I spent part of yesterday setting up a Chroot for testing packages that are in need of becoming stable. Its a fairly easy process that will allow you to do a lot of testing without breaking or creating bloat in my main system. Much like the install guide you create a directory to install the chroot to and download a stage3, we’re after getting it setup quickly speed is a secondary concern really, and unpack it. Next is the slightly different process. Since we are in a live system, we need to mount with –bind a few directories of the live system (as you can tell right now this isn’t a secure chroot, but its not something we need as well) to the chroot directory. These are the following that should be mounted: /proc, /dev, devpts, /usr/portage so you don’t have to sync multiple trees on the same system. You might want to mount portage as ro depending on what you are doing. /usr/src/linux, so that kernel related stuff will still build, /lib/modules, /sys for all your system information, and finally /tmp.

With all that mounted you should be able to now chroot to your new environment and start updating packages to the latest stable x86 versions.

Now for the fun part. If you have a laptop, you don’t generally want to sit in front of the desktop that you might be using as your dev box. So lets setup a remote X system. As I’m a minimalist on packages, we’ll use something built into Xorg itself, note I’ve not used modular so I’m not sure if its part of the core install or something that is in a tertiary package. The program is called Xnest, and as you can probably guess it allows you to nest a remote X system in a window. This does however require some configuration on the host machine. Please also note that the following instructions allow anyone to connect to the remote X session if they know the address. Not something you’d generally want. So either limit it to hosts or only from internally on the network.

The first step to allowing Xnest to work is to change /etc/X11/xdm/xdm-config and comment out the following:

! SECURITY: do not listen for XDMCP or Chooser requests
! Comment out this line if you want to manage X terminals with xdm
DisplayManager.requestPort: 0

Once that is done, edit the /etc/X11/xdm/Xaccess file to either allow all users with * or select users via addresses.

For gdm or kdm users in your /etc/X11/[g-k]dm/conf files there’s a line that says xdmcp=false, change that to true.

You should be able to restart your dm at that point and on a remote box do a Xnest -query (host ip) :1 and see the login manager of your choice. I haven’t gotten it to work in a chroot yet but in the main system it works beautifully, and oddly enough allows chroot gui applications to mostly run on the non chroot X session.

Give it a try, and see how you like it. I know for me its far faster then windows remote desktop, that I use on a daily basis. Also of note is tsclient, a gtk2 front end for rdesktop that also supports xnest. I havent’ tried it but compnerd has and swears that its the greatest thing since sliced bread.

Hope this helps a few of you with setting up chroots and a new fairly easy remote system with X. It can also be run over ssh but I’ve not bothered with it yet. When/if I do I’ll let you all know about it.

Thought this might be interesting to a few of you. As most of you can know, and if you don’t I sure hope this is your first visit. That I’m a linux person. However, I don’t run just one os on my dev box, because it also serves as my gaming box. Since I got two identical drives, I decided to do a raid array. I’ve never set one up and decided it’d be fun. This is naturally mistake number one when it concerns installing Windows. *note linux people I am installing gentoo as we speak so I’m not a traitor* The following is my experiences with installing with raid in linux and windows.

Boot up windows and just sort of scratch my head as to why its not recognizing the raid array since it supposedly loading the proper driver. I try the normal nvidia slots and still get nowhere. Little do I know I need to make a boot disc (without having a floppy drive) that has the driver on it. Get that done after I rip apart another box for its floppy. Start the windows install and just wow at the speed of the Raptor 10k drives.

After the setup files copy and the first reboot happens , I start counting how man it takes to have a fully patched updated system. Take a guess at how many it took…come on guess. Good; I assume you have a number now. It will hopefully be 16 reboots to get windows patched and add the drivers for my nvidia cards. That’s a LOT of rebooting to get a operating system running in a fairly secure method. This also includes downloading over 400 meg worth of patches. For those interested that’s about 3.8 times the size of the open office source. With all the reboots and hunting down the software I actually needed, it ended up taking 4-5 hours. Microsoft listen well, your 1 hour install time is in reality a 4-5 hour grueling process of frustration. Vista better have usb driver loading ability at a minimum. If i can boot off usb, I better be able to load drivers from it.

Now tonight I’m doing the linux install. What’s the requirements for getting my raid to work….modprobe raid(level), making a few nodes, and running the following a number of times # mdadm –create –verbose /dev/md0 –level=1 –raid-devices=2 /dev/sda1 /dev/sdb1. That’s it. Not a hassle really. Now because of gentoo being from source, my install is still going 5 hours later, but I’ve had a working system that is really only doing updating of packages for 4 hours of that. Course with the number of times I’ve installed gentoo I can do it mostly blindfolded. Only real mistake I made was missing one driver for the raid, and causing a kernel panic.

I’m happy with linux, and I’m back to stabilizing things once again. I’m happy about that, since I’ve been annoyed at just being able to only advise people.

looking forward to your bugs.

Also come join us in #gentoo-x86 to help us out with testing. We can use it, especially if you would like to see x86 stable the way stable is meant to be said not in those silly quotation marks.

P.S. for you Gentopia users I maintain a backup of the project for just such occasions as its going down (note no updates are added here but you can download the last active ones) from this location

ParadoxHeart, was kind enough to help me with my problem with IE. It should now look okie along with everyone else. She’s in England for you ladies out there

On other notes, I’ve updated rufus to a 0.7.0 bump and it works fine, I’m still trying to communicate with upstream (where’s the IRC channel when you need one).

Another project I’m working on is avisynth for linux. The 3.0 branch builds with linux I just have to create a checkout for the cvs and create tar’s of them. Look for that in the future. If you don’t know what avisynth is, then a short description will do well. Its a frameserver for windows and linux that is amazingly easy to code for. Coming from the windows world, I’ve sorely missed being able to use it. I’ll be following it closely, so you might want to keep a eye here for updates about it.

I’m excited