Brief update: After about 11 years the Presario finally gave up the ghost. Consequently I won’t be describing the process of making a usable system out of it.
BUT: there is a new computer in my life with a ridiculously big hard disc just begging for a Gentoo installation, so maybe one day I will return to it.
AAARGH! I’d forgotten the mockery of aesthetics that is “fonts in Linux.” Since I work with Classical Greek, I need to be able to distinguish otherwise incidental markings (e.g., whether an accent leans right or left).
Also, the ability to type classical Greek and use the extended Latin keymap is almost mandatory for work on web browsers. Fortunately, with LaTeX, I can produce beautiful documents with nothing more than a text editor (VIM, of course).
So we begin here for on our journey from serviceable legibility to joyous eyes.
I can’t recommend that guide strongly enough. Although I didn’t update all of my packages yet, it took a few minutes and now things are greatly de-uglified.
Dropbox is a tool that syncs a particular folder on your computer with the cloud, in a sense it’s an instant backup of the most recent changes. You can then access this folder via the internet or on any other computer with Dropbox installed. In other words, it’s especially handy when your computer stops working and the manufacturer avoids honoring its service contract.
<code># emerge dropbox</code>
does install something, but it is not clear how to get Dropbox up and running from there. Consequently, I’ve uninstalled the Gentoo package and gone to Dropbox’s Linux page, and I’m following their install procedure.
And that was about the easiest install I’ve done on Linux. Works great, but being a bit unsophisticated on the Linux side, I’ll have to do some tinkering to get the script to start automatically.
While proctoring my students’ final I’ve been tweaking the system a bit (after finally getting on UT’s Restricted network) and now I’m going to try to get ACPI up and running so I can suspend to disk instead of shutting down every time the computer needs to be moved. Gentoo is as accommodating as ever with their guides.
My goal is that the computer will enter a hibernate-like state when the lid is closed.
I’m trying out Uswsusp instead of TuxOnIce because I don’t want to use a different kernel and I like the idea of keeping everything in user space, as described on this page.
I have had to add static-libs to my USE flags, and they’re getting a little long. Ah well.
Another Gentoo guide is available for this task, although it was written for TeX Live 2008 (three years out of date). I’ll take a look through, and hopefully it will not require much (any) modification.
The install was straight-forward enough
<code># emerge texlive</code>
But at the end I end up with the following error:
<code>
* Cannot run texmf-update for some reason.
* Your texmf tree might be inconsistent with your configuration
* Please try to figure what has happened
</code>
I keep coming to this forum posting, so it might be worth a try. First I need to figure out what
<code>equery b texmf-update</code>
is about.
Apparently it will tell me what package to reinstall before reinstalling the complaining packages.
And so now, I guess, I will.
If I remember right, this is the least problematic issue with this laptop and Linux. As always, I go to the Gentoo guide.
My sound card is an ALi M5451 PCI card, but for some reason I had USB and PCMCIA support built into the kernel. I am disabling these options, as well as OSS (a deprecated protocol), so I’m recompiling and then rebooting.
Of course Gentoo has a guide for configuring the synaptics touchpad.
Basically, I should have included “synaptics” in my USE flags, although that alone does not give me tapping or right-edge scrolling, but for the time being, the added precision should be enough. I will revisit this issue.
UPDATE: following a Gentoo Wiki I can now single-tap and use the right edge of the touch pad to scroll! I think that is all I want now, but, again, I might revisit the issue.
To achieve a secure wireless connection I think I should be able to just toggle a few settings on the router and wicd’s GUI. If anything unexpected happens, I’ll describe it.
BTW: Thank you Stuff Mom Never Told You, for enriching my mind as I bang it against things.
UPDATE: Good news! It took a little more tweaking than I thought it would (mostly on the router side), but my wireless access is now secured.
Well! The important things have been taken care of now.
Before I call it a night, though, there are a few important things I want to do:
In the next couple of weeks I would like to post a concise description of my efforts that might help guide me through this process in the future and might help other folks first.
UPDATE: I will add things as they occur to me in this list, but the priority for these is lower.
Ha! It seems that the problem was with my router. I have a Cisco Linksys E1000 capable of b/g, n, or mixed speeds. It seems that there was a problem with the mixed setting, and when I brought it down to b/g connection was possible! Of course, I did have to reset the router to factory defaults and I haven’t tried security yet, but who cares! I’m going for a beer to celebrate.
UPDATE: Oh yeah! I’m posting this from the Compaq with the wireless up and running!
