Gentoo on an i486DX2/66 12:19 PM, 0 Comments

I have resurrected my old computer, Dora, from 10 years ago, 1994. I Pulled the old motherboard out of a drawer. It was my only computer that didn't have a fan on it. (besides the apple II way back when). I don't know why I did this, I guess it was fun to see if I all that old hardware still works. I went through a bunch of old SIMMs to find my highest capacity memory that doesn't have bad bits in it after finding that it kept crashing whenever I did a memory intensive thing during the install, like formatting a larger capacity partition. It has a whopping 32 megabytes of non-EDO ram. I could have put in 128M of EDO ram, but the motherboard pukes on EDO. The bios only recognizes up to two gigabytes on a hard drive. Sheesh. I've got an old adaptec 1520, on the isa bus, controlling a 2 gig hard drive (getting a PCI adaptec card would likely speed things up). Believe it or not, plug-and-play existed back in 1994, and I have an old 3Com 3c509B card that follows the ISA plug-and-play spec.

The impressive thing about this, is I'm running Gentoo on it. Gentoo! For those of you who don't know, Gentoo doesn't distribute binary packages. It is all compiled from scratch so that you can optimally compile the software for your exact hardware. Well, I admit, I'm still working on compiling stuff. It's currently compiling ntpd. I'm trying to get portage to stop timing out when it goes out to distcc to go out to out to my faster box to compile stuff. When I compile stuff manually, distcc works great, but portage thinks it takes too long, I guess.

But, it's up and running. Don't ask me about forgetting to connect and turn on the "Turbo" button. Ugh. Suffice it to say, it was VERY slow for a while there... I'll put the cpuinfo output below. 32.32 bogomips (without the turbo on, it was 11 bogomips). The coolest thing is that it doesn't sound like a cyclone. The loudest thing is the hard drive.

troy@dora:/etc# cat /proc/cpuinfo
processor       : 0
vendor_id       : GenuineIntel
cpu family      : 4
model           : 3
model name      : 486 DX/2
stepping        : 5
fdiv_bug        : no
hlt_bug         : no
f00f_bug        : no
coma_bug        : no
fpu             : yes
fpu_exception   : yes
cpuid level     : 1
wp              : yes
flags           : fpu vme
bogomips        : 32.32

S/MIME pkcs12 keys in Evolution 1.5.93 11:59 AM, 0 Comments

My bugzilla for importing pkcs12 keys into evolution has been fixed! They committed it to the 2.0 branch though. Since I'm all into the s/mime thing, I edited the file myself with their change, and it worked! Here's the change.