Back from Sabrimala

Okay so I'm finally back from Sabrimala (Lord Ayyappa's temple), looking much tidy after the shave ( no haircut till now, but I will hopefully get one soon). It was quite a trip. We started on Monday afternoon and reached Sujit's place in Kollam in the evening, had dinner there, did Puja and left for Sabrimala in the night. The jeep ride was a bit scary, as the driver drove very fast, we were at high altitude and the elephants liked to play football with vehicles (yes the elephants do sometimes come and kick your car off the hill when you are going there, why ? Because they are elephants and they have nothing worthwhile to do, unlike us). We reached there at around 1am and took bath in the Pamba river. The water was not too cold and wasn't too deep. We started to climb the hill after that. The climb was really exhausting. We had to climb around 3Km with a very severe incline (and on top of that I had to take care of the Mund, which kept on slipping). We reached the temple at around 3:30am. The temple was to open in another half an hour.
The temple has been built on a raised platform. It is said that, it was once surrounded by a trench to prevent wild animals from coming inside the temple. There are exactly eighteen steps to the temple and each step is made up of pure gold. (The temple itself is made up of gold) These eighteen steps are considered very sacred.
The scene when the temple opened was worth witnessing. A horde of people come charging towards the steps with coconuts in their hands. As soon as they reach near it they start smashing the coconuts on the walls over the top of other people (surprisingly no one gets hurt). Then they go up to the temple.
We were fortunate enough to get Darshan and left back home with lots of paysam.

All that was very nice, but I haven't studied a bit for the exam and I wasted today also. I hope the gods help me ;-)

Rik Van Riel

Hi,
Its been a long time since I posted anything... well to be true I was too lazy to do anything. I got User mode linux working on my system. It took me a whole 12 hours to make the root file system and I was messing things up quite frequently.
Well I got UML working for the patched 2.4.26 kernel but I wanted to work with the 2.6.9 kernel. Unfortunately I has some problems building it... so I went to #kernelnewbies on OFTC. I typed my problem and guess who replied Rik Van Riel hmm that was something ;-)

Making boot up times faster

Well all my exams (including lab) are finally over.. so I set out to tweaking my system. I removed FC-1 from my system (as it had too many issues and gentoo was a better alternative) and used its partition as my /usr (so now I have enough space for Gentoo).
I wanted my system to boot fast as compared to XP. The first thing I did was to find entries in init.d which were not being used and removed them. Another thing which I noticed ,was, that my kernel was 1.6 MB. So I set out trying to make it smaller. I excluded a lot of things from the kernel and modularized the rest (which were needed) and in the end I was left with a kernel which was 980 KB.

And by the way Happy Diwali :)

The wishlist completed

One day it took to get everything in my wish list completed. Here is a screenshot of what I came up with. Looks really nice.

KDE is up

It was a good day today.. I finally got kde up and running. I have also got xmms running.. I also got the frame buffer thing going. So now even the console looks really neat. Here is a screen shot of the console. There are still a few things on my wish list though

• emacs
• mplayer
• ymessenger
• mozilla firefox

Probblems with Qt

So I had really big ambitions with gentoo.. but that seems to have taken a backseat. I was trying to install KDE but the qt library is not building. Now, as many apps depend on qt I dont know how I will get them to work. The only good news was that I got the sound going (mpg321 rules .. :) ).
I have a stupid software engg assignment to submit tomorrow. So I guess I will go write that.

More thoughts on gentoo

Well I got gentoo working from my hard drive. I had to compile the kernel 4-5 times to get all the things right. I have the internet (which includes sharing also) and the lan working. Overall I'm pretty proud of the nice clean system which I have put up together (although a lot of work still needs to be done). I also got X-11 working on gentoo. I still have to get kde (which is an incredibly huge download). I plan to put other things into motion also. Especially UML (user mode linux and not the stuff we study in software engineering) interests me. coLinux also seems to be something nice so I will dig up some stuff for that also.
No classes after tomorrow.. so yeehaw.. finally free..

Gentoo

So I had nothing much to do this weekend so I started browsing the web. It was then that I encountered gentoo. I had heard of it before, but never thought of installing it, as I already have a Fedora Core 1 system running nicely. Inspite of that I though why not give it a shot. So I downloaded the minimal live cd and the stage 2 tarball. I mainly chose stage 2 as I wanted to build the system approximately from scratch. The installation till now has not been too tough, but it depends heavily on the web. Just downloading the portage tree took 3 hours and I still have to install quite a few packages. I havent even downloaded the kernel sources yet. But come to think of it I'm in no hurry and I guess I will just gentoo run all through the night.