I’m telling the tale of two new boxes in my network, that are being tested and used all day long.
Intrepid is, as you might have already read, my new MacBook Pro Core2Duo, on which today I started to install Gentoo Linux (AMD64 of course). Unfortunately, well, I got into a little problem when I started installing, because I partitioned using fdisk after running BootCamp, so then GPT and MBR were out of sync, and both OSX and rEFIt weren’t sure of what was going on. I then decided to copy all the content of the installed root and then restarted from scratch.
As I wanted to have a swap partition (just to be safe, or if I ever decide to use software suspend), I then decided to first create the Windows partition with BootCamp, and then fiddle with the partitions directly on the GPT. Thanks to Daniel Ostrow, I then used the same method used on IA64 (GNU parted), and the result is, well, that the partitioning worked! YAI! 🙂
One problem I have now is that rEFIt shows as bootable also the swap partition, but that can be worked around somehow, I hope (actually I’m just trying to see if by using parted to set the boot flag off on sda3 and then on on sda4 it would help.. no…).
Runabout instead is a new name, a new box… if you can call that a box, it’s a Nokia E61 smartphone, that I bought to get back my 3 number while I’m without the V1075… afterward, it will become my work phone. It was suggested to me by a friend of mine, Andrea, who has similar tastes to mine (although I don’t usually like Nokia as much as he do); I decided to spend money and buy this on his suggestion, as I also got the first payment for my current job, which allowed me to spend a bit more money than usual for once.
Although I was skeptic at the start, after playing with the E61 for a while, especially with the WLAN settings, the email setup, the Web browsing, I had to agree with my friend, it is an interesting device. I also found a PuTTY port that will allow me to connect via SSH to my boxes directly from the cellphone (that’s the final tool for a geek system administrator!), and an IRC client, both Free Software, which is pretty good.
The hostname (Runabout) I reserved some time ago for whenever I had a PDA, and seems the time came, finally 🙂
