So, after giving up in disgust on the PyOpenGL 2.1 work, I decided that I was in the mood for something fairly mechanical. Since the Athlon (original Athlon, not XP, not 64) has been sitting unused since I built the Athlon64, I decided to install Gentoo on it and get started on building an IMAP and Samba server (as well as a backup desktop).

The only real problem (and it did eat a few hours) is that the BIOS on the machine is really flaky (which is why I retired the motherboard from duty as my primary workstation), so the floppy and CD-ROM drives both wind up becoming unreadable after the machine has been loaded for a while. Because of that I wound up re-downloading the stage-file and packages CD from a mirror rather than just copying it from a real CD (after trying it the "easy" way a dozen times or so).

Hint for Windows refugees, do not set the -march flag when using Gentoo! When you do, GCC compiles assembly-language code into your executables that will require a complete wipe-and-reinstall if you happen to switch processors (e.g. going from a PIII to an Athlon (or vice-versa)).

Sure, the binaries will be a bit slower, but without it you lose that ability to move disks from one machine to the other (which is common when working with Windows machines).

Also, use a stage3 tarball from a "universal install" CD and the Gentoo Reference Platform (a.k.a. the packages-CD) with emerge -pvK to get to a working Windows-like setup in about the same amount of time as a Win2K setup. Again, not particularly optimised for your architecture, but those optimisations tend to screw you over anyway.

Need to figure out how to keep setup-and-data (separate) backups eventually, but probably not until I start moving over to working in it as my main environment. Too bad the BIOS is messed up, would be nice to have it do automated backups to a CD-RW every so often. Oh well.

Oh, speaking of CDs, finally fixed Rosey's CD-R, was set to use PIO only (as distinct from DMA), so would only do 1x recording (instead of 4x, which is what it should allow).

I want to do some serious work on Cinemon this evening, but oh how I want to take a nap first...