therning.org/ magnus

A few days ago I ran into some problems after updating my kernel. It was almost certainly due to my own ignorance, however I did solve it and everything was good. Or so I thought. Yesterday I started seeing artefacts on my screen that shouldn’t be there. Squares and lines would appear out of nowhere and disappear as soon as I forced redrawing of the area. Having had problems earlier with frame buffers in Linux I listed the loaded modules. Whooaa! I didn’t spend that much money on my system. I had 133 modules loaded, just a few more than exptected. I received some help on the mailing list.

I turned on the autodetection in /etc/mkinitrd.conf and reduced the ramdisk by more than 50%. When using the --show argument for mkinitrd I noticed that a few extra filesystems were included. There’s a comment that AUTODETECT will limit the included filesystems but it didn’t seem to deliver on that promise. Modifying the list of filesystems does impact what’s included. Then I removed the entire CDROM subsystem, I really don’t need it during boot.

These are the modified lines after the changes:

REMOVE_CDROM=1

AUTODETECT=1

FILESYSTEMS=ext3

The Arch Wiki has an excellent page on initrd of course.

For the first time in years I don’t have a Ubuntu system installed at home. Over the last few weeks I’ve been playing with ArchLinux and it’s been good so far. I especially enjoy the frequent updates to the software. Ubuntu with its two releases per year has been leaving me less and less satisfied lately. Don’t get me wrong, it’s great at work where I need a system I can rely on. For home, however, I want a totally different system. I want it bleeding edge on top, with a less bloody edge at the bottom. Arch Linux gives me exactly that!

I just tried installing Dapper FT2. I suppose in attempt to see if tracking Ubuntu unstable would be an interesting hobby. The install CD’s expert mode didn’t work at all! I ended up in a cul-de-sac since it apparently doesn’t like non-networked system (yes, I’m still on a dialup!). The non-expert mode worked better, but the system didn’t boot once installed. The kernel didn’t manage to find the proper modules to deal with my SATA drive. A few hours later I had downloaded the kernel sources and had a few failed kernel compiles (some USB-related driver kept resulting in compilation errors). Once the I had a kernel that booted I decided to look at what I had installed. Oh my DOYC, a default Ubuntu system is amazingly bloated. I installed debfoster and started cleaning up. 50% of the packages went out the door… Then I stopped to think about what I was doing. Ubuntu clearly isn’t a system for me anymore. If I need a Debian-based system on my computer I’ll just go for the real thing (Sid of course) instead. My Ubuntu Dapper FT2 CD went in the bin.

I’ve just “finished” installing Arch Linux. (I don’t think I’ll ever be finished for real since Linux is such a dynamic place. However, I’ve installed enough of Arch Linux to be writing this using Epiphany, running on a slick GNOME desktop.)

So far Arch has proven to be a nice, well designed system with a lean feel to it. Being used to Debian (lately Ubuntu) and its extreme attention to detail, Arch does give a more rough impression. It’s a price I think is worth paying, and believe me, it’s not as bad as it sounds. I’ve spent about 2 hours getting the base system, postfix, X.org, and GNOME installed and configured properly. A few small details remain, but I would have to attend to those no matter what distro I choose (getting HAL to refrain from mounting one of the partitions on my USB stick isn’t something that comes pre-configured in any distro I know of :)).

The only thing left doing now is building proper Arch packages for muttng and keysafe.