Archives for October 2005

Yesterday, I decided to update my Gentoo Linux computer I use at work by doing a nice:


emerge --sync
emerge -avuDN world


I then switched off the computer monitor (thanks Ajay :-)) and went home. Imagine my surprise when I switched it on this morning to see this very frightening error message:


* Configuring system to use udev ...
/sbin/rc: line 93: 1076 Segmentation fault /sbin/udevstart


followed by something which looked like:


fsck.ext3 No such file or directory while trying to openb /dev/hda2
/dev/hda2 : The superblock could not be read or does ot describe a correct ext3 filesystem. Filesystem could not be fixed. Give root password for maintenance or Ctrl-D to continue


What happened is that, during the upgrade process, udev-068 was replaced by a flawed udev-70 which basically segfaults when used. As a result, no devices (i.e. no disks partitions) were created in /dev hence the kernel panic.

The solution is, obviously, to downgrade to udev-68.

I did it using a Fedora Core 4 bootable CD-ROM in Linux rescue mode (as I did not have a Gentoo Linux CD-ROM handy) :


# Display the list of partitions
fdisk -l

# Mount the partitions
mkdir /mnt/gentoo
mount -t ext3 /dev/hdaX /mnt/gentoo
mount -t ext3 /dev/hdaY /mnt/gentoo/boot
...

# and proc
mount -t proc none /mnt/gentoo/proc

# get in Gentoo
chroot /mnt/gentoo
source /etc/profile

# downgrade udev
echo "=sys-fs/udev-070" >> /etc/portage/package.mask
emerge -av udev


and rebooted my PC :-)

This procedure is also explained/described here, here,
here and also here.

Important : udev-070-r1 has since been released which corrects the bug.

An update : It is possible to boot without using udev by passing “gentoo=noudev” to the kernel (via grub). You just have to downgrade to 068 or upgrade to 070-r1 for everything to work. It’s much easier than using a bootable CD-ROM.

OpenOffice.org 2.0 has been released today!

From the website, OpenOffice.org 2.0 is an open, feature-rich multi-platform office productivity suite. The user interface and the functionality is very similar to other products in the market like Microsoft Office or Lotus SmartSuite, but in contrast to these commercial products OpenOffice.org is absolutely free.

It contains a word processor, a powerful spreadsheet, a multimedia presentation software, a vectorial drawing application and a database frontend.

OpenOffice.org 2.0 has a lot of features. Some of those are:

• OASIS OpenDocument is the native file format. For those who live on another planet, this format will become the de-facto standard for document interchange in the coming years.
• Nearly perfect (in my opinion) compatibility with Microsoft Office documents (read/write Word/Excel/Powerpoint files).
• Perfect PDF export.
• Multiplatform. The softwars runs natively on Linux, Windows and Solaris and two ports to Mac OS X are also available (X11-based and native Aqua/Cocoa/Java).

Personally, I’ve been using OpenOffice.org 1.1 for years (I don’t have Microsoft Office either at home or at work!). I switched to 2.0 about two months ago (when it was still beta) and I’ve had ZERO problems.

I have a little secret to tell you. OpenOffice.org Writer may be a fantastic word-processor and may be a strong competitor to Microsoft Word, but the diminutive LyX (which basically is a nice graphical frontend to LaTeX) is the BEST application to use to write documents. Try it too. I’m sure you will be nicely surprised!

Le Roi est mort, vive le Roi! Mais, n’oubliez pas la petite Reine :-)