Category: Gentoo

My stubbornness is the stuff of legend and much maligned by some people that know me. I very, very rarely quit or give up on something. Even more so when it is something that is simple that just doesn’t do what it’s supposed to.

Enter this little shitbag, the HP ProBook 4340s.

Rather a nice little 13″ laptop. Aluminum construction, decent i5 with 4gb of RAM and a 120gb SSD. Sounds like a great little Gentoo machine, right?

Well, despite my best efforts, I cannot get this little bastard to boot into legacy mode. Before you ask, I’ve been a sysadmin for 10+ years, and know how to set all the BIOS options. I managed to track down some BIOS updates even though HPs website lists none for the serial number based search I did for my particular machine.

Some of you may say, “Just use UEFI?”

No, I will not, and do not want to use UEFI. Same with my aversion to Pulseaudio and systemd. I don’t like them, and will avoid using them when I can. The laptop running Gentoo isn’t a necessity, I have a Macbook Pro already. It was more to play with, do a little more learning about Gentoo and possibly as a package testing machine. I still plan to move my desktop rig to Gentoo when time allows. It’s the household Plex server currently so I basically need to plan outages.

I think I will sell the Probook, and maybe pick up a favourite of mine, the Thinkpad X220. We will see.

WhileI was installing Gentoo on my Toshiba today, going through the same motions I’ve done many times before, I had to smile. I remember the ludicrous compile times and the heart in mouth moments during that first boot waiting to see if you had a working system.

Now, thanks to superb Gentoo documentation that I think has clearly taken a leaf from the Arch wiki, installing Gentoo is almost uneventful. Compile times are way better (depending on package of course) and with the Linux kernel hardware support being so great, it pretty well just works.

I only got the base install done today. Dad life means I have to spread my time around other duties, but I can continue later on.

So I’ve decided to make a return to gentoo linux after a bit of a break. I have a laptop I need to replace the hard drive in that will be getting the gentoo treatment, so I thought in the mean time i would run up a VM on my work PC and configure things the way i like them and sync the dotfiles to git.

I’ve installed and used gentoo many times so this wasn’t much in the way of coming to grips with a new distribution. The only anomaly that I hadn’t experienced before was with feh which I use for setting the background image for my desktop. It uses the imlib2 library and it wasn’t compiled with support for JPG images. As usual with gentoo though, adding a USE flag for the application and recompiling fixed the issue and all works well.

I also used genkernel for this VM which is a the lazy way, but it works and isn’t so bad these days on modern hardware.

I would like to make and keep this blog active again so let’s see how we go in the future.