My Digital Self

In the beginning
I started of my computing career with a second hand Commodore VIC-20, I was around 7 or 8 years old at the time (that's 1987-1988, I was born in 1980). Shortly after the VIC I got a brand new Commodore 64 as a present from my parents, from my C64 days I recall quite vividly playing a lot of Giana Sisters, F-15 Strike Eagle and a game about M1 Abrams Main Battle Tank. I also got my first introduction to programming with C64's Basic.

After the Commodores I had a quite long pause until I got my first PC, although I was a very reqular quest at my friends who already had their own PC's. I think I was around 14 years old when my family bought a 90mhz Pentium desktop and it was so cool I was almost torn in half in excitement. The operating system then was of course DOS and Windows 3 and a bit later Windows 95. Funny to think that in this point Linus Torvalds had already released 1.0 version of Linux Kernel, but I was not aware of it, not at all.

Since then I've had several desktops and a occasional laptop. From 1994-2004 I was using first Windows 3, then Win95, Win98, Win2000 and then Windows XP. I was always very curious about the operating systems and how to tweak them to their maximum performance, that was mainly because I never could afford to buy the absolute latest and greatest hardware available. So I have a good decade of experience in different Windows systems.


First touch with Linux
My first serious experience with Linux was at my summer job during 2004. The job was at one the biggest IT corporations in Finland and I was tasked testing software that ran on UNIX platform. I don't remember anymore what gave me the push to install Linux to one extra computer that I had at work, but I soon noticed that my work (connecting to various UNIX servers, debugging them and so on) got much easier with Linux. The distribution I installed (at that point I didn't know there were others) was Red Hat, but I soon found out about the new Fedora Core project and decided to install Fedora Core 1 at home desktop to dual boot with Windows XP.

Fedora Core 1 did not actually impress me that much at the time, I found it to be quite unstable, requiring quite a lot of manual configuration to get basic things working and, being a newbie with Linux, quite easy to break. So I continued using Windows XP as my main OS, playing computer games was a big hobby of mine then anyway, but I recognized the potential that Linux held.


Age of nerdism
I think it was around fall 2004 that I dreamed up a nice PC customization project. I decided to try and fit a small Pentium motherboard inside a old Sony cassette tape player to make a retro looking MP3 player. I managed to fit the motherboard with 200mhz Pentium CPU and 96MB RAM, heavily stripped power supply unit, 3.5" hard drive, a sound card, a network card and a video card inside the little cassette player (quite like the one above). I even managed to install Debian on it, but partly because I faced some problems configuring Debian to work with my hardware and partly because I was worried about burning down my flat, the project got abandoned.

After the MP3 project I quickly tested Fedora Core2 and Mandrake on my desktop, I still was not convinced enough to stop using Windows XP but then along came SUSE. I was sold from the start. It recognized all my hardware and the configuration with YaST was so easy that I actually was very impressed and from that point on (end of 2004) SUSE or later openSuSE has been the main OS on my desktop. Although I still sometimes boot to XP to play a occasional game, it is Linux 99% of time. I even had couple of years there when I was completely Windows-free.

During past years besides running openSuSE on my personal desktops and laptops, I've created three HTPC/DVR's using Gentoo (one for myself, one for my parents and one for my little brother), I've run Ubuntu on my work laptop for a year, since then installed both my work machines to run openSuSE and been recognized as RHCE. Nowadays I work as a Qt software developer and besides the day-to-day development work I also administer four Linux continuous integration servers for our software project.

So in summary, it could be said that The Penguin has been good for me. I think it is time to give something back to the community and that starts in my next post.

Widening the scope

This blog started off as my personal diary, sort of, marking down my steps to Linux HTPC nirvana. Since the HTPC has been working pretty much flawlessly and I've been reluctant to fiddle with it, there has not been nothing to write about lately. So as of now I'm widening the scope of this blog to include also other things digital, besides just Linux and it's uses in HTPC.

The original intent of the blog will be tested soon. I've ordered couple new terabyte hard drives for my HTPC and they will house the new installation, actually the fourth incarnation of my personal HTPC. New drives are necessary because I don't want to lose my current setup so I've something to fall back onto in case something goes "horribly wrong". The old blog entries should come handy when I start anew, albeit this time around it will be Debian Linux not Gentoo. But more about that later on.

What those "other things digital", that I mentioned in the beginning of the entry, will be, I do not know yet. One idea is to blog about digital photography, a dear hobby of mine. Second thing is that I've been testing my mettle in screencasting lately and I would like to dedicate few blog entries to them next.

Trying to evolve

We Finns have proverb about learning by "kantapään kautta", basically that means that we learn from our mistakes. This must be the one of most painful methods of education, but it sure is effective. If you are wondering what I am babbling about, then please read my first blog entry, because this entry is about BACKUPS.


An easy and pretty fast way to make a backup of Gentoo installation is by using script called Stage4. This archives your root partition either into single or multiple gzip's or bz2's. The script is easy to use and does not need much configuration. I am currently running it with default settings. During my first backup my root partition used 2.7GB and was compressed to 552MB. I am storing the backup-archive on my workstation, because even I cant wipe out two computers at once.

You can download the stage4-script from here. I advice you to read through it, the configuration is in the beginning, it is very well documented and is not that long. But basically you just drop the file to /usr/local/bin, chmod it to have execute rights and then execute the script. Script reports problems if there are some and the output is pretty self explanatory. Hopefully you don't have to learn the restoration process, but if you do, it is documented in the wiki.

Once my installation is ready, or at least "more complete", I will be writing a script that makes stage4 archive every week or so, and then transfers it to ftp-server. I also am planning on cloning the whole partition with a tool like dd or partimage, latter being a better (and more complicated) solution, because it does not backup the empty space on a partition. Current situation with my mirrored root drive gives some protection against a hardware malfunction, but offers only little against user mistakes.

So for the time being I am making stage4 archives from my root partition as backups and if you are using Gentoo, I advice you to do at least the same.

Starting a new blog

Few nights ago I managed to corrupt my root-partition on my Linux-based HTPC machine. I was a little tired when migrating the system to RAID1 configuration, didn't make complete backups, and of course managed to hose things pretty badly. Ironically my objective was to make my system more durable by mirroring the system disk to second hard drive. Long story short, reiser filesystem in my / (root) partition is corrupted and no amount of reiserfsck-magic can make it whole again. So now I need to re-install the whole Gentoo based operating system.

At least that serves as a good learning experience, I am going to be more diligent about making backups from now on. This blog serves as a method to "back up" information about my installation process, so I have someplace to refer to when I am installing new HTPC system and can not exactly remember what needs to be done. Gentoo installation itself can be quite complicated process (at least when compared to easy-to-use modern distros like OpenSuse and Ubuntu) and making it fully HTPC cabable is not easy either.

And who knows, maybe this blog can help someone facing same problems.