the corner office

Everybody who's anybody always says that Struts is just sooooo 2002, but rumours of its death and all that. It's being merged with WebWork (which I know very little about, to be honest), to become Struts Ti (as in titanium).

Just a few more notes on the install experience. There have certainly been a few quirks, but it's not as bad as I thought it would be.

Browser and Mail

As I mentioned before, I went with the firefox-bin ebuild, which is a 32-bit binary. The 32-bit binary is needed to play nice with proprietary plug-ins, most notably Flash. I installed a natively-compiled version of Thunderbird, which hasn't given me any hassles.

Video players

Video players pose the same problem. A lot of the 'common' (Windows, Quicktome) codecs are only available as 32 bit binaries. These won't work with a 64-bit video player, so in addition to the normal gmplayer and gxine video players I use, I also installed mplayer-bin which is, again, a 32 bit pre-compiled binary which can play nice with the codecs. There are some open-source codecs for these formats, which can work with the natively compiled video players, but they're generally not up to date. So the modus operandi is to try to play video clips with gmplayer, then gxine, and then fall back to mplayer-bin. It's a bit of a schlep, especially because mplayer-bin is just a good old-fashioned command line app with no fancy control panel. I've seen talk of an ebuild floating around for a 'g'mplayer-bin which has the gnome trappings, but I haven't bothered to try it.

Incidentally, I've seen mention that Win XP 64 still has a 32-bit Windows Media Player, for the same reason that they haven't ported their codecs.

Eclipse

Being a good ole Java app basically, installed without a hitch. The Java plumbing is a bit of a pain to get going, though...

Java

Ain't so easy. The default JDK that apps like Eclipse want to pull down is the Blackdown JDK (version 1.4.2.something). I was happy to stick with 1.4 for now, for a number of reasons, so I have no idea what Java 5 is like, although reports are not entirely favourable. The nice thing about Blackdown is that it's open source, and compiles to 64 bit. The not-nice thing with Blackdown is that it was a bit slow, and not too stable. Slow... when trying to fire up Tomcat from within Eclipse, the entire desktop would lock up, mouse juddering etc. That ain't supposed to happen on a modern PC... What's more, Eclipse would crash every couple of hours. I've had no such hassles on Windows or Linux 32 Eclipse before.

The only other 64 bit JDK available is from IBM, and I eventually went and installed that. It's been a few days, and so far, so good. Much faster and perfectly stable. (The IBM download site has a bit of a daft setup, though, and each version of their JDK has the same file name, so you have to make sure that you're installing the 'unmasked' version and rename the file yourself, otherwise the files don't pass MD5 tests). Pfff, IBM, pfff. As I've said before, the proprietary JVMs still seem to be the only serious choice, imho.

Apparently, the 64 bit JDKs don't support the client-friendly hotspot compiler, which also affects performance. The alternative would be to manually install a 32 bit Java JDK and use that. To be honest though, the IBM JDK seems fast enough for my purposes.

Tomcat

No specific AMD 64 issues (other than a LOT of masked dependencies), but in the latest 5.0.x version of Tomcat, the Gentoo developers decided to unravel the file system layout to cater for multiple instances, and the Tomcat directory structures have changed just enough to confuse a lot of things. I think it makes great sense for servers, but for developers it's been a pain in the butt to adjust. Not only do you need some head-scratching to configure things like the Sysdeo Eclipse plug-in, but the default (safe) permissions are not intended for iterative development. The best thing to do is add your normal login to the Tomcat group and bulk-change the permissions on all Tomcat directories to allow group control.

MySQL

No hassles, but the GUI query browser, for example, won't compile on AMD64. I'm not sure whether grabbing the binaries from mysql.com and installing manually will work.

Wine

Works mostly! I'd heard that Wine doesn't play nice on AMD64. I thought I'd install it anyway, to see what happened. It installed cleanly. I pulled across my fake_windows directory from my old machine, and fired up Notes. It looked awful, with all sorts of icons blacked out and the cursor randomly disappearing. Turns out it was a bug with my version of X windows. I did an emerge sync a few days ago, and a new version fixed the problem. Since then, Wine and Notes seem OK (I'm typing this blog on the new PC), except for the occasional cursor-disappearing problem when hovering over certain icons and tabs. I can live with that, though. I'd stayed with an older version of Wine on my previous machine because of upgrade problems earlier this year. I'm now using Wine 20050725. I've heard that post-20050725 versions of Wine break Notes (again), so we'll see how long this lasts.

A friend of ours, Angela, passed away on Friday. She was staying overnight in hospital after some tests on her back (she had pretty bad back problems), and at some point in the morning, something went wrong and she passed away. What caused it, nobody knows yet... which is perhaps the weirdest part and what makes it seem so much more unfair. Her and her fiance Richard were due to move into their new house shortly, wedding planned for early next year. So sad, so pointless.

Been studying, mostly, but I've made a bit of progress setting up the new PC. Xorg and Gnome installed without a hitch earlier this week, and getting the ATI drivers for my new graphics card working was a breeze, too. The ATI-specific X config tool (fglrxconfig) isn't the most user-friendly of configurers, but it did the job. I had my monitor up and running without any hassles. The Gnome installation is also a lot nicer. In addition to the +kitchen_sink standard Gnome install, there's now a gnome-light package which installs a bare-minimum Gnome desktop, leaving you free to pick what bits and bobs you want to add. The main saving this brings is not being dependent on some of the bigger Gnome packages, like Evolution and Mozilla. I noticed though, that Mozilla still gets installed to satisfy some odd dependency, but you can apparently sidestep this by setting 'firefox' USE flags which tells Gnome to rely on firefox wherever it needs a browser engine.

(The only trick is that if you install Firefox natively on x86_64, you can't use old-fashioned 32-bit plugins like Flash. The only way around this is using 32-bit Firefox binaries, meaning you have to have a source version of either Mozilla or Firefox, and the binary version. But I'm getting ahead of myself).

Setting up a Gentoo box from scratch takes you through a couple of milestones. The first one is getting the kernel built and bootable. Once you can actually boot up the machine, you can start mucking around with drivers and whatnot, knowing that you can always roll back to an earlier kernel if things go wrong. Usually at this stage you get ssh going, so that you can connect to the box and do all the set-up remotely.

The second big milestone is getting X (and your desktop environement - in my case, Gnome) up and running. This gives you a GUI to work with. A GUI is nice, but for me, the third milestone is getting sound going. When you can listen to mp3s, the machine is 'inhabitable' :-)

So this evening I got the sound drivers set up, which was also a straightforward case of following the documentation. I love Linux, because it lets you do cool things that you just can't do (or conceive of doing) with Windows. For example, to test whether sound is working, the Gentoo ALSA docs suggest that you just redirect random noise to your sound device with

cat /dev/urandom > /dev/dsp

Lots of static for free!

Anyway. Next step was installing VNC on my old PC. That's allowed me to 'move' across to the new PC, but still I get back into my old PC's Gnome desktop to do stuff like type this blog entry into my Notes client.

Next step is to start installing apps on this machine, and start moving my data and junk across. This is all still going incredibly smoothly...

Links (for future reference)

• Gentoo ATI driver HOWTO
  
• Unofficial ATI drivers FAQ - for installing the proprietary ATI drivers
  
• Gentoo Linux ALSA guide - sound configuration guide
  

That was a lot of fun... work year-end do at Carnivore restaurant, just down the road from us. I haven't been since about '99, and I realised that I couldn't remember what wild animals I'd eaten the last time. So this list is for posterity... apart from the usual critters, we ate kudu, warthog, crocodile and zebra. I, like most people, I think, was most apprehensive about eating croc, but it was actually quite decent. Zebra, on the other hand, is just dreadful. Now I know why 'horse meat' is such a pejorative term. Bleh.

The new machine, which shall be known as 'mirkwood' (since the old 200MMX mirkwood is an ex-PC), is an AMD 64 3200+. I got m'self an MSI nForce4 motherboard, which with new 939 pin design, PCIE and SLI support will hopefully be upgrade-friendly down the line... especially if, when this Honours degree is over, I regain a semblance of a normal life and dip my toes into the gaming world again. I got a gig of memory which isn't much by today's standards, but the proof will be in the swap file, so to speak, and can be upgraded later. I guess the main thing one gets from a new machine like this is unspeakably insane memory and IO throughput, compared to the machines from a few years ago.

Things have certainly changed since my last foray into hardware. Old ATA is out the window, in with SATA. AGP is on the way out, in with PCI Express. Gigabit on-board LAN, by default. On-board sound cards with more output ports than I know what to do with. The machine itself wasn't a problem to put together - which has improved my mood immensely. First of all, I really don't enjoy hardware. Fiddling with jumpers and getting tangled up in cables just isn't my scene. On top of that, I usually just accept that whenever I buy electronic stuff, there'll be at least one component that's a dud. Kind of like people who don't like horses always getting to ride the psychotic devil-horse. So anyway, having everything pop into place, and the machine just boot up without a whimper, was probably a first for me.

On the software side, things are also a bit different. This AMD64 thing is a little daunting. I've made the machine a dual-boot, and installed XP up-front, since common wisdom, which I'm fully prepared to listen to, is that letting the Windows XP installer loose on a hard drive with other operating systems is just asking for trouble. I also know there's an XP 64 bit edition, but my copy(s) of XP are 32-bit, and since I hardly ever use Windows right now, it'll do.

A quick run-through with the various driver disks gave me a pristine, juiced up XP installation waiting to be ignored for a few months. On to Linux...

Gentoo seems to have been a pioneer on the AMD 64 bit front, which I think just means they got to discover and document the problems sooner than most distributions. I could have gone with a safe 32 bit install, but where would the fun be in that? So armed with heaps of documentation, and the as-usual decent install guides, I got started last night.

The main change is that the old Stage 1 and Stage 2 installation methods have been deprecated. These two install methods basically involved compiling the whole damned system from scratch. There wasn't much point in doing it really, but it was an ubergeek thing to do, so that if you were ever chatting to other geeks you could casually toss in a 'oh yes, I've done a Stage 1 Gentoo install', and they'd phear you. I've done a few Stage 1 installs on home machines, so I have my cred and can happily move on. By the looks of things, this old way of installing has now been marginalised and is called a 'jackass' install, which says it all, I guess. About 15 minutes of research had me sold on going with the (recommended) Stage 3, which involves downloading a tar file of all the system tools, pre-compiled and packaged, and basically plopping a near-complete directory structure, and set of system utilities, compilers and libraries onto your hard drive with a single tar -xvf.

With that done, it was a quick job of going through the kernel configuration and compilation, getting the system set-up and installing a few system tools, and then getting GRUB going. Then it was time to reboot, and... I got a kernel panic. A quick Google later, and I realised that I'd forgotten to compile the nVidia SATA drivers into my kernel. So I recompiled, and retried, and ... pff, the same thing. A bit more digging around and I realised that when I copied across the recompiled kernel to the boot partition, I'd gotten the boot image's name wrong, so GRUB kept rebooting with the first, driver-less kernel. Got that fixed, and I booted up OK.

All in all, rather painless (apart from my own stupidity). I've got the machine doing a quick emerge world to get everything updated in preparation for the next step, which will be installing X, Gnome and all the other goodies I need. That'll probably be tomorrow's job. That's where things will get tricky, and the 64-bit issues start cropping up, so the install isn't over yet.

I have to say though, looking at the machine compiling its way through the various updates to system packages, this machine is suhmoking. I am thus far a very happy camper.

Haven't blogged in a bit, hereisthenews:

I hit the big 33 last week. I've decided that 33 is the age at which you can no longer pretend that you're a thirty-something who doesn't belong there. It seems to mark the transition from 'early 30s' to 'mid 30s'. And, it doesn't really have a nice ring to it. Come to think of it, 34, 35 etc etc don't have nice rings to them either.

Ronwen's finished her exam stretch, and all seems to have gone quite well. We're looking forward to returning to a more sane culinary regimen again. I, on the other hand, have about 2 months before I start exams, and the weeks are whizzing by a little too fast for comfort. Two months sounds like a long time, but dividing that by the number of subjects I have to cover doesn't leave much wiggle room. Still, it's doable, with a bit of discipline.

Which brings to my next topic. As if I didn't need more distractions, I finally bought myself a new PC. My current machine had gotten decidedly long in the tooth, and I'd put off getting a new machine for long enough. I decided to leap into the world of AMD 64 with a respectable, if not completely beastly machine. While I went for an old fashioned 32-bit Windows XP Pro install (it's going to be a dual-boot), my intention is to get Gentoo's AMD 64 distribution running on it, because I'm a silly bastard who loves a challenge and making life difficult for myself. I'm in the set-up stages of doing the install at the moment, so I'll leave the geek waffle for another post once I've made a bit more progress.

Via The Register via LinuxToday, SGI has been delisted from the NYSE. Reading a related article, they still cranked out over $700 million in turnover last year, which is nothing to snort at, but the days when uberpowerful, almost mythical SGI boxes were worth the premium are over. The story isn't new, but it is sad, I guess.

On a related note, Sun 'only' lost $133 million this past quarter.