Back to Gentoo ... Slowly

After a long hiatus (about several months), I returned to installing Gentoo on my Acer Ferrari 4005.  Things have certainly changed much with Gentoo.  Instead of "emerge" being the single trigger for building a whole system,  I frequently had to run "revdep-rebuild" and myriad other tools. All good but whatever happened to the solid "emerge" that I previously loved? Perhaps AMD64 platform is the one to blame. Not many distributions support it nicely. Gentoo is one of the better ones.

I will chronicle my adventure as I proceed to building a fully functional Gentoo desktop on my Acer Ferrari 4005. So far, some interesting catches:

• ati-drivers took a lot of retries to install correctly. I had to run revdep-rebuild once to correct the issues with libexpat.so.0
  
• Had to reemerge xorg-server and xorg-x11 a few times with minor glitches. One of which was pci.ids error. Very weird. Googling produced a clue from a non-English site. I ended up running update-pciids to generate a new pci.ids.gz. But then again, hal was repeatedly failing since it couldn't locate pci.ids. So, I ended up manually gunzip'ing /usr/share/misc/pci.ids.gz. Emerging gnome is somewhat back on track.
• opera works great. Fast as ever.

Sun TV programs for Pongal celebrations

 Cinema filled Sun TV's special programs for the Pongal celebration:

• Interviews with cine stars (lots of them :)
  
• Cine stars reminiscing about their childhood, schooling, friends and movies
• Paid commercials about upcoming/recently released movies
• Movies ("Thiraikku Vanthu Sila madhangale ona"-type)
• Songs from new movies

One nice exception was the Patti Manram (Debate in Tamil) which was really of high quality. The debate was about whether "Academic Education" or "Experience" is the most needed attribute for success. 

The judge "Salomon Pappaiya" is an experienced hand that correctly judged that 
"Academic education" is less worthy than "real experience" finally after a very
humorous and thought-provoking debate by debaters. Perennial favorite "Raja" and "Bharati Bhaskar" were available. India really 
needs thinkers like this gang to advance to a super power. Kudos to this team !!!

Happy PONGAL !!!

I heard a wonderful talk by Suki. Sivam on Sun TV about Pongal. I am constantly amazed at Suki.Sivam's clarity and lucidity in the way he presents his ideas and talks. Kudos!!

He explained that Pongal stands for thanking Sun God (Surya) and it is scheduled on the day the earth traverses from Southfacing direction to Northfacing direction in its rotation.

Pongal is celebrated very heavily in Tamilnadu with two days of holidays and fun. Nice way to start a new year!!!

Also of interest is the Tamil proverb "Thai Pirandal Vali Pirakkum" (When the month of Thai is born, a new way will be found -- generally good).  So, goodness all around.

Chennai Engira Madras

This blog is dedicated to Chennai, Tamilnadu, India formerly known as Madras.

• General information
• Titbits
• Interesting viewpoints from yours truly
• etc
• etc

Only constant thread

 There is really one constant thread in all our lives that never changes. That is a reference point by which we can measure our own changes and the changes that happen around us. That reference point is God.

He is always the same. Our lives, in a sense, resemble, rollercoaster rides. We never know what is going to happen next and how the ride is going to be -- up, down, turn right or left, bump up or down.

Best strategy is to just hold on to your handles and just enjoy or observe the ride as it happens.

Happy new year to everyone!!!!