Today I have been slowly but surely working my way through installing Gentoo under a virtualisation application, VMware Player to be precise. Why use a Virtual Machine? Well, they are tidy and quick to set up, no messing about with partitions which is good if you have no free space to play with and don't want to resize your existing partitions. Besides my only reason for setting up Gentoo is out of curiosity. I don't actually plan on using it so the VM option is good for me.

There were a few stumbling blocks, but progress is being made albeit very slowly. Infact I'm installing/compiling Gnome/GTK+ at the moment and it's taking an eternity, the downside of using a VM is that it's about four times slower to do this. However I plus side is that I can close down the VM in the middle of this process and open it up again tomorrow (which I will do shortly).

Gentoo isn't an instant operating system, it's like nothing I have tried before, even with ready made packages there's still a lot of config to do before you can install them. One plus side about it is that it's fun fun fun! Actually it's only fun if your a geek and you still believe the Command Line Interface to be this retro but cool and very powerful tool and the idea of compiling a large part of an OS and it's kernel using a CLI is your idea of fun The level of control you get is great no choice has been made for you.

After I have finished setting up Gentoo - providing all goes well - I might just start on Linux From Scratch, again just for fun. It would be nice to make and use my own distro as my primary distro but it's a lot of work and I couldn't possibly do as good a job as a team of people can do ... but what a fun thing to build. I'd certainly learn a lot doing it

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For about a year I have been looking for a solution to my problem. I wanted a server, I could have used an old PC knocking around but I have there's a few conditions this solution would not have met. I needed something quite (I want it in my bedroom), small and with a low power consumption, ohh and it has to be cheap too

I was looking at building a Micro ATX computer but I decided that even an 800MHz ATX computer was too expensive and not very energy efficient for what I wanted, plus the cases are often quite big.

I have been looking at small linux devices, things like NAS devices which run on Linux and can be used as a server. This sounded great, all I needed to do was splash out around £50 for the NAS, connect and USB HD and mod it. However the modding of it put me off, I'm still a novice when it comes to hardcore Linux usage, that is I'd struggle with it if I had to compile software for it's ARM platform. Afterall this particular NAS was not intended to be a server and so the hack for it could be messy.

Then I found it on eBay, the Netwinder 2100. Small, fast enough for what I wanted built in 10GB HD. A machine built to be a server running Linux. This was better than hacking a NAS or router as there should be no complications. I managed to get it for around £50 quid, seems they used to retail for £500. I say used to because they are no longer in production as the company went bust.

When it arrives I hope to move my blog to my own server and set up FTP, SSH, an IMAP server and what ever else I fancy trying my hand at

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Having recently spoken with Psycho275 about SuSE and his recent switch I decided to give it a go. I managed to mess up my Ubuntu installation, it could have been fixed but I couldn't be bothered as I'm getting a new hard drive soon and though I may aswell just trial SuSE.

My plan was to use it until I get my new drive however I don't see how that's going to be possible as I have found I hate using SuSE lol. Suse is lacking a decent package management system such as Apt with Synaptic. I tried installing Apt and then Synaptic but run into problem with a missing gksudo command, could be fixed but why should I have to fix such basic things?

YaST the much touted SuSE config tool is powerful but a total mess, ugly KDE icons with an equally ugly Win95 look. Some of the features on YaST are useful but I never had it before and didn't have a problem getting along with out it.

SuSE is a perfect example of how to mess up a Gnome system, KDE style menu with ugly icons, KDE apps litter the your system. The Gnome system menu has gone. Firefox has loads of preset links which I upon seeing them I instantly thought just like Windows do to IE. To top it all off where is the community? Scattered all around the internet, no central wiki or forums like with Ubuntu.

SuSE is probably a great KDE distro if you like that type of thing though I fail to see how Gnome users could stand using it, I certainly can't. I'm off to wipe it from my drive

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I have been downloading a few more Timothy Leary recordings and just heard that phrase which I think it fantastic. "Any reality is an opinion, you make up your own realities", think about if for a while. That one line pretty much sums up the whole idea of "freeing people from collective delusions and the chains of irrational social structures" which I believe is more important now than ever before in a world that is so heavily influenced by the media. So many people are unaware that they can think for themselves, they don't realise they are being strung along, being told what to do, how to behave, how to live their lives. I have influenced a friend "open his eyes" and see things from his own perspective. He described himself as feeling outcast much in the same way as I do but concluded that he would rather view things from this perspective than any other.

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Doing my end of module tests at Uni now, two down two to go. The test on Operating Systems and Networks was fairly easy, then there was the Systems in Organisations test. 500 words on how barcodes are used in supermarkets, difficult to write 500 words about that. Tomorrow is my Java test followed by HTML web development. The HTML test is going to be a real challenge

Good thing is I have two weeks of after the tests.

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