Saturday, December 30, 2006

Recompiling my Linux

Somehow, my Xserver just hung everytime I browse some sites, especially the ones with script. That was one of the reasons I almost rebuilt all my Linux components from scratch. From kernel, XWindow, QT, KDE, DBUS, Apache and many others.

Compiling those libraries and applications are not always staright forward. Many of them are dependent each other (causing circular/loop dependencies). Others are out-of-date or too old hence would not compile with the latest GCC/kernel. I had to hand-fix them manually. You know it was not easy at all to fix these broken codes, but luckily I enjoyed it and learned a lot by doing it. Google is still my best tool to search missing components or how-tos.

Now, my machine had been running (almost) the latest libraries available at the time I wrote this blog. I also always enabled optimization with -mtune=pentium3 -msse. Also, if possible and available, I turned on POSIX threads as well. The kernel recognized my dual-processor chips as well, so I ran folding@home application and it showed (by 'top' tool) that the application uses one of the processor to do its very extensive biological chemistry computation.

I am still having problem making PHP run from Apache. Somehow it could not recognize/interpret PHP commands and just showed error. I will try again later if I have time. Oh, by the way, I could make the perl cgi work. It was just a configuration issue (fault from my side!).

I think I will take easy and relax now to concentrate more on my work, study and research (and perhaps pursuing my professional certifications). See you again in year 2007! (hopefully I still work on the same job).