/me += failed hardware

Nothing like mixing C-syntax with IRC commands to really geek out a topic...

So much fun. Got Michael working for stuff. That was fine. Blah-blah-blah.

So then I tried to get Gentoo going today. The Gentoo LiveCD I have doesn't work fully *but* I did have a working Gnoppix LiveCD *and* the Gentoo docs have section specifically for installing Gentoo from a Knoppix (or Knoppix-based) LiveCD. How cool is that?

After some confusion, I did get to the point where I was to compile the kernel. So this involved sorting what stage I needed and formatting partitions (reiserfs for my root partition, thank you very much :P). The kernel failed to compile.

I thwacked at it and the genkernel utility but still couldn't get it to float after several tries. It's dying somewhere in the networking section. Suxx.

Round about then, my project member for school calls and he's on his way over. "Fuckit", I say, and I install Fedora Core 2. That went super snarky-fast. It was done it's part of the install by the time he got here.

That was cool. What wasn't was that when trying to restore the testbed lan, stuff started failing. I had forgotten about the bum NIC. So that was wrong.

Not only that, but it would seem that the crossover port on my hub has failed. That *really* sucks cause I normally don't believe in crossover cables. The hub was working fine through yesterday even... Maybe it's a combination of things that made it seem like a bad hub.

No matter what, it was basically a lot more difficult then it should have been. It'll be fine though. I just have to rip out this bad NIC from michael and stomp it. Fedora Core 2 installs the gig NIC fine anyhow.