Stuart Herbert

I promise I’ll find some time this evening to expand on Donnie’s post about bringing focus to Gentoo!

In the meantime, it didn’t take all that long to build & boot my first Xen virtual Gentoo machine. Most of the time was spent rebuilding everything with the ‘-mno-tls-direct-seg-refs’ CFLAG, which boosts performance inside the virtual machine.

Things Learned About Gentoo Inside Xen

• Make sure hotplug is stopped before mounting loopback filesystems, otherwise udevd opens files on there, preventing you from umounting the loopback filesystem when you’re done building your generic Gentoo image.
• With a minimal virtual machine configuration, you only get a single terminal inside the Xen virtual machine. Gentoo’s default inittab expects there to be six terminals.

Things Added To The TODO List

• Learn more about console devices with Xen
• Learn more about configuring udev and hotplug

Kristi and I have just gotten back from a weekend break at Whitby, up on the North Yorkshire coast. Whitby is famous for its magnificent abbey, and for being a Mecca for both photographers and goths - Bram Stoker is said to have written Dracula whilst staying in the town.

We had a great time up there, and I managed to snag a few photos with the D200 before the battery ran flat. We were really lucky with the weather; we got there the day after a full moon, and there wasn’t a cloud to be seen day or night until it was time to come home.

Despite it’s bulk and weight, I’m starting to use the 80-400 lens more often than not. I think half the photos I’ve uploaded to Flickr were taken with it. I have been looking around for the Sigma 70-300 lens (I was very impressed with Sebastian’s), but I’m told there’s a massive shortage of these in the UK; I’ll be sticking with what I have at least until Christmas.

Looking at the results, I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing