An Exercise In Futility

After hours of messing around, I was able to get linux to boot, and i’m happy to say that the problems were simply due to me having overlooked some things during kernel configuration. The first problem I encountered was a kernel panic mere jiffies after the kernel was loaded. As it turned out, my .config was set up to force compilation for an Athlon/Duron, but this particular box was a PII. After that was fixed, i began to encounter a different kernel panic when it was trying to mount the root file system. The error was “unable to mount root fs on unknown block(3,2)”. After reading a lot of newsgroup (er, forum) posts, i figured it must be one of several things: no dos partition support, no ext2 support, or no IDE chipset support. I knew for sure i had configured the first two. When i checked out the kernel config, sure enough i had left “default/generic ide chipset support” unchecked. whoops!

So i decided to install solaris, as a first step in getting a J2EE server running, etc. Well, as it turns out, i don’t have enough RAM to install solaris, since all i have are 32MB SIMMs, and motherboards with 3 slots. So i decided, ok, i will forego solaris for now, and just install gentoo on this one particular machine, and put J2EE stuff on there. The machine already had debian running, but from what i had read there were incompatibilities with debian and sun licensing (and other things i wanted) so i would not be able to get the .deb packages i needed. So i go through the whole gentoo install process, and build a kernel, etc, and the effing kernel panics immediately on boot. I spent all evening trying to resolve this with no luck so far.

While trying to find out how i could possibly build my livingroom music player using J2EE, i found this neat thing called java incubators, which provides some APIs for communicating with software outside of the JVM. They are part of JDIC, and at this point i don’t know if they would work with J2EE or not. If not i’m afraid i might have to go with ye olde perl scripts instead of java for this particular project.. grr..

As you know i don’t do “new year’s resolutions”, i’d much rather be decisive and get on with changing my ways as soon as i detect a problem. Plus there is the whole issue of chronological time being sort of meaningless and arbitrary in the whole scheme of things. However, i suppose it is useful as far as *planning* goes, or having some sort of metric for trend analysis… or recordkeeping. In 2006 i don’t seem to have accomplished very much… i got the hallway drywalled and painted, and the tile and laminate down, but there is still trimwork to do. Kitchen carpet was removed, ceiling in the spare room was repaired but has not yet been textured. Parts of the attic were re-insulated; pantry closet was built in the basement, back yard perimeter fence was partially completed.. and some more terracing work was done in the yard. Hmm, i guess that is not too bad after all