work on the mac makes it a bit of a non-starter. Either I'm carrying two laptops, or doing my remote presentations by remote desktop'ing to a windows box, which again is just dumb. This one isn't entirely Apple's fault, but a big issue nonetheless.

I'm sure the Mac is great as a desktop, or even as a laptop that you always use in a single configuration. But for a power laptop user, I don't think it is all there.

Is it better than a Windows laptop? On balance, not sure. 

I agree with Rick, though - it is very very pretty.

Tool for requirements management - not

I was at an industry talk a week or two ago, and a vendor in the corridor was selling a Requirements Management tool.

The tool in question provided a mechanism to enter, store, and report on product requests. It also allowed web entry of requests directly by customers and prospects via a portal, so the busy PM wouldn't have to enter requests himself. So far as I could tell, or the demo boy could tell me, it didn't do much else.

In the simplest form, requirements management could be just storing and listing requests. I guess. Though that's pretty simple-minded.

An axiom for product managers is that we serve markets, not individuals. We build product that meets the needs of a broad audience. We don't like to build one-offs. We identify groups of people with similar needs in terms of features, delivery channel and so forth, and money to spend, and then go about fulfilling those needs.

So for a product request to be useful to a product definition process, we need to be able to do things with it that are a little more involved than just listing. We may need to decompose into finer grained components of ideas. We definitely need to combine several requests together that may be worded in different ways. We want to identify the group who made that request, and collect the other requests made by group.  We probably want to define one or more product features that together satisfy that request, and associate releases with those product features. And so forth.

Capturing, keyword search, and listing are just the barest beginnings, and without the analysis capability are effort for no return. After all, I can capture requests just fine in an email folder.

These thoughts in mind, I asked the demo boy a few simple questions about how his tool would help categorize requests, or trace request (de)composition, or basically support any kind of decision making.  He earnestly answered the third question, "Sure, you can do that with our tool! If you see a request come up 2 or 3 times, you probably want to build it in your next sprint."

*sigh*

iTunes and remote media via NFS, not SAMBA

Strange that I haven't posted for months ... and that one was about iTunes as well.

Anyway, I've been cursing iTunes for months. I have over 5000 songs in my home library (for the record, almost all ripped by me, a few from artists who supply downloads, links below), and rather than copy them to all the machines in my house and try to keep them all sync'd, I store them all on a terabyte+ RAID server on a linux box. The filesystem is exported through SAMBA and mounted into each of the Windows machines around the house.  Hey, it works.

But it hasn't worked well for a few reasons. One is that it is SLOWWWWWW! It took me ages to figure that it was Samba that was causing, or at least triggering, the problem.  It seems as if iTunes needs to read the files when just scrolling the file list in the iTunes library, which is quite insane.  But what I would see is I'd drag the scrollbar and a full second or more later the window would actually scroll. Ditto if I click for page down or something. It was desperately annoying. And going through SAMBA to read these files, well, it wasn't pretty.

So today I bit the bullet and figured out how to install MS' NFS Client for Windows, and I remounted the linux filesystem through NFS. This is a huge improvement. While still slower that local, the action is almost live now.

Of course, the real culprit is a broken design for iTunes.  Whether single-threaded, or just reading the files when it doesn't need to, simply scrolling the window shouldn't do anything but scroll information already present, either in memory or at worst already in the library file which *is* local.

For those with similar problem, here's how I did it.

1. stop iTunes 
2. Download Windows Services for Unix direct from MS
3. unzip into a local directory (just click the exe in explorer)
4. install in a cmd window per these instructions 
5. reboot - the mount command used below wasn't found until rebooting
6. unmount the samba drive
7. remount from the command line. I used: mount -o rsize=8 -o wsize=8 -o anon -o nolock \\server\media m:
8. move the itunes directory under My Documents | My Music to another name. You can delete it later.
9. start iTunes. In Advanced settings, I set the location of my itunes folder to the remote media folder (in my case, M:\mp3). Make sure "Copy files to iTunes folder" is cleared. The reason I set the library to M:\mp3, rather than keep the library local, is so when I rip more albums they are automatically saved on the server.
10. File | Add Folder and pick the remote media folder.
11. go have a beer or two while all the files are indexed, volume and gapless checks are done, etc

That's all it took, and now iTues is almost as responsive as I would like on Windows with all media files remote.

Enjoy.

I promised links to some artists who supply downloads of their music. Here are a couple:

• Children of the CPU supply mp3s of all tracks on their album for download here  
• SXSW'07, there is a torrent of 739 tracks on this page
• I love Milla Jojovich, and her site usually has some tracks available, usually demos.