my return to college

well i have always mentioned that how lazy i am and how i always think that i always wanted to update my blog but my laziness stopped me...well not anymore, i pledge ( again :-) ) to start blogging actively this time....hehe

so to keep you guys updated on what i am doing presently is that i am back to college after 2 months of internship in singapore and it feels like i am missing something... not pretty hard to guess what i am missing...

Singapore time was real fun, it was like jumping from a village to a modern city remind you that i am doing my graduation from college which is almost in one of the most remote part of the country....so obviously it is pretty hard for me to actually come back and settle down again here...anyways, its my final year in my college and pretty much all of my friends have passed out who happened to be in 4 year course, only some of us are unlucky being in 5 yr course...

most of the time is free and is passed by involving in some form of discussion or other.. maybe i will some time soon post some of the contents of the discussion....in few words my friend summarises it as : ki hum log chutiya gaye hain....and i simply agree with him....

and yes no more linux post for now, my machine is down and probably i wont be getting it repaired anytime soon...i am content for now working on windows machine and not trying to be over adventurous.....

Those of you who have ever thought of compiling your own kernel must have googled how to do it
and may have read warnings like:

"Compiling the Linux Kernel is like playing with fire"

Well, two years of linux usage and my urge to learn more motivated me to compile the kernel, though warnings like above always made me think again. So I almost always thought of it but could never go ahead with it.

But things changed when i decided to install Gentoo from stage 1 and i almost surely knew that i could do nothing to avoid kernel compilation but do it. So what was on my mind:

"Oh dear, Why this moment had to come" :P

but then again if i wanted to build a custom system, i had to. So i went ahead and tried to customize my kernel's .config file according to my needs. Here was the time of truth, i compiled it and went for reboot with the new kernel and i was anxiously waiting whether what i did went right or not??

and YAY it did. I couldn't possibly tell you how great i felt at that time but it was an awesome feeling. That boosted my confidence and i went for more customization of my kernel and removing things which i certainly didnt need.It all went fine till i decided to rebuilt my Slackware kernel too.

Having a reiserfs as my root and /home partition meant i need to compile it right into kernel and not as a module, but silly me i did just the opposite and tried to boot the new kernel and thats when i saw the message:

Kernel panic: VFS: Unable to mount root fs

for once i wasnt able to figure out where did i went wrong but then later i realized what silly mistake i made.

Sincerely, before this whenever i saw my friends compiling kernel and talking about kernel panic, i thought it was something that could possibly cause disruption to computer hardware and it was one more reason that kept me away.hehe i know how silly i sound but thats the way it is :)

Anyways been there done that, i suppose now i am thinking of upgrading my kernel to the stable release of 2.6-24-3. I will post sometime later how it went. for the time being i would rather go and study for my exam tomorrow.

My Linux Journey

So last time i did write my blog was long time back, so u guys may think i am quite lazy as i mentioned in my last post. Well Things have been going on and i pretty much mean it, they have just been going on and i am trying my best to fit myself in :-)

More specifically, my computer had a strange motherboard dysfunction which even my vendor couldn't find out, but eventually my machine booted after 4 months of continuous boot failure. This eventually led to me unable to update my blog (which is though rarely updated :P ) and i became more of a social animal ( for which my mother always scolds me that i am not :D

Anyways, coming back to the point after almost 6 months of refraining from Linux and one month of boring windows usage, i decided to restart my Linux journey and this time be more daring. Shifting from OpenSuSe to Slackware 12.0 was my instant decision. I also had long been thinking of installing Gentoo from stage 1 which i finally decided to try out.

Slackware has been an instant hit with me and i am kind of falling in love with it. Its extremely stable though a little cumbersome in configuration and installation ( which i think SuSe has oversimplified and taken away the essence of using Linux ). Using the lightweight Xfce4 had almost instantaneous implications of being not resource hungry and giving a smooth operation on my machine which by todays standard is almost outdated.

Update on Gentoo: I am almost done with Gentoo compilation. Building the Linux kernel for the first time was though somewhat confusing but with the wealth of information provided by Gentoo wiki and my friend to back me up it went smooth with one or two minor problems which got sorted out soon. Right now i am building a custom kde rather than those shipped as a default and this has led to one more night out for me( though this is not the only reason for night out :-)

ps: I thought i would be able to build kdebase in the time when i write this blog and put some other things to compilation before i go to sleep. seems like that wont be the case.
saying you people gudnite at 8:30 am ;-)