11:30AM - Hard drive in my laptop died yesterday, started spewing DMA errors during an emerge sync.

11:35AM - Booted from the livecd, bind mounted an empty directory over /var/cache/edb (the affected area) and copied the rest of the filesystem to an NFS server.

11:50AM - Popped over to the wholesaler for a new drive

12:05PM - Popped in new drive, booted livecd, copied filesystem back, reran lilo

12:15PM - Rebooted, re-ran emerge sync, all better.

Whee!

I haven't spent nearly as much time as I'd like to have with Gentoo lately, life seems to be jam-packed with other fun and excitement (slight sarcasm there ;).

Now that things are back under control I'm going to start getting back into it. You can't keep me away!

I've also been spending time in the wonderful world of Windows, and with a fresh perspective on Linux based desktop environments, I can confidently say I'm quite impressed with how far we're getting. Many of the little 'take it for granted' touches one finds in Windows/MacOS are appearing by the truckload in GNOME/KDE. Good stuff.

Oh and Evolution is working again. I'd like to thank Chris White for all his support and understanding. ;)

I'm one of the lucky few to have a Microsoft Exchange server running at my company. I use it to organise my life, and here's why.

Of all the e-mail systems with groupware capabilities, none quite does justice to the featureset of Exchange. With Exchange, you can store all your data on the server, contacts, calendar, e-mail, and have it be retrieved by virtually any device. A PC running Outlook, a PDA, a cell phone, you name it, it'll store it.

You can create projects and goals, and subprojects - and you can relate two projects to each other so that the level of completeness of each project adds up to the completeness of both projects as a whole. You can chart, graph, monitor and streamline to your hearts content.

In short, Exchange is really nice, and I don't care who hears me say that.

And so, in order to retrieve my data, I use Evolution. It works nicely. It doesn't allow me to sync my PDA, but I put up with that and keep Windows around in a virtual machine for palm sync.

The only problem is, like clockwork, almost every second release of Evolution stops talking to Exchange.

True to form, GNOME 2.10 comes out, and the included version of Evolution no longer works with Exchange servers! Sure, it says it does. It has the Microsoft Exchange dropdown option. It lets you configure it, and authenticate into the server. It may even let you read a mail or two.

But the NEXT TIME YOU RUN IT! It's kaput. Totally screwed. And there's nothing you can do about it. It's not a distribution issue - the same issue manifests itself on Arch Linux, Ubuntu Linux, Fedora Core, and FreeBSD.

So I'm doomed. Here's a mail client with advertised features which don't work in the real world! Don't bury your head in the sand by thinking you can do away with Exchange. Oh no. It's here to stay. And as soon as Gentoo brings GNOME 2.10 into stable keywords, I'll never be able to talk to my beloved Exchange server again. SIGH!

Hot off the presses, Mozilla 1.7.7 and Mozilla Firefox 1.0.3. They fix lots of known vulnerabilities, so everyone update! Quick like a bunny!

I'm thinking of pulling enigmail out of our Mozilla and Thunderbird builds. They're a stone on the road to official branding, and they're a bit of a pain to update. Why rebuild the entire package for just enigmail, when you can install the XPI separately?. That's my take anyway. What's everyone else think?

As many of you are aware, AOL's latest version of Netscape is based upon Firefox, with a twist. It allows users to render their pages using their choice of either Internet Explorer's rendering engine, or Gecko, the native Mozilla engine.

For those who aren't familiar there's a good article on it here.

The ability to switch between Gecko and Internet Explorer rendering engines is a good thing for users, I think, and. It allows them to use their browser of choice and still be able to browse any web pages they want. And of course, Gentoo is all about choice!

As such, a new version of Firefox will be in portage a bit later today with exactly this enhancement. Using the same basic technologies as Captive NTFS, we are now able to make use of mshtml.dll on the Linux platform, and optionally use it in place of the gecko engine currently used by Mozilla Firefox.

The Internet Explorer renderer will be enabled by default in the ebuild, and can be switched off using a menu item once Firefox is running. I hope you all enjoy this technical innovation!

Do your boys:
	- Hang low

Do they:
	- Wobble to and fro

Can you:
	- Tie them in a knot
	- Tie them in a bow
	- Throw them over your shoulder
		- Like a continental soldier

(wtf?)

A new firefox ebuild is in CVS (mozilla-firefox-1.0.2-r1 ebuild) and places includes and libs, pkgconfig files, firefox-config and all that cool stuff on the filesystem for various browsers to build against.

Now to wait while Obz throws epiphany at it. Whee!

latexer, on point #2 about a vocal minority making us look bad, I don't think that's a long-term concern - I've seen groups of people once driven to extreme annoyance at Gentoo users completely converted by the distribution's technical strengths within months. I think Gentoo is a good enough platform to win the appreciation of even its most staunch detractors, if they're open to checking it out.

Another set of Mozilla updates out of the way. It's a pretty smooth affair at this point, now that we're using Aron's mozconfig.eclass. We hit a few bumps with mozilla-launcher, but that's sorted. Mostly.

If anyone's having trouble committing changes to the Mozilla ebuilds after the mozilla-launcher move from net-www to www-client: The solution I found was simply removing my CVS tree and checking it out again. I'm sure there's a far more elegant way to fix it, but oh well. :P

Shortly I'd like to start setting up our Firefox in such a way that epiphany/galeon and others can build against it as they currently do with Mozilla. Considering Mozilla Suite is going into maintenance mode it'll be better to build against the newer stuff anyway.