October 2005

Yep, after 2 power failures, weeks of anticipation, and much hair pulling on my part (good thing though, I need a haircut anyways), the full set of stages is finally built and uploaded. You can find them on my devspace in the usual place.

These haven’t undergone much in the way of testing… so it would be greatly appreciated if some brave souls could give these a try and report back on how they go. All going well, we should be able to get these pushed out to mirrors by the end of the month. 🙂

I’ll also start knocking up some new netboot images shortly. The new images will differ from the old ones, in that you will no longer have to download and extract CoLo into /nfsroot. I’m planning to produce images which can just be untarred directly into /nfsroot, and contain all the necessary files for boot. It’d also be nice to rid ourselves with the past time of mucking with the shell. All going well here, I’ll be re-writing that section of the handbook, and things should become significantly more simpler.

But we’ll see — for now I’m breathing a sigh of relief, but soon I’ll be back into the slog that is end-of-semester exams, so I don’t have long just now. Likely, this will be a summer holiday project. (Yes, for those of you playing along in the Northern Hemisphere…temperatures are warming up down here in Brisbane.)

As always, I’ll keep you posted on further notices, and I’m usually online if people wish to contact me.
Regards,
Stuart Longland

Well, ain’t it lovely… I’m busy fixing a few things up in a local CVS repository…. I hit cvs commit, as you do… then all a sudden the lights go out, my screen goes blank, and I’m left in the dark — totally silent except two computer UPS’s screaming about the loss of power. As for my stage 3 tarball compilation on my Qube2 … up in smoke.

So I get up, and crash around in the dark looking for my torch so I can check the meter box (it hasn’t been unusual for the earth leakage to trip out without reason). No sooner do I get just 3 meters, the lights come back on. Okay, fine, it was late, so I just switched the rest of my computer off (namely the monitor, desklamp and tuner) and headded for bed. Then the power fails again. Lovely.

I found a torch and went looking at the meter box… Hrmm, not our end, and looking around, I see other people looking around in the darkness. Unfortunately in this case, the outage lasts longer than my UPS’s can supply power — so we go offline.

The power was restored at around 1:00AM, but unfortunately this means my compile for the Cobalt stages is now put back a whole couple of days, as the build must now start again. I’ve now pieced my network back together (namely a couple of IRC bots were offline, and my IPv6 tunnel was nonfunctional) and so I’m back online again.

Hopefully there won’t be any further interruptions, and this build can progress right to the end. 🙂

Well I’ve fixed it. After a lot of arguments with my Qube2, I finally have a stage 1 tarball for 2005.1, with stage 2 and 3 tarballs on the way.

I’ll be uploading the stage 1 tarball shortly (tomorrow in fact, as QUT has a slightly faster pipe, and it costs me nothing to upload there), and will upload the stage 2 and 3 ones later as they are built.

I’ll also be uploading binpkg’s, for those who wish to just upgrade their existing Cobalts to the latest Gentoo release.

So yeah, Gentoo/MIPS Cobalt 2005.1 comming soon, to a mirror near you. 🙂