On my blog post about Installing Gentoo on ALIX.3D3 Mart Raudsepp made an interesting comment: He pointed out, that on AMD Geode CPUs it might be better to use i486 CHOST instead of my used i586, because the CPU is more like a i486 as far as instruction scheduling and times go.
This sounded interesting, so I googled for some benchmark test to measure differences. I found nbench, which measures performance by executing some typical algorithms and compares them to a Pentium 90 based system. So I installed it and run on the i586 CHOST system, then rebuild it completely to i486 CHOST and run it again. Read more…
Usually BIOS updating means booting DOS and running a proprietary tool from the board vendor. A few days ago, coreboot’s flashrom 0.9 has realeased. It’s an open-source tool which supports program almost all flash chips used on x86 mainboards. Its compatibility list includes Geode™ CS5530/A, which can be found on the ALIX.3D3 board. So why not using flashrom to update ALIX.3D3 BIOS.
Read more…
Nowadays, most desktop mainboards provide more than one gigabit ethernet port. Connecting them both to the same switch causes most Linux distros by default to get a individual IP on each device and route traffic only on the primary device (based on device metric) or round-robin. A single connection always starts at one IP and so all traffic goes through one device, limiting maximum bandwidth to 1 GBit.
Here comes bonding (sometimes called (port) trunking or link aggregation) to play. It connects two ore more ethernet ports to one virtual port with only one MAC and so mostly one IP address. Wheres earlier only two hosts (with the same OS running) or two switches (from the same vendor) could be connected, nowadays there’s a standard protocol which makes it easy: LACP which is part of IEEE 802.3ad. Read more…
When I ordered the ALIX.3D3 board I thought installing Gentoo on this should be a piece of cake, but finally there were some stumbling blocks and that’s why I want to summarize how I got gentoo running.
First of all, I recommend installing Gentoo on a normal desktop to get to know the installing process, which is a bit different from graphical installers of mainstream distros. The Gentoo Handbook is a great documentation how this done.
To install gentoo, you have to boot a minimal or “rescue” linux usually from cd/dvd. I tried to convice the bios to boot from a usb cd-rom drive, but I hadn’t any success. Read more…
I often use iptables (or ip6tables, the IPv6 version of iptables) to implemented firewall rules on my linux systems.
In earlier times I used a commented bash script to setup the rules after booting, but using Gentoo nowadays there is a nice init script saving and restoring my tables. Using this I stopped commenting the firewall rules, but yesterday I found a very nice solution for this problem.
Iptables has a special “match” for comments. Read more…
Kernel 2.6.29 introduced the Kernel Mode Setting feature, meaning the kernel to be able to change resolution and adresse other outputs. For example kernels pre 2.6.29 always actived the external DVI device (if connected) on my macbook and showed boot screens there. This is now configurable. Also switching between X11 and console is much faster. Read more…
Via SiXXs können auch Privatpersonen ohne natives IPv6 Internet Zugang zum “neuen” Netz erhalten. Registriert man sich auf der Seite kann ein IPv6 Tunnel unter anderem via AYIYA realisiert werden, welches sogar NAT unterstützt und somit auf fast allen PC funktionieren sollte.
Das Programm AICCU initialisiert die Tunnel und benötigt als Konfiguration lediglich SiXXs-Benutzername und Passwort sowie eine Tunnel Nummer. Das Programm gibt es als net-misc/aiccu als Ebuild für Gentoo.
Ist der Tunnel erfolgreich eingerichtet kann auch ein IPv6 Subnet beantragt werden und weitere PCs im Heimnetz ans IPv6 Netz zu bekommen. Der Gentoo-IPv6-Router-Guide erklärt wie man radvd und dhcpv6 konfiguriert.
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