I've spent the last few hours to fighting udev. It just wouldn't do what it was being told to. After taking many different paths, it so happens that I had named the rules file 25-lfs-rules instead of 25-lfs.rules. This fixes the permissions so people can now write to /dev/null (and other stuff). It doesn't sound very exciting, but considering that this happens for every node, it's something we really should have working.

Now that I have this system up, I've no excuse for not helping out with the ACX100/111 driver. The latest version breaks horribly, but it might just be my setup. I'll see when it breaks.

Right, my server is almost ready. I just need to get the kernel, which surprisingly enough I've managed not to keep and it's coming in quite slowly. It wouldn't be so bad, but the network keeps falling out so I need to restart the download, which my desktop (through which everything goes at the moment) only allows after a while. Why? I stopped wondering some time ago with regard to Windows and networks.

I expect for the server to be fully operational tomorrow midday, maybe with the exception of the wireless connectivity. On the one side, I have to hand-write the start-up script for it, and on the other, I have to use ndiswrapper for one card, and a not-so-stable driver on the other. It works, I've seen it work, I've patched it to work (actually compile, but let's not go there) and the only real problem is that I need to use the USB one.

It still amazes me how after so much time, you still can't get two computers showing non-ASCII characters the same way. I still can't manage to transfer accented/umlauted vowels or letters with "drawings around them" (by which I mean ñ, ç and the like) correctly.

I'm trying to standarize on UTF-8, which would show promise if everyone else decided to join in. At home, I've decided to use that so I can host my files on the server and download them from any OS or architecture and have it display the same. I've managed to do it (more or less) with PuTTY, emacs and bash, but much work is still needed.

Whilst trying to reclaim some space on the hard drive, I managed to screw up several times, so the reiserfs partition is absolutely screwed.

First, /bin was gone. I managed to recover some of it through fsck and /lost+found, set grub up so it would boot properly, but the kernel (or init, or whoever insists in mounting root as read-only and not executing any of the rc commands, which means all I get is a prompt, and can't even log in because I can't change to /dev/tty1 because the filesystem is read-only. Or so says getty.

I'll hopefully get a wireless AP tomorrow, so I can connect the computers without having to move one from one side to the other of the room or having to use external drives or the laptop. All I'll need then is a card that's properly supported by Linux and all will[0] be set to go.

[0] How about all'll? Hmm, the spellchecker doesn't like it...

I managed to build OpenZaurus using OpenEmbedded. This needs around 3.5GB, which I don't really have at the moment on my /home partition, so the kernel dir now resides on root. I'll try to reclaim more space from SuSE later on with KNOPPIX, because that's just wasted space at the moment.

Spent all day yesterday at the lake in Sanabria. Nice, but really tiring for some reason.

I finally solved the dead-computer problem with KioPa. The PSU gave up, although not quite. The green LED on the board lights up, but it won't power on, so I'm now using the PSU that came from indy. It will get the PSU from the P3 (without a name) and we'll see how it goes.

It also turns out that the huge 17" monitor has two bent pins shorting on the VGA connector, which explains why it was zapping me. The TFT has been used in its place.

Transmitting a 4G file over Ethernet was fun. No problems kiwi->pepe but apache on pepe would return an empty document, which sort of defeats the point. At first I though it was a problem with the file size, but then I remembered that pepe is a 64-bit machine. Figuring this one out is going to prove interesting. I finally had to move it over using the iRiver jukebox. Ridiculous.

So, finally at home. The Internet connection gets cut for no apparent reason at some point in the night, and works again in the late afternoon. They blame power cuts. Since I don't know where the computer that handles DHCP and routing is, I cannot know whether this is actually true or not.

Thanks to the time the connection does work, I've managed to download the LFS LiveCD and will start building the server tomorrow. The big problem is how to get internet connection to that computer. the AP seems busted, so no Wi-Fi at home. Right now the laptop is using a Cat5 to connect to the Windows box, which is the only one which gets some sort of decent connection. I either need a longer cable or a new AP.

I was thinking about the new AP from some time ago anyway, but the main problem right now is getting drivers for the cards. The new server has a Broadcom chipset which only works with ndiswrapper. Now, I'd rather not use that and buy a card with proper Linux support. Some 802.11g card and a correspoing AP would make my day.

I'm going to make a sacrificial box out of a PIII with not much memory (I've no idea how much it's got) and this one can be connected through Ethernet to my desktop (as soon as I get one working) or laptop, as it shouldn't really have anything to do with any other box.