Jackass! 2005.0 Support Group

Jackass Project · n00b Joined: 29 Mar 2005 Posts: 3

This is the Official Support Group for The Jackass! Project for Gentoo 2005.0.

Read This Before Posting

What Kind of Support is Available Here

The Jackass! Support Group has been created to address technical issues that are uniquely related to the Jackass! Toolkit. We're limiting our Support efforts to such problems.

General questions about Gentoo are beyond the scope of this thread, and the Jackass! Support Group is NOT a good place to look for answers to these types of questions. If you have Gentoo-related questions that are general in nature and are not specifically related to the Jackass! Toolkit, please post them in the appropriate Gentoo Forums.

Quick Reference: Common Errors Associated with Jackass! Installs

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See the Quick Reference for the Stage 1/3 Guides: https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-314985.html

Please Support the Jackass! Project

If you've found Jackass! to be helpful, or if you've found our Support efforts to be helpful, then please support the Jackass! Project. Information on how to support our efforts is available on the Jackass! website at http://jackass.homelinux.org/support.html.

Acknowledgement

The Jackass! Teams would like to thank the Administrators and the Moderators of the Gentoo Forums for their help and for their generosity in making The Jackass! Project possible. We would also like to thank the Gentoo Developers for all of their hard work on Gentoo. In appreciation for their efforts, and out of a desire to give something back to the Gentoo Community, Jackass! has been released as a free download that is licensed under the GPL. If you value the efforts of all of these people, please consider making a contriubtion to The Gentoo Project or to The Jackass! Project.

Disclaimer

Just for the purpose of clarification, "The Jackass! Project for Gentoo 2005.0", "The Jackass! Toolkit", and The Jackass! Project website at http://jackass.homelinux.org are not affiliated with "Linux for Jackasses" or its website at http://www.jackasslinux.com. It seems that both of these projects based their name on the Jackass Penguin, which was coincidental.

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Cool Idea: Boot from a Jackass .ISO without burning it to a CD! https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-334279-start-112.html (cool :cool:

but unsupported

)
_________________
I am the brains behind Jackass.

ccutler · n00b Joined: 19 Jan 2005 Posts: 28

ok, Im a newb, so please forgive me if this is a stupid question. do we not need to recompile the system for jackass? is this installation more like an optimized stage3 with no bootstrapping/emerge system ?

thanks for all your hard work

Bob P · Advocate Joined: 20 Oct 2004 Posts: 3374 Location: USA

This is different from a Stage 1/3 install, in that all of the compiling has already been done for you. Jackass! provides the equivalent of a "canned" Stage 1/3 installation in the form of a Stage 3 tarball for your specific architecture.

Just read the Jackass Installation Manual and follow the instructions and you'll be all set.

ccutler · n00b Joined: 19 Jan 2005 Posts: 28

ok, great

time to get started!

travlr · Apprentice Joined: 20 Apr 2005 Posts: 158 Location: USA

Bob, Guys... An incredibly PAINLESS install. Not to mention the professionalism is certainly to be commended.

A most sincere thank you!
travlr

Sith_Happens · Posted: Sat May 07, 2005 11:39 pm Post subject:

obsidianblackhawk · Posted: Sun May 08, 2005 2:03 am Post subject:

SVN · n00b Joined: 15 Apr 2004 Posts: 45

What do suggest doing for a pentium-m architecture? (can I cut down the install time for pentium-m with using jackass instead of stage 1/3)

Can I just follow the guide with a pentium3 tarball and before 7.2 emerge services change cflags and do a double emerge -e system?

Bob P · Advocate Joined: 20 Oct 2004 Posts: 3374 Location: USA

we have avoided the pentium-m architecture for a couple of reasons that were mentioned in the development thread. the biggest problem is that we did not have an adequate testing base for the pentium-m architecture. so at this point, pentium-m is officially not part of the Jackass! Project and right now its unsupported.

you could use the pentium-3 tarball on your pentium-m computer without any problems. the only difference, IIRC, is that the pentium 3 tarball contains SSE support, while the pentium-m processor offers SSE2 support. to me, that's not enough incentive to get me to rebuild the system on a laptop.

in addition to not having sufficient suitable platforms for testing, one of the other reasons that we didn't bother to make a pentium-m or pentium4m tarball is because we figured that people who own fast processors could always perform a Stage 1/3 installation with minimal effort.

in your case, it might be worthwhile to change your architecture flag and rebuild the system. if you do it before you emerge any world packages, then two emerge -e systems should suffice. but our official standpoint on the pentium-m architecture is that its not yet supported. so anyone that rebuilds a Jackass! toolkit for an alternative architecture shouldn't look to the Jackass! Support Group for help, because you're no longer using our product. if you were to rebuild your system, you'd need to post support requests in an independent thread instead of posting them here.

looking at this from another perspective, if we have enough people inquire about pentium-m support, and they'd be willing to act as testers, we could build a pentium-m ISO and see how well it works. if you're interested in that, let's move this conversation to the Jackass! Development Thread.

96140 · Retired Dev Joined: 23 Jan 2005 Posts: 1324

Okay, I redid my Pentium3 installation, just to savor the feeling of installing a system tailored to my processor. And I'm happy to report that the intermittent graphics problems on the LiveCD bootup screen are gone; the icons appear in sequence and light up.

However, I also reinstalled my system using the same set of CFLAGS I'd been using when testing the other tarballs, and it seems to be confirmed that "emerge -a ***" or "emerge -p ***" where *** is any package, runs terribly slow. I actually gained more performance from the Pentium and Pentium2 stages. I'm not sure if this is caused by my USE flags, or what. But I'm sadly disappointed; normally, reiserfs & the pre-recompiled tarballs give me such a blindingly fast system. If necessary, I'll take this issue to a different thread that centers on emerge slowness or Portage problems. But seeing as even when I used to do the good ol' Stage 1/3 recompile approach and this never happened before, I figured I should mention it.

Sith_Happens · Posted: Sun May 08, 2005 10:12 pm Post subject:

The speed of emerge -a or emerge -p is always unpredictable, and usually slow if you haven't run it in a while. Thats not really a Jackass problem, its just a Gentoo reality. :wink:

_________________
"That question was less stupid; though you asked it in a profoundly stupid way."
I'm the brains behind Jackass! | Tutorials: Shorewall

96140 · Retired Dev Joined: 23 Jan 2005 Posts: 1324

Righto then. It does seem to be intermittent now; it's really slow only when used on metapackages like Gnome; Firefox and gpm are the usual fast speed. Thnks, Sith.

Hikaru79 · Posted: Mon May 09, 2005 4:48 am Post subject:

I'm having a pretty serious error with Jackass! here =( I'm installing it onto another computer through SSH so I can read along in the guide. I'm at the stage of emerge'ing the gentoo-sources but when they download, they apparently fail the MD5 digest check

So I decide to do an emerge --sync, but once that finishes and it gets to the end, it does this:

Bob P · Advocate Joined: 20 Oct 2004 Posts: 3374 Location: USA

it would be helpful to know what you're actually installing. so it would be very handy to know which ISO you've downloaded, and what kind of box you're trying to install it on.

one thing that i have noticed when looking over the statistics on our server is that the majority of the users are NOT downloading the MD5 files to verify that the ISO are properly transmitted. after you download the ISO, its absolutely essential to verify its integrity. i'm at a loss to explain why everyone seems to be skipping that step.

with that said, your problems seem to be portage related. one thing that we have NOT done in Jackass! is to disable the newly implemented strict features checking in portage. this means that if you encounter an ebuild that fails the digest check, you can expect that it will not build properly. i have seen segfaults occur in cases like that. when a digest verification failure occurs, the problem lies with the ebuild and your only options are: 1) to edit it to fix the problem (good), or 2) to turn off strict features checking and hope for the best (bad). there's a sticky thread in portage and programming related to this problem.

another thing about segfaults -- they can be random occurrences, and when they are not, they can be exceptionally difficult to track down. so i would ask that you reinstall and verify that the problem is reproducible, and that the problem is not due to some other problem like memory failure, overclocking, etc.

Hikaru79 · Posted: Mon May 09, 2005 11:38 am Post subject:

Bob P · Advocate Joined: 20 Oct 2004 Posts: 3374 Location: USA

i'm glad to hear that you're one of the few who did bother to check the md5sums. :wink:

now i have a couple of questions for you.

first, did you read the thread i referenced about strict features checking in portage? the problem you are experiencing may be a QA problem with the ebuilds that is attributable to newly implemented changes to portage. what are you using as your FEATURES statement in make.conf?

second, did you reinstall, as i had suggested, or did you just continue to build upon the potentially corrupted installation?

Bob P · Advocate Joined: 20 Oct 2004 Posts: 3374 Location: USA

third, post the output of the following command:

Sith_Happens · Posted: Mon May 09, 2005 8:15 pm Post subject:

Bob P · Advocate Joined: 20 Oct 2004 Posts: 3374 Location: USA

Edit: this post may appear out of context, because it was typed in reply to an inquiry from a reader who was upset by our requests for others not to mirror our files without coordinating their efforts with us. A number of off-topic posts ensued, and one of the Administrators was kind enough to purge them from the thread. Thanks!

If you take a little time to read the actual terms of the GPL, you'll find that In the open source world, everything is copyrighted. Gentoo is Copyrighted. The Gentoo Forums are Copyrighted. If you have any doubts about this, take a look at the bottom of this page and you'll see the Gentoo Copyright notices there.

The problem that we've encountered in our first couple of days of being up and running is this: we've had an entire team of people who have spent months of their time putting this project together. We've built tarballs for a bunch of architectures, and even though we've built for a bunch of arches, we haven't built for all of them. One task that we are performing with our Project Server is to monitor which architectures' ISO files are being downloaded. This helps us to determine which platforms have demand for the ISO images and which platforms do not. Compiling this sort of data will help us to decide where we should deploy our resources when supporting Jackass! and when building future editions of Jackass!

Within 48 hours of when Jackass! became available on-line, somebody in another country copied our distribution files and the content of the text on our website and restricted the availability of our work to people who were willing to pay for it. That rubbed us the wrong way, for a number of reasons:

First, we've spent the time and the money to put together a Jackass! Project Server to give our work away for FREE. Quite frankly, I find it offensive that Jackass! hadn't even been available for 48-hours, before we had a leech on our hands who was trying to make money selling our work.

Second, we need to be able to keep an eye on how popular the downloads for each architecture are for the purpose of providing Quality Assurance. By knowing how many copies of each ISO get downloaded, we can make decisions about how much effort we should dediciate to each architecture in the future. When somebody starts providing our files on a remote site without our consent, they've undermined our ability to perform Quality Assurance measures. In a case like that, it appears evident that their desire to make a profit on our work is more important to them than our desire to maintain the quality of our work. That rubs me the wrong way too.

Third, when somebody decides to make some of our work available on a pay-to-play system, but intentionally makes some of our work unavailable, users get an incomplete impression of what Jackass! is and what architectures it supports. In a case like that, the end-user is the one who loses. That rubs me the wrong way too.

So even though some people think that everything in the linux world should be free as in beer, it just doesn't work that way. In contrast to the opportunists who are attempting to hijack our files for their own profit, we are giving our product away for free -- on a server that is much faster than the one that the opportunists are charging people to access! Given that their server is as slow as a slug and ours is blazingly fast, I hope that nobody is gullible enough to pay them for our work.

Sith_Happens · Posted: Mon May 09, 2005 8:27 pm Post subject:

Bob P · Advocate Joined: 20 Oct 2004 Posts: 3374 Location: USA

moving back to the subject of support, i did a jackass install on an older box yesterday, and i also had problems running into inexplicable segfaults. i cured the first round of sefaults by disabling strict features checking in portage. technically, this is an ebuild/portage issue and not a Jackass! issue. i know, disabling strict checking is a kludge workaround, but i'd prefer that the ebuild maintainers maintain their ebuilds instead of @me having to maintain their ebuids.

i did this by adding "-strict" to the FEATURES line in make.conf.

after doing that, i ran into more segfaults. it turns out that i was silly enough to forget to enable swap when i was installing the system. :oops:

enabling swap solved the problems and the rest of the install went without a hitch. the following command, which i mentioned earlier, was suggested to verify that swap is indeed activated:

SuperYak · Posted: Tue May 10, 2005 4:08 pm Post subject:

First off, just wanted to thank you all for donating your time to this worthy project. I'm installing it on a pentium 3 at the moment, and it is great not having to recompile the 3.4.3 toolkit.

On to my main question...I have a couple of AMD Duron 700mhz machines that I would like to install jackass! on. I normally use -march=athlon-tbird for these processors. Do you think I could get away with using the jackass! Athlon-XP iso for them, or am I going to be S.O.L.? I dread the thought of having to rebuild the toolkit manually...

Also, I'm sure there is a reason behind it, but I noticed there is no mention in the jackass! install manual about running an emerge --sync before building the world.

Thanks again fellas..

obsidianblackhawk · Posted: Tue May 10, 2005 4:21 pm Post subject:

SuperYak · Posted: Tue May 10, 2005 4:39 pm Post subject:

Bob P · Advocate Joined: 20 Oct 2004 Posts: 3374 Location: USA

I have to profess Athlon Ignorance. :oops:

the best way to answer your question is to compare the output of cat /proc/cpuinfo with the CPU info from other CPU. which architecture may be most suitable as a substitute for yours would be the one that supports as many of the processor flags that your processor supports as possible, without issuing any processor flags that your CPU doesn't support.

AFAIK the guys with Athlon-XP systems can run any of the Intel Pentium X tarballs, but I have no idea what kind of compatability is provided by the Athlon-TBird or the Duron. Unfortunately, we're not going to be making tarballs for any of the older AMD boxes, so your only options are to find a compatible tarball or to perform a Stage 1/3 install.