Jumping In
Oops. So much for being all patient and waiting until summer vacation. I played with the Freesbie LiveCD last night and my computer didn’t blow up. I was only able to get X running with the vesa driver and I didn’t even try to get my wireless card working, but I spent over an hour playing with the system internals and frankly, it wasn’t that scary. Then something happened which made me feel like advancing my schedule for trying out FreeBSD. And it was through no fault of Gentoo’s.
When I went to boot from the Freesbie LiveCD, I forgot to choose CD as a temporary startup device and linux started to boot. Well I didn’t want to wait for it to load, login, and then restart again, so I quickly popped the power button. It was just as the system was starting and only one partition had been mounted. But lo and behold, after I was through playing with FreeBSD, I rebooted into linux to find all my jfs partition tables scrambled. Normally, not a big deal for me. Just log in as my normal user, su into root, and run a simple little bash loop on all the partitions using jfs:
vault ~ # for i in /dev/sda8 /dev/sda9 /dev/sda10 /dev/sda11; do fsck.jfs $i; done
There was only one problem this time. I had been playing with the Z shell for the last few days and had just switched my normal user and root over to use it as default instead of bash. Well! Turns out zsh needs a certain .so file that is kept in the /usr partition. Not very smart, if you ask me. I feel like the shell, of all things, should be as self contained as possible. Anyway, needless to say, my new default shell barfed on me after it couldn’t find the files it needed, and I was stranded. Yeah yeah, I could have maybe used Freesbie and done a chroot, but… what a pain. Finally my girlfriend came home and I had her sign in under her account name, which I had not switched the shell on. Then su - and did my little magic. But still! What a royal pain that was.
So here I am. I just backed up all my stuff, and wiped the hard drive clean ;-)
I’m going to be trying ZFS as my file system following this tutorial. More news and HOWTOs later.
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