The Beauty of a Gentoo installation

I have installed various linux distributions so far but Gentoo installation has an unmatched beauty to it. It is special because you can stop the installation and resume it at will. You just need to chroot back in if you have not completed the base system installation. Once the base system is installed, you can keep adding features at your pace and suiting your internet speed.

Unlike other distributions, Gentoo offers very fine-grained control over the packages you install and what features those packages have enabled. This is done using USE flags.

If you are looking a graphical installer that does its job without asking you much, this is not for you; but if you want robust control with proper dependency checking and stability, Gentoo is the right choice for you.

While other distributions have trouble connecting to the internet from their install environments, Gentoo minimal install environment had Intel Wireless microcode (iwl3945-ucode) and I could connect to a WPA network and do the installation.

Support on #gentoo sets Gentoo apart from every other distribution. I have solved problems of other distributions on this channel. Every time you have an issue, you can find someone here to help you out.

The beauty of the installation process lies in the freedom and the host of options that it allows you.

Connecting to WPA networks

Wireless networks using WEP keys are not very secure. WPA keys should be preferred over WEP keys. To connect to a wireless network on linux, first store the passphrase in a configuration file with the following command:

wpa_passphrase "<your essid>" "<your passphrase>" > /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf

Set up WPA handshaking using

wpa_supplicant -Dwext -iwlan0 -B -c/etc/wpa_supplicant.conf

The option -Dwext specifies that generic linux wireless drivers should be used. The -B flag tells wpa_supplicant to work in the background. The -iwlan0 option specifies wlan0 as the interface for communication. Now set up dhcp client on wlan0 using

dhcpcd wlan0

Robust Firefox

Today an interesting incident occurred which reassured by trust in Firefox's robustness. Well I was downloading gentoo minimal install image in Google Chrome and after 80mb, the download speed had gone down to some bytes per second. When I started a parallel fresh download, I was getting a speed of about 60 kbps. So, I decided to try and get Chrome download the rest of the original file at about 50 - 60 kbps. I tried the following procedure:

- copy the install*.chrdownload file (i.e. the temporary file into which the file was being downloaded) into some other folder
- cancel the download
- start a fresh download
- pause it
- overwrite the new .chrdowload file with the old one

However, this trick did not work with Chrome. It was still downloading more than 100 mb as if it were the fresh download.

I opened up Firefox and applied the same procedure except for renaming the .chrdownload file to .part file and Firefox intelligently downloaded only what remained of the file completing the download in minutes.

HIV shown in great detail

Removal of hal improves boot time

I upgraded my kernel to 2.6.37, removed hal and KDE to 4.6 and experience improved boot times now.

Chromium and Firefox: a comparision

Well I have been a hard-core firefox fan for a long time. However, recently I have found some improvements on the chromium front, that are worthy of notice.

The battle started when Chromium started using Webkit and V8, one is a fast web page rendering engine and the other is a fast javascript engine. Firefox fell behind for some time; but those are old days. I shall just brief on some points of comparision between Firefox 3.6.13 and Chromium 9.0 on Arch linux x86_64.

Firefox:
- It is very stable. I have not seen it crash for over a year now.
- With AdBlock Plus by Wladimir Palant, I can easily get rid of ads as well as unwanted iframes, images etc.
- With Ghostery, I can easily get rid of tracking sited too.

Chromium:
- Its is stable for use but not as stable as Firefox.
- It does not work with a number of sites. I have been posting such sites since when it was in version 4. Even in recent versions (8.0 and 9.0) there still are sites that don't work well with it.
- It however works fine with those sites that are tailored to work with Internet Explorer and not on Mozilla Firefox.
- AdBlock or Ghostery are not completely supported on Chromium yet.

KDE 4.6 review

I was eagerly awaiting for kde 4.6 because I would be able to remove hal from my system after installeing it. So, as soon as kde 4.6 was available on Arch linux repositories, I got it installed. I was thrilled by some features and disappointed by some others. This review is about those.

Pros:
- The first thing I noticed was faster response. It spurred my interest in finding other improvements in kde 4.6 over previous versions. I do not know the reason why I am experiencing faster response; yet it is the best feature for me.

- Finally, KDE guys have done away with HAL. My other desktop environment, Enlightenment had switched to udisks, upower etc. So, I have been waiting for KDE to get rid of it.

- ksnapshot is improved. It is allowing two nice options:
     * hide mouse; and
     * hide window decoration.

KSnapshot

- KDE 4.6 has some delights in terms of graphics. The new wallpaper by Nuno is really cool. There are icons for compiled html files (chm) and also for portable compiled format(pcf) files. There is a new pointing cursor too.

Cons:
- I found a funny problem with knotes. I had saved a note as "typing <td>"; but it was transformed to "typing ".

- There are no icons for jpeg files yet. Neither are there any icons for deja vu(djvu) files.

Improvement for Google Instant

Today, while using Google Instant, I noted that if the query included "site" specification, Instant does not work. Any query of the following form fails with Google Instant.

<search text> site:<site where the search text is to be looked up>

Increased spam in my gmail inbox

For about a month, I had been noticing increased spam in my gmail account. Gmail used to be known  for its spam filters. People used to advise to redirect other mails to gmail so that spam is filtered out well. However, things seem to be changing. I am posting a few spam email ids.

From	Reply-to
mabanks@ic.sunysb.edu	inf22@msn.com
elcytchandy@hotmail.com	jdetwiler1@comcast.net
info@winner.com	instantclaims@live.co.uk
ibgranny@sbcglobal.net	marutisuzukijobs2011@live.com
g-karen@sbcglobal.net	g-karen@sbcglobal.net
jilani@pasteur.fr	cox16@live.co.uk
hana.jilani@pasteur.fr	mic_04@live.com
jilani@pasteur.fr	cox16@live.co.uk
info@videocon.com	info@video-con.co.cc
rallahiq@insurebc.ca	mic_04@live.com
osirodjohnson@gmail.com	inf44@live.com
info@live.in	marutisuzuki.recruit2011@gmail.com

It is interesting to note the high frequency of "inf" and "live.com" terms in the email addresses. It is also interesting to note how most of them have their "to" email addresses pointing to "undisclosed-recipients:;" and talk about lotteries worth £500,000,00 in the United Kingdom. They also include phone numbers from United Kingdom.