Mindstab.net

Well it looks like Haiku is progressing. They have a Build Factory up which daily generates a small Haiku system image which can be run in QEmu (without kqemu worked for me). It boots, has a terminal, and you can launch the Tracker and Deskbar from in the terminal. It has a bunch of basic command line tools including up to gawk. It also has a bunch of GUI test apps. Very impressive. I took a screen shot.

Well, I'm reviving my OS farm project now that I can find a bit of time in the mornings for it. I tossed up a wiki page for it here and installed Debian this morning to kick it off again. My OS Farm is back in business.

Well, my OS fetishism project has been neglected recently so now, just before bed I started qemu up with fedora. Yes I've just had some rotten experiences with it, but that was trying to make a desktop out of it. Having it around just for the build environment is fine and what it's for. I've become a little concerned that recent distro's like fedora and ubutnu are more glorified Gnome development distro's rather than desktop distros, but oh well. A debate for another day.

Tip: Using `qemu -monitor stdio` qemu gives you a console while it is running so you can unmount and remount the "cd drive", or in my case, the four fedora isos ((qemu) change cdrom cd/FC4-i386-disc2.iso).

I started by downloading the NVidia linux driver package from the nvidia site. But I recalled that since it's a module it needs a little compiling. So I opened up the add/remove package thing Fedora supplies in the Desktop Sytem Settings menu and installed the default development tools option. Whoever setup the CDs is a retard. It started off and asked for cd1. Ok. Then cd2. Ok. Then cd3. Ok guys, you could have put this together a little more since this is the default option you guys made. What ever. Then cd2, then cd1, cd2, cd1, cd2, cd1, cd2, cd1, cd2, cd1... etc. Holy fuck that was retarded. Why not grab everything you need off the CD at once, and who's bright idea was it to place things on the cds like that? What a monumental pain in the ass. But it got done.

So next, I need the kernel source. This is where Gentoo really shines, but oh well. It wasn't even in the add/remove package app so I had to go looking on the net and install cds. The kernel packages are on cd1, as well as the devel packages for the xen and SMP kernels, but the regular one processor kernel-devel packages some how ended up on the 4th cd. I put that in and tried to rpm install it but it needed hardlink which was not on that cd. I started getting pissed. This was retarded.

Then after some more googleing I discovered yum.

# yum install kernel-devel-2.6.11-1.1369_FC4

That was all it took. It took a bit to initialize the archives but then off it went and downloaded what I needed and installed it. So that was nice and a lot easier.

So, now I had everything I knew I needed, lets see if I forgot anything. I sued to root and ran the installer. First off it demanded I leave X and turn it off. So I tried. How? I couldn't just log out. I needed to turn X off. I tried to kill everything I could from the console with the help of ps, bot X and gdm. I also of course tried the gdm entries in /etc/init.d but unlike gentoo, that did dick all. ps aux reported that no X or gdm was running but the NVidia installer was unconvinced.

That failing, I found this tutorial on Linux Questions. The answer turned out to be to edit /etc/inittab and change the run level to one without X and reboot!

I then ran the driver install and for the first time it worked, but cryptically notified me that my tnt2 was supported by legacy drivers but that it would be ignored? And then it proceeded to install. But stoped because there was no kernel interface. So back to my kernel source /lib/modules/`uname -r`\build and a make bzImage and modules. It gave me lots of warnings and then failed.

And I gave up. It should not be this retarded and hard to install the nvidia drivers which are given away for free by nvidia. Do distro's really think their users don't want to use the expensive video cards they bought. What is going to happen when gtk 2.8 with cairo gets here. It has GL support and will make things fast but if distros don't even support GL. ..

What the fuck. This is lame and has pissed me off. Ubuntu shipping with broken nvidia drivers. Fedora making it nigh impossible to install them.

This is fucking lame for linux. How are windows users supposed to move over if their games which developers took time to port to linux and which hardware companies have written decent drivers for still don't work because distro's do not support them in any way shape or form.

Lot's of people slag gentoo for its "hard" install, but it's not that bad, had an amazing manual and properly supports all these drivers, in a really easy fashion. Out of Fedora 4, Ubuntu, and Gentoo, Gentoo is the only distro I've gotten GL working on with nvidia cards either at all or in a non buggy manner. Fuck you Redhat and Ubuntu.

Well, with qemu 0.7.0 out with it's kqemu module it's really quite decent at emulating things. Also, Frost has been getting slow and weird lately and I've been eyeing Janus as a replacement firewall. So I decided to move all my OS test bed work right onto Inferno, my desktop. It's actually pretty good. With the much faster cpu, even though everything is in emulation it's mostly faster than Janus in a lot of situations. And I'm learning lots about qemu and a few other things. Anyway, I've got win98, winxp, freedos, and reactos installed freshly. I was going with the Microsoft OS's and clones first because I was interested in getting starcraft working and my girlfriend wanted Keen. None of them quite worked well enough for Keen, so I installed dosbox, and it for the first time I've seen worked perfectly there. Also, starcraft seems to run at decent speeds in windows! The only catch, the networking doesn't fully work, but that's a configuration thing. I needed to learn about TUN device tunnelling so I put it off temporarily. Next up I noticed qemu does PPC emulation theoretically, so I decided to try and install ppc darwin because that would be cool. It failed, but not wanting to give up, I installed pearpc (a ppc emulator) and now have darwin installed under it. It's networking isn't as advanced as qemu's and it only supports the TUN method so in the process of getting Darwin up I've figured out a bit about how that works.

So I currently have Windows XP, Windows 98, ReactOS, FreeDos, and Darwin PPC installed and I'm just getting warmed up. I'm planning to put my harddrive space to good use and build a massive collection of operating systems.

On a slightly related note, learning Xnest is on my todo list since I'm uncomfortable running most FPS games on my desktop since they sometime crash taking my desktop with them. Normally I start a whole new XServer for them, but XNest might be just what I'm looking for.

Anyways, lots of play and work to do. The moral of the story, qemu rocks, and pearpc seems pretty cool.

[If this update was slightly incoherent it's because I'm coming down with a slight head cold.]